The Peaceable Kingdom

Our Scripture readings this morning focus on the tensions we experience as people of faith.  This tension is the on-going human struggle between the realities of our lives and the vision of new life, a new creation, new heavens and a new earth.  It is our spiritual struggle for a more just world.  We live with the hope and expectation that life for everyone and all the life on our planet will be better.

For example, we see the injustices that surround us, the homeless and hungry people who have little or no hope, the uninsured and the unemployed, the victims of violence and the victims of natural disasters like this past week’s typhoon in the Philippines.  We are familiar with injustice at many levels, but we also have a sense, a hope for a better tomorrow, a time in which there will be greater understanding, compassion, care and opportunity for everyone.

We heard in the Gospel of Luke, “When some [of the disciples] were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, Jesus said, ‘As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down…. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues; and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.’"  It sounds so much like the circumstances that affect the lives of so many of our citizens and people around the world.

Against the dire prediction about the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, we also heard the words of Isaiah who had prophesied many years earlier.  Isaiah wrote, the Lord God said, “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.  But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating; for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight…. The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox; but the serpent -- its food shall be dust!  They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the LORD.”

Isaiah had predicted the restoration and rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem in 515 BCE following the Babylonian captivity.  Hundreds of years later Luke has Jesus foretelling the destruction of the temple.  It happened a generation after Jesus’ death in the year 70 CE. The building, destroying and rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem represents the tension that exists between what is and what is to be.

Edward Hicks was a painter who spent years working on paintings titled, “The Peaceable Kingdom.”  He was born in 1780 in Pennsylvania.  His parents were Anglicans.  His mother died when he was just eighteen months old and he was then raised in a Quaker family.  In 1812 he became a Quaker minister.

On the Wikipedia web site there is an article about his life, his working career, his paintings and exhibitions.  The article points out that Hicks' Peaceable Kingdom exemplifies Quaker ideals.  He painted 61 versions of this composition.  What we are looking at today is the culmination of his work, and the original of this painting is in the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts.  The animals and children are taken from Isaiah, including the lion eating straw with the ox.  Hicks used his paintings as a way to define his central interest, which was the quest for a redeemed soul.

John Braostoski, a Quaker member of the Shrewsbury, New Jersey Meeting, wrote in the February, 2000 issue of Friends Journal that Edward Hicks was a painter who “had a genuine feeling for the Scriptures along with hope for a continuing sense of insight open to all.”  Over a period of several years he portrayed in his paintings titled The Peaceable Kingdom “a delicate balance of difficult and unresolved issues.”  His Biblical text was from Isaiah chapter 11: “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.”  Our passage from the 65^th chapter of Isaiah is similar: “The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox.”

Look carefully at the photo.  Edward Hicks’s “wild animals are seemingly domesticated and brought into line with loving kindness…. The sense of light in the gorgeously rendered creatures, trees, and air becomes the subject…. Hicks believed in the Inner Light and its power; he felt it, therefore he saw it.  Most importantly, he saw it in others, including the lion…. The world was all light to him, that special Light…. [He] allows us to see the Light coming out of all living beings and the world, speaking to that which shines within every one of us.”

It is important that in our present-day human condition we continue to embrace the tension between what is and what can become in realizing a vision of new heavens and a new earth. The ongoing struggle between what is and what can be better is a spiritual struggle.

Katie Givens Kime, writing in the current issue of The Christian Century magazine (November 13, 2013, p. 20)  says, “The paradox of God’s lofty promise in Isaiah is that all will be resolved and that all is resolved.  The good news is that this frees us: we are not prisoners of our circumstances.  The world is and shall be bigger than all the limitations we encounter in ourselves, in others, and in the material universe of gravity, violence, aging, suffering and injustice…. Living in the moment is a continual spiritual struggle…. In seeking… to imagine and to insist on God’s intention for a just world, we participate in it, which may be the best news of all.”  Amen.