Episode 1275: Peace and Harmony

[00:00:00] Scott Maderer: Thanks for joining me on episode 1,275 of the Inspired Stewardship Podcast.

[00:00:07] David Smith: I'm David Smith, author of Who's Got Your Back Making and Keeping great Friendships among men. I encourage you to invest in others, develop your influence and impact the world by using your time, your talents, and your treasures to live out your.

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[00:00:48] Scott Maderer: And yet maybe if there are people willing to work and suffer and stand up for a different way of being in community, maybe people could stand up and signal [00:01:00] that there's a better way. But who would do that? Who would sacrifice that much? Who would endure that much to bring about a new world and a new piece?

[00:01:12] Welcome and thank you for joining us on the Inspired Stewardship Podcast. If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent, and your treasures for your true calling. In the Inspired Stewardship Podcast, you will learn to invest in yourself, invest in others, and develop your influence so that you can impact the.

[00:01:46] In today's spiritual foundation episode, I talk with you about Isaiah chapter 11 verses one through 10. I talk about how peace and harmony is something we hope for, but often struggle to find. And I also share with you how there is [00:02:00] joy to be found even in brokenness. Isaiah chapter 11 verses one through 10.

[00:02:07] A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. 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, his delight shall be in the fear of the Lord. He shall not judge by what his I see or decide by what his ears here, but with righteousness, he shall judge the poor and decide with equity for the meek of.

[00:02:34] He shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth and with the breath of his lips. He shall kill the wicked righteousness, shall be the belt around his waist and faithfulness the belt around his loin. The wolf shall live with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf, and the lion, and the fating together, and a little child shall lead them.

[00:02:55] The cow and the bear shall graze. Their young shall lie down together, [00:03:00] and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp and. The wean child shall put its hands on the adders den. They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain. For the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord.

[00:03:16] As the waters cover the sea on that day, the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples. The nations shall Choir of him and is dwelling shall be glorious. I've got a house full of animals and a lot of times, Things seem a little chaotic and unsettled, especially with the animals. We have one cat, Simba, who's a giant cat.

[00:03:42] He probably weighs 18 or 20 pounds and he constantly wants to love the two dogs. He's young and the two dogs are quite a bit older and. Quite frankly, they really don't want his attention and they don't want him loving on them. He comes [00:04:00] up to 'em and meows for attention and tries to rub up against them, and they look at him like, please just go away.

[00:04:07] And then they look at us like, please can't you do something about this guy. He's irritating to all of us, and despite the fact that all he really wants is some attention, it disrupts the. Life. And in fact I think sometimes if the dogs would just growl at him, or maybe the cats would just swat at the dogs, they would leave each other alone.

[00:04:29] They could bite or nip and get some pushback against each other and then be able to occupy the same space together. Maybe. Really, there is a world where all the friendly beasts could live together in peace and harmony. Holding each other's paws and singing kumbaya together. But we definitely don't live in that world today.

[00:04:54] I bet when you heard that story from Isaiah, you wondered if I was reading it right. The [00:05:00] wolf shall live with the lamb. The leopard shall lie down with the kid. That's a baby goat. In this case, the calf and the lion and the fating together, and a little child. She'll lead them, and then it goes on the cow and the bear she'll graze and so on.

[00:05:14] We, we always think of it as the lion and the lamb. You've probably seen cross stitch or pictures where it's a lion and a lamb lying together that has become the prototypical image of the piece and harmony of the kingdom. But in Isaiah, it actually says the wolf and the lamb, and the lion and the calf, specifically the fatted calf, the calf that's ready for eating or ready for sacrifice.

[00:05:42] This would be like saying Democrats and Republicans get along with each other. It's just not gonna happen. It's like saying, people that are for gun control and gun control advocates could sit down and have a friendly convers. It just can't have it. [00:06:00] Whether it's a conservative and a liberal it just feels like we just can't ever get along.

[00:06:06] And immediately, I think to myself, maybe if they would just give each other a swat on the nose, they could just get along better, just like the animals. But that's probably not a really good idea. And the truth is our differences just seem too great. Our divides seem too deep. Until something comes along that is bigger than us, that shows a deeper reality, a bigger crisis, a bigger direction, a bigger connection between us.

[00:06:39] We'll continue to be separated and have the battle lines drawn up between. That's why I think Alien invasion meetings movies work the way they do they show the aliens coming in and all of a sudden the humans get along because they have a common enemy. I, if we suddenly had something in common that we [00:07:00] wanted to be able to get, then maybe we could get along.

[00:07:05] But instead, we seem to actually just be stuck where we are and where we are is on opposite sides of this. Divide at least that seems to be the reality that we're convinced exists. And yet at this time of the year, as we come into Advent in the Christmas season, maybe that's a time of the year that we begin to believe just a little bit, that this peace and harmony and peace on earth might be.

[00:07:37] We see movies like Charlie Brown's Christmas and that Poor Excuse for a Tree, or the Grinch, where his heart grew three sizes one day. And all of these specials and these sappy seasonal movies begin to make us say maybe there's a little glimmer of hope in that, but it doesn't seem possible because maybe the teeth and the claws are just [00:08:00] sheath for the moment.

[00:08:01] It's a fantasy. It doesn't really work in the real world. It doesn't work in our homes. It doesn't work in our churches. It doesn't work in our boardrooms. It doesn't work in our businesses. The marketplace doesn't work on the battlefield. It doesn't work to have that piece that only happens in the movie.

[00:08:19] For the holidays and in our imagination, and yet maybe if there are people willing to work and suffer and stand up for a different way of being in community, maybe people could stand up and signal that there's a better way. But who would do that? Who would sacrifice that much? Who would endure that much to bring about a new world and a new piece?

[00:08:48] Yeah, we do a, an annual Christmas party at our church where we give out gifts for many families and many childrens. I live in a part of the [00:09:00] world where there's a lot of working poor. There's a lot of folks that. They're doing okay, but they're really not able to provide what they would want for their kids for Christmas.

[00:09:10] And we step in and do that. And you've probably seen hundreds of churches do this, but we try to do it in a way that honors the family. We try to not. Be the church that's giving the gifts, but instead we let the parents pick up the gifts in secrets so that they can take them home and wrap them and present them as part of their Christmas, and we just throw a big party that the kids get to come to and decorate cookies and eat and do other things as as an excuse to be able to give the gifts to the parents in secret.

[00:09:41] We do this in a way that we try to make. more about the family and less about us, and we're not perfect at it by any stretch of the imagination, but we try because we understand that's part of honoring the family there. There were, there's [00:10:00] barriers that we pass when we do this. There are folks in the community that consider us their church, even though.

[00:10:07] Never come to a Sunday service because of this, because we're not looking at them as victims or people that need help. Instead, we're looking at them as part of our community, our neighbors who we have the ability to help, and so we can and we will, but not in a patronizing way. We actually ask them what do they want?

[00:10:26] What do they need? What would help them? When we think of peace and harmony, we often think of that painting of animals clustered around a small child. In fact, that painting, there's a famous painting by Edward Hicks. He's the painter, and he posted and painted a, a picture of a European man gathered around a group of Native Americans shaking hands in peace.

[00:10:56] The man was William Penn, who was a Quaker and Edward [00:11:00] Hicks painted this image, and it's a very famous one, and there's animals all behind them that are almost smiling at them in peace, but, Edward Hicks did several versions of this painting, and as he went on, the older paintings show the animals in peace and playful as they lay down together.

[00:11:21] But over time, the teeth and the claws grew sharper and there was more snarls on them, and it became a more violent image in ways and the child. Representing Christ in this image, and that begins to tighten his grip on the lions man in the Bear's neck seeming to hold them in place with strength rather than peace.

[00:11:44] Hicks actually represented in the painting how he began losing hope in the human community. He began to lose hope, that peace would be something that we would bring about and began to instead put his hope in Christ in saying, let us clinging [00:12:00] tightly to Christ. That's the message of Isaiah.

[00:12:05] That's what this season reminds us of. Peace on Earth is possible, but not through our power, only through the power of the spirit, through the power of Christ, through the power of doing and acting and being different than we are before. Because even out of brokenness can come a moment of joy and peace and harmony if we give ourselves up to that being.

[00:12:34] Thanks for listening.

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