The Wolf May Lie down with the Lamb, But the Lamb Won't Get a Very Good Night's Sleep...

Sermon Dec. 9, 2007, The Rev Este Gardner Cantor
Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley

All of the readings today talk of waiting, hoping, watching- they are in a way, strange Advent readings, but I can see why they were picked.

In heart-breakingly beautiful prose, Isaiah speaks of the coming of the Messiah. He speaks of one who will come not judging with his eyes and hears- those faulty human organs, but with righteousness, with God’s eyes and ears. And he shall come from the stump of Jessie- King David’s father. And when he comes, what a transformation there will be. The text reads that the wolf (not the lion, by the way) will lie down with the lamb. The leopard and the lion and the adder will not hurt or destroy in all this holy Kingdom. For, just as Jeremiah predicted that the law of God would be written on our hearts, the earth, and presumably all its creatures, will be filled with the knowledge of God.

This is not the Kingdom of Earth that is being described. In the Kingdom of Earth, as Woody Allen has noted, the wolf may lie down with the lamb, but the lamb will not get a very good night’s sleep. No, what is being described is a paradise of peace, a realm of trust and love between all beings.

John the Baptist also predicts the coming of the Messiah, and he warns that there is not much time to repent. He shouts out, like any street profit “Repent! The End is near! The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!” The Pharisees and Sadducees who have the nerve to join him at the River Jordan soon find out that their status means nothing to John, as it will mean nothing to God. The dark side of the Day of Judgment is described- unless you bear fruits of repentance- of transformation, you may be thrown in with the chaff. In this text the Greek word Metanoia is badly translated as repentance. Repentance is from the Latin for “turn around.” A better translation of metanoia might be true transformation.

So what is our part in this? Is there a way that we can speed or facilitate the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven? And must it be a future vision, or can it be in our time? The timing of the Kingdom of Heaven varies from Gospel to Gospel, but it is sometimes clearly stated to be now at hand, especially in the Gospel of John.

I recently heard a beautiful story of the manifestation of the Kingdom of Heaven. The story was told by the Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield, who was born Jewish, and the protagonist of the story was a Muslim, the Palestinian poet, Naomi Shihab Nye.

The poet was taking a flight from Phoenix to Huston and she suddenly heard a flight attendant frantically calling out, “Does anyone speak Arabic?” Well, as the poet said, these days one hesitates, but her better nature prevailed, and she came forward. Greatly relieved, the flight attendant ushered her over to a woman in her sixties. She was dressed in full traditional Moslem dress and had collapsed into a heap on the floor, loudly crying. “I announced that the flight had been delayed four hours and this happened!” The flight attendant said. The poet knelt down beside the woman and began to ask her why she was crying in a language she could understand. It turned out that the woman had misunderstood the flight attendant and thought that the flight had been cancelled all together. She had to be in Huston for a medical procedure and was terrified that she would not make it in time. After learning the times and particulars the poet assured her that she could make it and asked who was picking her up. The women gave her her son’s number, the poet called him and they had a nice chat. It turned out that the Muslim woman had three other sons, and the poet called them all up too (they had four hours to kill after all.) Then she began calling some other Palestinian poets she knew, and introducing them to the woman, just for fun.

The woman, now very much more calm, had brought many things in her carry-on luggage (among them a potted plant- a classic folk medicinal remedy) and a huge supply of incredibly good little home-made powdered sugar cookies. She began passing them out to all the passengers waiting for the flight, primarily Texans. All exclaimed that these were the best cookies they had ever eaten and not one person refused the cookies from the woman in full perdah, who spoke not one word of Englis, and there was not one shred of mistrust in evidence. “This is the kind of world I want to live in,” said the poet, “Where we all share in one sacrament, where we are all covered with the same powdered sugar, where the grandmotherly goodness of a generous woman can be savored even as she wears her scarf and long dress, communicating through the universal language of powdered sugar cookies.”

These cookies were fruits worthy of repentance- of metanoia. They were offered by a woman some would associate with terrorists to people who some would associate with bigotry. But the lion lay down with the lamb. In my imagining of the story, after a few hours went by, they started to take naps, and the rich Republican Houston Oil executive lay down with the Muslim woman in full perdah, and no one was hurt or destroyed in all that Holy waiting area.

Perhaps this is the kind of metanoia spoken of by John the Baptist- the dissolving of age old prejudice in favor of full communion.

"Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near. Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight, and share thy sugar cookies without restraint.”

The indiscriminant acceptance of these fruits of metanoia, this instant communion, and the age old prejudices laid down herald for me the coming of the Kingdom as clearly as any lion eating straw, any child-friendly adder, or any angel’s declaration.

Stories like these show us the possibilities of grace, even of paradise in the here and now. And here, in our second Sunday in Advent, we remember that the kingdom is indeed at hand, and that a little child shall lead us.