The beautiful future: You can’t get there from here

As we set our first foot into the Advent landscape, we hear Isaiah utter God’s promise of the beautiful future, the future in which “they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks.” In the promised future, “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” But when we look around, that beautiful future is not what we see. We see violence and idolatry, hot wars and cold peace, and abuse of our planet host. Frayed nerves and soft bodies and what the late John Prine called “a crooked piece of time”. 

We find ourselves, that is to say, standing inside the story, standing beside Isaiah, who utters the promise of the beautiful future even as he begins a sustained account of the anger of God over the idolatry, greed, dishonesty, injustice and violence of Jerusalem, and of the approaching fury that God will level against “all that is proud and haughty”. Chapter after chapter will bear witness to a fury that will last “until cities lie waste without inhabitants, and houses without people, until the land is utterly desolate”.  In the end, nothing will remain but a burnt tree stump. We seek the beautiful future, but you can’t get there from here. 

Do we have the courage to hear Isaiah’s witness as our truth?  Can we hear him describe both a desolation that is upon us and a promise that is among us? Can we make ourselves see, really see, the toxic sludge that we fashion out of our fears – the incivility, the lies, the greed, the violence, the worship of power, the illusion of immortality. Honest reflection requires us to admit that we tolerate a substantial gap between principles and something we call pragmatism so as not to use its true name. We can't find our way to the beautiful future for all, so we settle for whatever we can pick up when the piñata breaks. And if we squint the right way, we can make the sludge seem like fresh water.

The Holy One doesn’t settle, doesn’t squint. The Holy One tells us what we are doing and where it will end up. Nothing but a burnt stump. There is no pathway to hope that does not pass through this apocalypse. There is one burnt stump and one promise. That’s all.

Advent, it turns out, is about the future you can’t get to from here. Advent is about the predicament in which we find ourselves – frail, foolish, fearful, desperately imagining a way out of this mess that doesn’t require too much truth. And it is about a future that is looking for us, that has promised to find us. A beautiful future.

The Author of the beautiful future is our friend, is Way, and Truth, and Life. The Author is Word, the Speaker the Spoken, the deep Holy and the deep Human inhabiting time together just long enough to change everything.

(For Advent 1, Year A. Isaiah 2.1-5)


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