This Isaiah passage has the beautiful image of the peaceable kingdom

where the wolf lies down with the lamb

and the leopard with the baby goat

and the calf with the lion

and the bear with the cow

and the asp with the child.

It is a beautiful, idyllic passage

 an image of peace between predators and prey.

We love this image

and there have been many paintings of it.

The most famous is a series in the 1900s by Edward Hicks, a Quaker. 

Quakers as you might know are committed to peace making

and so Hicks painted this peaceable kingdom– 62 times!

The paintings, at least at the beginning, are pastoral – peaceful:

all the animals getting along.

But the last ones he painted were no longer peaceful:

the leopard is bearing its teeth in one;

in another the child, considered by some to be Jesus,

has his arm wrapped around the neck of the lion

holding it back from attacking.

This vision of the peaceable kingdom, or as others have called it-

the Holy Mountain, is meant to be an image of hope,

but I think Hicks ended up with despair.

That is a place in which it is easy to find oneself

when we consider our planet in peril.

I find that I myself sometimes turn away from programs that show me the creatures and other parts of our planet that are dying. I want to turn away from the devastation and how it impacts first and ever more those who already face the impacts of racism, classism and other inequalities.

But I think Hicks ended up in that place of despair with his later paintings because he had jumped too quickly to the peace part.

He painted an idyllic image, not the truth.

We get it.

Who wants to deal with axes that cut away

that which does not bear fruit;

fires that burn away the chaff;

repentance that presumes an acknowledgement

of going way off course?

(Matthew 3)

But real hope and real peace begin with the truth.

The Isaiah text does not begin with the peaceable kingdom

but with the stump of Jesse–

a seemingly dead stump.

The promise of the text is that life comes out of what seems dead.

Just like the gospel says:

God is able from cold, hard, seemingly lifeless stones

to raise up children to Abraham.

I have a copy of another Holy Mountain painting.

This one by Howard Pippin entitled “The Holy Mountain III, 1945”

(see image below). It was given to me by a seminarian who worked with me for a couple of years when I served in Wilmington, DE. 

This is a painting of the peaceable “kindom” proclaimed against the background of a lynching, cemetery crosses, a tank, and a plane dropping bombs. 

Pippin was an African-American who fought in WWI in the all-black 369th infantry division known as the Harlem Hellfighters. He was wounded by a sniper and permanently disabled. The date he gives this painting is August 9, 1945, the day the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. 

I find Pippin’s painting such a powerful proclamation of what it means for a faith community to speak of the Advent promises of hope and peace. These only have meaning and power when we are able to proclaim them with our eyes wide open to the evil that exists. 

Questioned about why he painted the way he did, Pippin responded,

“...I paint things exactly the way they are. … I don’t do what these white guys do. I don’t go around here making up a whole lot of stuff. I paint exactly the way it is and exactly the way I see it.” Sounds like starting with some hard-lived truth.

A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,    and a branch shall grow out of his roots.

Resurrection shall break forth from a tomb.

And peace and hope will grow rooted in the truth of what is.

 “…with righteousness God shall judge the poor,    and decide with equity for the meek of the earth;God shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,    and with the breath of his lips God shall kill the wicked.”

The peaceable kindom is ushered in when we are no longer identified by the power we have usurped or abused (predator)

or by the power we never felt we had (prey)

but rather when we all know ourselves as those who have been anointed with the power of the Holy Spirit and with fire.

We can throw off the shackles of being a predator

and we can rise up and refuse to be anyone’s prey.

Isaiah prophecies about the one coming:

the spirit of the Lord shall rest on him,    the spirit of wisdom and understanding,    the spirit of counsel and might,    the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. 

This one whose coming we Christians await is Jesus,

Immanuel, God-with-us.

But when else do we hear these words?

We hear them when hands are laid upon us at baptism or confirmation

when we are anointed with this same prayer,

really an Advent prayer:

Stir up your power Lord God and come

Upon this daughter/this son.

May the spirit of the Lord rest upon them:

The spirit of wisdom and understanding

The spirit of counsel and might

The spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord

and we add: the spirit of joy in your presence.

We have been anointed with the spirit of the Lord that transforms us 

from predator and prey

from abuser and abused

no longer the aggressor nor the timid one

But raised up like those stones to Abraham

Shoots of life coming forth to become

A royal priesthood

A holy nation 

that includes all creatures and all of creation

A peaceable kindom.

God’s vision of the holy mountain come to earth.

The stump of Jesse that appears dead has a shoot growing out of it.

It’s vulnerable

and it’s just a little tender shoot

but it is infused with the power of God.

So are our acts of healing on behalf of creation

On behalf of the least of these

On behalf of the ones lynched, bombed, preyed upon

And on behalf of those who have lost their way in being predators.

Therein lies hope and the seeds of peace.