Subversive Knowing

God knows something and shares that knowledge through Isaiah: There will be a peaceable realm where the infant is safe with the adder, the lamb with the wolf, the kid with the leopard, the cow with the bear, where the lion’s a herbivore, with the whole unlikely menagerie led by a child. 

It’s easy to make a connection between the peaceable realm and a child who, as an adult, will make that realm the heart of his own purpose and proclamation. It’s also easy to see in it a prediction that favours “our” part of the story as denouement, that predicts “our” Messiah. I wonder if we might rather catch, in the peaceable realm, a sense of how “the knowledge of the Lord” functions as a subversion of certainties – including religious certainties – throughout the Hebrew and Apostolic scriptures. “They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord.”  

Having lived all my adult life in a church fighting – hurting and destroying – over who may love whom,  because we have bound both the Holy and ourselves with chains of doctrine, having grown up in a church that took children my age away from their parents to erase their identity, spirituality, and culture, I am pretty clear that whatever we’ve been full of, it hasn’t always been “the knowledge of the Lord”.  

Having lived my entire life under the shadow of hurt and destruction that comes from what the world knows as “just the way things are” (visionless dreck dressed up as clever “knowing”) I am pretty clear that what’s true of the church is at least as true of the world.  It is long past time for us to yearn for "the knowledge of the Lord", for God's subversive knowing.  The knowing of the world and the knowing of the church need to be brought under its lens.

God's subversive knowing astonished two ancient elders – promising them descendants as numerous as the stars. This knowing left Jacob with a blessing and a limp, neither one possible or even comprehensible without the other. Hagar, abandoned with her baby in the wilderness, encounters this knowing as accompaniment and safety – life! – in a well of fresh water and the promise of an angel. This knowing illuminates the loyalty and love that brings Ruth to Bethlehem, to the threshing room floor, to Boaz. David finds a vein of this knowing as a boy with a sling and a few stones. Moses encounters it as he hears “I am”, and with Aaron and Miriam leads an enslaved people toward a dream God dreams for them. The psalmist knows by stillness. Elijah, defeated and alone, meets the knowing in “the sound of sheer silence” and finds strength and hope to subvert the juggernaut of Baal’s prophets. An unnamed Israelite slave girl knows of a prophet in Israel, though Israel’s king does not, and that prophet, Elisha sends Naaman to the truly unimpressive waters of the Jordan, where the knowing that subverts kings and commanders will heal him. This is the knowing that strengthens Esther to turn the (banquet) tables on Haman (every self-promoting chief of staff ever?) and save her people.  God's subversive knowing.

Isaiah isn’t predicting the coming into the world of this knowing. It was in motion long before In-the-beginning. The church is not its denouement. On our best days we are caught up in its purpose and proclamation. On other days we despair (like Abraham and Sarah) of how long it takes to conceive the new creation and try it our way. Disaster all round.

And yet this knowing is among us and makes itself known. The dream that it will one day make creation whole is sometimes remembered, if only in fragments, as we rub our sleepy eyes. We have seen this subversive knowing (that will one day fill the earth) fill a broken heart with compassion, fill a friendship with loyalty, fill a tired body and soul with resolve to continue the work of love and justice, and will fill the chill of betrayal with the warmth of absolution. Dr. King spoke of his dream, and touched again and again the hem of God's subversive knowing. We have heard it in witness to the courage of the healing journey from countless Indigenous voices, we hear it in the voices calling “Women, Life, Liberty!” It is the knowledge of the Lord that breaks our hearts when we witness children and other vulnerable creatures harmed by the folly and arrogant cruelty of the strong. It is the psalmist’s prayer, it can be our own: “May those who sow in tears, reap with shouts of joy.” 

Jesus, whose birth we will celebrate from sunset on December 24 to sunset on January 5, is not a prediction. Jesus is an invitation to sow some seeds ourselves, lots of them, everywhere, even as the tears stream down our faces. 

 For Advent 2, Year A. Isaiah 11.1-10

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