My son and his wife brings their dog Roxy over now and again. And in 4 years the same drama gets played out with our cat Osker. The cat does not understand the dog. Roxy is a big beautiful golden retriever, as big as a horse and would love more than anything to play with the cat. But the cat will have none of that. She hisses and gets her back up and throws the dog the occasional claw. doesn’t get the message. Roxy is the politest dog and as gentle as a lamb. They’ve been doing that for over 4 years. I keep imagining that one day I’ll come home and find the two of them snuggled up together resting peacefully. I’m close to giving up on that hope, but I still have that image in my mind. Cats and dogs together in peace.

And wolves and lambs in God’s peaceable kingdom! Imagine a wolf and a lamb taking naps together, and lions salivating at the sight of straw. Imagine nobody, anywhere ever being sad again. People can’t wait to get to work because they love their jobs so much. No more need for orphanages in the world. No more infants will ever die. All people in all places will live full and satisfying lives. Sounds like Paradise on earth.

Now I think many of us can get our heads around some of that can’t we? I think a world where all people love their jobs, where people will be able to live in the houses they built themselves and eat the produce from their own gardens they planted is amazing but believable. We could even I think get our heads around a world in which infants will never die. But—I don’t know—a world in which people will still be blowing out their birthday candles when they’re 195 years old, and wolves eating their dinner with lambs and lions eating straw is sounds like a fantasy beyond anything any of us can imagine.
And here’s the thing. The people who are hearing these words of a brand new world are totally beaten up. They’ve spent their lifetime up on Babylon and now Persia. They thought Jeremiah was going to give them some good news 60 years ago that they could go home. But all Jeremiah told them was to sit back. They’re in for the long haul They weren’t going anywhere for a very long time. Well now it’s a lifetime later, and it’s time to go home. Today is their day of liberation. The ones who survive the hard trip back home for Jerusalem discover that home looks anything like home. There’s nothing. It’s a void, a wasteland. Think of nothing and then take away a lot more. That’s what they had—nothing multiplied into a wasteland of nothing. Their families have turned against them. The family who had descended from Abraham and Sarah were looking like they were going to be extinct. Life is not delight and joy. It is chaos. Looters, worshippers of pagan gods, and foreign armies invaded them from all sides. And here’s the kicker. It’s in this nothingness that God speaks this unbelievable, fantasy of a new world. How can these poor people believe God when God says, “I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy and its people as a delight”. God seems to be so far off this time.

This is what it sounds like to me. Imagine you have lost a loved one, say you have lost a child suddenly, one of the worst nightmares a parent can have. And somebody comes up to you after the funeral and says, “Be glad. God is going to create a new world in which no child anywhere will ever die. God is going to create a whole new life that you are going to delight in and find such joy in. That doesn’t seem to help.

What would we think if God spoke like that to us. If God said to us “Don’t worry about all those traffic accidents this summer. I’m going to create a whole new world where there are no traffic accidents. Or don’t let your hearts be troubled over the babies you see with leukemia because in my world I am about to create no babies anywhere will ever get sick with anything. And about all those farmers who put so much money into the ground in the spring and get little return back. Well, I’m about to create something so new and so great that families will rush out to buy land and combines and seed and swings for the big garden because the lifestyle of farming will embrace all family values. Don’t trouble yourself worrying about the earth and that oil spill catastrophe in the Black Sea. Yeah, the US is spending trillions of dollars on wars in the past 5 years, but not to worry, there’s going to be no war in my new world. And about those two boys in Detroit who killed a man with Alzheimer’s merely for the thrill of killing, in my new world killing is non-existent.
I so want to believe that new world God is about to create. But right now, it just seems so far off. God is inviting us in this text to hope for more than what is possible. How can we believe it. It seems too hopeful. It seems too far off from where we are now. I want to tell you some good news. I want to tell you that this impossible new world is happening. But sometimes its so hard. Sometimes this journey of hope is too much to hope for.

But we do know some things. We know that God did finally re-create the people of Jerusalem to be a people again. They did build their temple again with Persia’s help. They did re-claim their identity as a people, as we read in Ezra and Nehemiah. They did marry and have children and become families again. They did live off their own land again. And they did live again as a restored people of God. That happened over a long period of time. There is a temptation to pass over what needs to be passed through. And what we are doing today is passing through generations. Today’s text is set into a massive context that was lived over many years. God’s vision of shalom is realized by passing through many, many generations.

And we do have a ways to go. Sometimes it feels like quite a long ways to go. We are living in an already but not yet time. But God’s kingdom is surely coming. It is not yet here in its fullness. We see glimpses of this fantastic and amazing brand new world that shocks us. There is a short documentary that is produced by an organization called The United Religion Initiative. Most of the documentary is a conversation between two men. One is an Israeli Jew whose son was killed by Palestinian Hamas soldiers. In the documentary he says, “My son was my best friend and I was his best friend. And they killed him.” The other was a Palestinian doctor whose 4 brothers had been shot down by Israeli snipers. In the documentary he says, “My brother died while I was looking at him.” Like the wolf and the lamb these two improbable pairs, sat next to each other. Each one had seen how the other had suffered and their vision of a new world was one in which there was “No more violence!” God is working through people such as these two improbable pairs to usher in the new outrageously peaceful world.

Well, there are no doubt other stories similar to this one. God’s kingdom of shalom is surely coming. God is moving the world towards shalom. It’s just so hard to see sometimes. BUT it is happening. That much we know. God’s kingdom is marked by amazing acts of grace: in acts of repentance and forgiveness, in hospitality and care. And so we dare to rejoice and be glad in what God is doing. And we pray boldly to God with all our heart and all our hope, even all our hope beyond hope, every Sunday and at every other opportunity we find, Thy kingdom come! Thy will be done. Thy will be done. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Thy will be done—on earth as it is in heaven. May it be so. AMEN