Isaiah 2:1-5
November 30, 2025
When I was ordained as a minister in
our denomination – a very long time ago – I was ordained as a Minister of Word
and Sacrament. That was my official title, and that’s what I did and do. I do
my best to preach the word, and I get the joy of presiding over our sacraments
of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. But over the course of my years as a pastor
in the PC(USA), that title has changed to Teaching Elder. That does not mean
that I am not a Minister of Word and Sacrament. I still am, but my official
identification, whether I am at a presbytery meeting or in some other church
role is, Amy Stoker, Teaching Elder, First Presbyterian, Pulaski, Tennessee.
But Teaching Elders are not the only
elders in our denomination. There are also Ruling Elders. It hasn’t been that
long ago that I understood that ruling does not refer to reigning over but to
measuring. The Ruling Elders who serve on our session are responsible for
taking the spiritual measurement of our congregation. Are people growing in
their faith? Are they growing in spiritual depth and wisdom? Is our
congregation witnessing to the love and justice of God in all that we do? It’s
a challenging call. But Ruling Elders are vital to our church. They serve on
our session and head up ministry units within our congregation and sometimes
serve on committees and commissions at the presbytery level and beyond, and in
the case of our own Chris Williams, serve as the Vice-Moderator, soon to be
Moderator, of our presbytery.
We are a denomination of elders –
both Teaching and Ruling. Our name, presbyterian, comes from the Greek
word for elder, so it makes sense that the governing of our church falls
to elders. But whether we are Teaching Elders or Ruling Elders, or Deacons in
the churches that still have them, we all take the same ordination vows. We all
make the same promises and abide by the same covenants. There are eight
ordination vows that we share, and the eighth one is my favorite.
It
is, “Will you pray for and seek to serve the people with energy, intelligence,
imagination, and love?”
All
the vows that we take, the promises that we make at ordination and installation
are vital and important, but this last one really gets me. When I was a young
minister, I heard this vow and immediately thought,
“Yes!
I am promising to be creative! I get to try new things and maybe I’ll get to
sit with kids and color. Bring on the crayons!”
Okay,
that may not have been my first thought, verbatim, but I do like sitting with
the kids and I really enjoy coloring. Always have. Always will. But my point is
that when I was a young minister, I took this call as license to just always
try new things, new ways of preaching or teaching. And that still holds true,
but the older I get and the longer I serve God and the church, the more I
comprehend the depth of what this eighth vow requires of elders, of us. It’s
one thing to serve with energy, intelligence, imagination, and love when life
is great and everything is going swimmingly. It’s another thing to hold to this
promise when we are tested, when life is hard, when nothing is going to plan,
when it seems that God is far away, when the world seems to be spinning wildly,
and we are just trying to keep going.
Why
am I giving you this mini lesson in our church’s polity? Because in the very
governance of our church, our congregation, our denomination, we are called to
use our imagination. And the very words of scripture that we hear on this first
Sunday of Advent, the first Sunday of the new church year, come from Isaiah – a
prophet, a person charged by God to use his imagination.
Isaiah
was a prophet called by God who saw God’s word. What does it mean to see God’s
Word? I don’t know if I have a good answer to that question, but maybe our
understanding will be helped if we clarify what a prophet was and what a
prophet did. I think sometimes we confuse prophets with fortune tellers. We
think of them as looking into a crystal ball and seeing images of a future that
may only look like clouds and mist to a non-prophet’s eye. But that’s not true
of biblical prophets. They were not fortune tellers or mind readers. They could
read the context and circumstances in which they lived and were called and they
could see the potential consequences of the peoples’ actions. They did hear the
voice of God. Clearly, they were given unique insight into what God was doing
both in their present and in the future. And they were called to both see and
proclaim the word they saw and heard from the Lord. But what really made a prophet
a prophet was that they had what Walter Bruggeman called the prophetic imagination.
They
could imagine the future consequences of actions taken now. They could imagine
a different reality, a different present, and a different future. A prophet was
gifted with the imagination to see the world as God sees it and as God created
it to be. Perhaps when Isaiah saw the word of God concerning Judah and
Jerusalem, that’s what was happening. He was not just seeing words scrolling
like on a movie screen in his mind. He was able to imagine the different
reality that God was creating.
What
did Isaiah see?
“In
days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the
highest of mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all nations shall
stream to it.”
What
did Isaiah see?
He
saw God as arbitrator and judge. He saw God as teacher.
“He
shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many people; they
shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any
more.”
What
did Isaiah see when he saw God’s word? What did he imagine? He saw a world
where people from every nation were streaming like a constantly flowing river
to the mountain of God. People of every nation – which implies that people of
every gender, of every race, of every ethnicity, culture, background – will be
streaming toward that holy mountain of God. Isaiah saw God as judge and
arbitrator between every nation. And in response to God’s judgement, people
were not only relinquishing their implements of war, but they were also
remaking and refashioning those implements into tools for growth, for food, for
nurture, and for nourishment. Swords into plowshares and spears into pruning
hooks.
Isaiah
was given the ability to imagine a world where every nation not only ceased
their wars, their battles and fighting, but they stopped learning war
altogether.
Isaiah
was gifted with a powerful prophetic imagination. He saw God’s word. He
proclaimed God’s word. He imagined the world that the word of God was creating.
And his prophetic imagination produced such beautiful and powerful imagery that
centuries later we still turn to his words for hope. His words have inspired
and comforted generations of believers.
But
Isaiah’s prophetic imagination was not born out of comfortable or easy
circumstances. We cannot read his words out of context. He saw and spoke God’s
word to his people because times were hard, because his people were being
tested and would continue to be tested and tried in ways no on had yet
conceived. Isaiah spoke his words of hope and light out of a growing darkness.
His prophetic imagination came into its fullness when the world he and his
people knew seemed to be spinning out of control.
His
prophetic imagination was a glimpse into seeing the world as it could be, as it
should be, as God created it to be.
When
the pandemic first hit and the world went into lockdown, we had to learn how to
be church differently didn’t we? We went from being in person every Sunday to
streaming. Public gatherings became dangerous. Public singing became a prolific
way to spread a virus that was terrifying to say the least. We had to learn how
to be community, to be church in a world that felt like it was spinning wildly
out of control. We needed to live into that eighth vow more than ever before,
to pray for and seek to serve the people of God with our energy, our
intelligence, our imagination, and our love.
The
prophetic imagination that Isaiah and the other prophets employed can be ours
as well. It is not about being artistic, although that can certainly be a part
of it. It is about seeing what the world can be. It is about imagining a future
where we all stream to the highest mountain, to God’s mountain, to a place
where awe and reverence and mystery outweigh cynicism and certainty. Using our
imaginations, we can see a world where difference does not equal distance –
distance that is physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual – but instead draws
us closer together and closer to God. Using our imaginations, we can envision a
world where weapons of war are transformed into tools of peace. Swords into
plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. Using our imaginations, we can see
the world as God created it to be, as it one day will be, and we can find our
hope. That is the challenge and call of this first Sunday in Advent, indeed of
this entire season. We can imagine, therefore we can hope. We can hope that one
day swords will be replaced with plowshares and spears with pruning hooks. We
can hope that one day we will learn war no more. We can hope for the world that
God is creating, right now, in our midst. We can hope for the future because
the future is in God’s good hands. We can imagine this and so much more. Thanks
be to God.
Let
all of God's hopeful children say, “Alleluia.”
Amen.
