A Time for Plowshares
Isaiah 2:1-4
November 16, 2014
Ken Blanchard, who wrote The One-Minute Manager and a bunch of other business
books, tells a story in one of his books about Alfred Nobel.
Nobel was a chemist in 19th century Sweden, an engineer, an inventor, very smart guy.
His signature achievement in science was that he invented dynamite, which ushered in a new
level of destructive power for both good and evil.
In 1888, when Nobel was 55 years old, his brother Ludvig died. The next day Nobel
picked up a newspaper and was stunned to discover that they had mixed up the two brothers, and
there in the paper was not his brother’s obituary, but his own. It was hard reading. The story
went on and on about the terrible death and destruction that this powerful force, dynamite, had
unleashed on the world.
Nobel was devastated. He wanted to be known as a man of peace. And so he made a
decision: He designated his vast fortune to endow what would come to be known as the Nobel
Prizes, and first among them was the Nobel Prize for Peace. He planted a seed for peace that has
outlived him for a long, long time.
World peace gets a bad rap these days. The idea that a world without war is even possible
– that’s the stuff of Burning Man hippies and naïve Miss America contestants. The practical view
seems to be that we live in a dangerous world and we need to protect ourselves at all cost.
So maybe the prophet Isaiah’s vision feels like the pipe dream of a hopeless romantic.
Isaiah imagines a time when the weapons of war become the tools of agriculture, and when West
Point and the U.S. Naval Academy close their doors because there’s no need anymore to learn
the tactics of waging war.
Good luck with that, right? But there are some very practical elements in this impractical
vision.
For one thing, the vision presents a peaceful world as God’s doing, but it doesn’t let you
and me off the hook. Isaiah sees humankind working alongside God in this holy work. “They
shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks,” he says. That
“they” is not God, it’s you and me.
And then Isaiah uses a violent verb, “beat.” Have you ever seen a blacksmith beating a
piece of iron into shape on an anvil? It’s hard work. It’s loud. It’s sweaty. Blacksmithing is a
whole-body workout.
That’s what the work of peacemaking is like, Isaiah is saying by implication. It’s not
passive; it’s not content with sitting back and living peaceably ourselves while turmoil rages
around us. It asks of us our time and energy and muscle and sinew.
So that work is our work as well as God’s work. The other aspect of this prophetic vision
is that it’s future-oriented. Isaiah lived in tough times for Israel, the eighth century before Christ.
The nation had a problem protecting its border, and it was under threat by invaders from the
Assyrian empire to the north. Within a couple of centuries the nation would indeed be invaded
and its people sent into exile.
And so it’s remarkable in this political context that this vision of deep peace comes to
Isaiah. His people would not know peace, but maybe their descendants would, the generations
down the road.
Descendants including us. And for us to be part of that peacemaking process, to be part of
this unfolding of God’s peaceful kingdom, we need to think about both the present and the
future.
We can make small choices every day that inject a little bit of peace into the world.
That’s the work of peacemaking in the present. You can think of it like a big thermometer – the
heat of anger and conflict raise the world’s temperature, but the cool breeze of calm and
reconciliation can bring that temperature down. When we meet some provocation not by lashing
out but by taking a deep breath and figuring out how to be constructive and loving in this
situation, we’re lowering the world’s war-and-peace temperature by a millionth of a degree. The
challenge is to stop reacting, an impulse that comes out of our reptilian brain, and start
responding, bringing Jesus’ signal value of compassion into the equation and acting consciously
in line with our understanding of discipleship. Maybe you can think of a situation in your life in
which a thoughtful and loving response would drive down the temperature. Maybe you could try
it this week.
That’s the everyday work of peacemaking, in a thousand small decisions. But Isaiah’s
vision is a big one, and it’s not going to happen overnight. Probably it won’t happen in our
lifetime. Remember, though, that God’s sense of time is not the same as ours.
Think of it this way: If you go to a financial planner to figure out your investments, she’ll
talk to you about your time horizon. Because investments compound, right? Throw in a little
now, it can pay off big later on. But it depends on your age. If you’re 22 years old, your investing
time horizon is a long one. You can take some risks with your money because you have a long
time to recover if those investments go sour. But if you’re 110, your time horizon is short. You
might want to keep your money someplace safe, because you don’t have decades to recover from
a market crash.
God’s time horizon is, well, forever. Because God is eternal, right? Martin Luther King
Jr. said it like this: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” We have
to trust that God shares this vision of a conspiracy of events and actions that will lead to peace at
the last, real and lasting and widespread peace. And so our peacemaking work needs to be
looking at the long term as well. Like Alfred Nobel, we need to be about planting seeds that will
outlive us and will bear a crop of peace.
I’m thinking for example about programs that have been set up to get Israeli and
Palestinian teenagers talking to each other, to start to break down the ignorance and suspicion
between those two peoples. It’s hard to hate someone when you know his story. That’s planting a
seed. It won’t end that conflict next Tuesday, but with God’s grace it will eventually bear the
fruit of peace.
Or think about our nation’s response to threats to our security and our citizens. Most
recently it’s a question of, what do we do about the terrorist group ISIS in Iraq and Syria? Our
government’s choice has been targeted bombing to try to weaken this group, which is evil
incarnate, no doubt about it. Maybe those bombs are necessary, but they’re only a temporary
solution. We can bomb the world to pieces, but we can’t bomb it into peace.
What would planting a seed of peace look like in this case? Maybe it would involve
trying to understand what’s going on in those societies, and even here at home, that is
radicalizing young men and making them hate Americans. Understanding that, and then
investing ourselves in long-term peace through building schools, or drilling wells to provide
clean water, or training civil society in how to run a democracy.
That’s harder than launching a drone strike. But Isaiah’s vision, that world where all the
swords have been hammered into plowshares, is bigger than the crisis of the day. It’s a vision of
the peaceable kingdom that only God can foresee – and only God’s beloved children can make
happen.
Amen.