The Good News of Judgment and Peace
The Good News of Judgment and Peace
Last week I mentioned the traditional and the newer themes for the four Sundays of Advent—Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell—and Hope, Peace, Joy, Love. So, is the theme for this Second Sunday of Advent Judgment or Hope? Yes. There are ways to see judgment, then repentance, that don’t leave us feeling like we need to make a bunch of New Year’s resolutions (Advent being the start of the liturgical year), many of which we know we won’t end up keeping. But this Advent, I invite you give up “judgment”—but not responsibility.
This world that our holy and gracious God created in their infinite love is not a court, with God as a combined prosecutor, judge and executioner waiting to ambush us. Judgment is the moment where we are surprised by an unexpected insight, perhaps caught up short, but also made aware of just how gracious our God is. If you were ever judged and felt no grace, that judgment was not about God.
So, to accept judgment and repent is not first and foremost to make a checklist of all the things we’ve done wrong and try not to repeat them, only to fail more often than succeed. It means to change your heart, your mind, your purpose; to look within yourself and ask where you need to trust God more and not turn to some emotional crutch. Then it means to trust God to take what you can change, and by God’s grace, do the rest of the changing for you. And if, as John the Baptist says today, “God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham,” then God can certainly change us.
And if God is able to change us, then God is able to make the “Peaceable Kingdom” of which Isaiah prophesied—wolves and lambs, leopards and goats, calves and lions, all led by a little child. It’s the vision that Pennsylvania Quaker Edward Hicks painted over 60 times in the early 1800s, the former predators and prey side by side with a little child petting the lion, and down in the valley, Pennsylvania’s founder William Penn making peace with the local tribes of the First Nations.
Wait, scratch that last part. We all know that in this world there are only predators and prey. Even Hicks, in his later versions, knew it was false to hearken back to the peace-making Penn and no longer included that scene. And we humans are by far the most predatory animals on this planet. And yet, Jesus is the shoot from the stump of Jesse, father of King David, and when Joseph accepts Jesus as his son, father of Jesus the Christ, the Messiah. The Son of God did not become fully human only to keep you or me out of God’s eternal doghouse. He came to exemplify this transformed creation that he himself experienced in his resurrection.
So back to repentance and what I said earlier about giving up judgment but not responsibility. Essential to repentance is enlarging our perception of our responsibility, to our fellow creatures and most of all to our fellow humans, like us made in the image of God. And having enlarged our sphere of responsibility, we then need to make whatever safe space we can for those who would become prey to the appetites, ambitions, fears and hatreds of those who think they can only be predator or prey.
Even if that safe space is no bigger than our arms and hands, when we do that, we make one brush stroke in God’s painting of the Peaceable Kingdom, a painting that only God can complete, but that we can co-create, one stroke at a time. I once viewed a more realistic version of the Peaceable Kingdom in the Art Museum of Asheville, North Carolina. In it the little child isn’t petting the lion, they’re pulling the lion’s whiskers, and the lion looks annoyed but isn’t biting the kid’s head off. So, if I may be so bold as to paraphrase the prophet, from the shoot of Jesse shall come a King of peace chosen by God, in whose kingdom the little child shall pull the lion’s whiskers and the lion shall merely be annoyed.
This Advent, give up judgment but not responsibility. Enlarge your responsibility, make as large a safe space as possible, and trust God to finish the painting.
December 07, 2025,
2nd Sunday of Advent, Year A
The Rev. David Kendrick