The Vigilant Hope of Isaiah
Isaiah 2:1-5; Mark 13:24-37
This year marked the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. When the levees broke , John Keller, a lifelong resident of St. Bernard Parish and a former marine, refused to evacuate because he wanted to keep an eye on his elderly neighbors who could not leave. As the water rose, he moved from house to house in a small fishing boat he had tied to his porch beforehand – an act of watchfulness that proved lifesaving.
Before the storm hit, Keller secured ropes, flotation devices, tools, and a flashlight so he could monitor his neighborhood. When the surge came, he navigated the floodwaters to locate several elderly neighbors who were trapped on upper floors. With no power, no communication, and no official rescue in sight, he rationed his own food and kept alert through the night, watching for rescue boats and keeping spirits up. On the third day, he climbed to a damaged rooftop waving a bright white sheet until a passing Coast Guard helicopter saw them.
Keller wasn’t a first responder or someone with any authority. His role came from a posture of vigilance: keeping watch over vulnerable people, preparing his small corner of the world, and staying alert even when exhausted. His watchfulness saved lives.[1]
If you’ve ever lived through a hurricane, you know about the restlessness leading up to the storm –it feels charged with anxiety, and preparations to leave or stay. Then the real chaos hits when the screaming winds and rain make landfall ravaging trees, rooftops, electrical lines… Everything struggles to hold on for dear life. And then as abruptly as the storm blew in, comes the quiet, the lull. The wind may drop to zero. The rains may cease and the sun might even break through. It’s an unnatural calm, a sudden stillness. It’s the eye of the storm. “All is calm. All is bright.”[2]
On this first Sunday of Advent, our scripture texts are anchored in these five verses of profound hope from Isaiah 2. As in the eye of the storm, these 5 verses claim a future peace amidst the first two swirling chapters of heaping judgment. In chapter one, all of Israel and Judah, their leaders, even Jerusalem are brought into focus for their lack of faithfulness to God.
Isaiah prophesied amidst a storm. In the time of Isaiah, Israel’s twelve tribes were not unified under one king. They were divided under two different monarchies – Judah in the south with only two tribes and Israel in the north with ten.
Isaiah lived during a very turbulent time in Israel’s history. The Assyrians were attempting to establish an empire that would include Egypt. In order to achieve this worldwide power, they first had to defeat all the smaller kingdoms in what is modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel. As they conquered city after city, they deported the indigenous populations to various locations under their rule to serve as cheap labor supporting the war effort.[3]
Here we go again. Israel expects to be scattered and exiled. The Assyrian army is marching from north to south conquering every city along its path. Samaria, Israel’s northern capital, had already been besieged. Jerusalem would be next. But the Assyrians were called back to their own capital city before they could invade because civil war had broken out back home. All Jerusalem saw this as a miracle. God had spared them in part, they believed, because Isaiah had interceded for them.
Perhaps these five verses of poetic possibility are reflective of the joy Israel experienced as they watched the enemy pack up their ammo, turn their beasts of burden around and head back north.
In the face of impending doom and violent corruption, Isaiah dares his hearers to imagine – a world reordered by divine justice, divine wisdom. It’s as if he is saying,
“If you think that was amazing, just wait! Someday, these very same enemies will return here to this city, not in hostility and violence, but in humility and kindness.” The nations will come back because they realize that Israel’s God is the source of wisdom. [4]
In the eye of the storm, all is calm, all is bright. All is not perfect. All are not 100% repentant. Isaiah doesn’t wait for ideal circumstances to proclaim a future peace of unprecedented cooperation. He casts a vision even while chaos still swirls all around them.[5] He invites all of Judah to imagine, just imagine, “what we could do if we turned all those swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks?! Nation wouldn’t rise up against nation; neither would they learn war anymore. O house of Jacob,” Isaiah implored all twelve tribes, “Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!” That’s the invitation of Advent.
Now, immediately following these five verses, Isaiah’s kingdom vision deteriorates as “the same old human folly enters back in” one commentator wrote. The prophet of possibility reverts back to a prophet of warning. Listen to Isaiah’s words. He could be standing on almost any corner in this world and saying the same things:
“How can we go to worship at the Holy Temple when there is blood and fire in the streets? War is everywhere!"
“How can we offer our sacrifices when children have empty bellies and the rich hoard more and more?”
“How can we praise a good and faithful God when the world seems to be crumbling around us?”
“How can we find hope when we feel so alone?”[6]
The eye of the storm passes and the storm rages on.
This is the truth of our lives. Suffering and injustice (Life!) rage all around us. There are momentary breaks in the chaos – like saxophone spirituals in a gorgeous sanctuary; or lighting a candle while you read an advent devotional; or sorting through cherished Christmas ornaments. For a moment, All is calm. All is bright. And then another reminder scrolls across the screen of our lives that there is still a storm brewing… This week we have witnessed the suffering of our own loved ones – their death, their grief, their cancer, their car accident. Everyday we are witnesses to relationships beyond repair, frustration that divulges into harmful words, exhaustion that turns to apathy. It is a weary world.
Isaiah’s hopeful words could have been swallowed up and forgotten, but they weren’t. They remain like a beacon showing the way on this first Sunday of Advent. “Come let us walk in the light of the Lord!” is Advent’s invitation. Isaiah’s prophecy dares listeners to dream – of what is possible “in the days to come.” Hope for Isaiah, is not a feeling; it’s a posture of imagination and action. In him, we see how holy dreams shape real futures, and how sacred vision becomes an invitation to walk a new path.
Hope dares us to keep watch even as the storm clouds gather. Hope stirs. It protests. It builds. It gathers… people into movements of mercy and imagination and resistance. Hope shapes tools of peace out of weapons of war. Isaiah’s dream is not a solo endeavor. It’s a communal dream.[7] This reminded me of a modern day Isaiah who wrote recently, Resistance is impossible alone, but in community everything is possible.
Let me tell you about a couple more modern-day Isaiahs who have the will to dream and the courage to DO something based in defiant hope.
Shane Claiborne is a prominent Christian speaker, activist, and author. On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, he transformed his first gun into a garden tool, literally. The widespread invitation to take guns off the street and forge them into actual tools became a meaningful part of his activism and message after Sandy Hook… and not only in his home city of Philadelphia, but across the country. In fact, in 2019 he brought his anvil and a portable forge to Birmingham to demonstrate exactly how it can be done. With more guns in the United States than people, our “thoughts and prayers” aren’t going to affect real change in the problem of rampant gun violence, he protests. Christians won’t ever pray the problem away without putting our faith into action. Real change begins in our hearts, Claiborne repeats, when we decide to care.[8] The hope of Advent is not about ignoring the storms raging around us, but confronting them with imagination. Vigilant hope sees the world’s wounds clearly and chooses to dream anyway.
Michael Woolf is an American Baptist pastor in Chicago who cares about his neighbors being impacted by ICE raids. He has challenged Christians to take their messages from the sanctuaries to the streets – whatever that looks like in your context, he says. “Some of us will run food banks or get trained in rapid response teams, others will take the fight directly to detention centers. What matters is that we do not allow these acts to be perpetuated without resistance. Raising our voices is good, but for those of us with privilege, we must be willing to put our bodies between our neighbors and those who would seek to do them harm.”[9]
As we watchfully wait for Christ to come into our lives and into our hearts, this season, the challenge for us is to consider how we must beat our personal swords into plowshares and our private spears into pruning hooks. What weapons are we wielding that need to be transformed into tools for peace? Let’s start in our families and churches and in our workplaces and classrooms…. And then, let us keep watch where God calls us next.
The hope of Advent is not about ignoring the storms raging around us, but confronting them together. John Keller, Shane, Michael, Isaiah… they all see the world’s wounds and they choose to dream anyway. That’s the world Jesus was born into on that night when all was calm and all was bright - just for a moment. That’s the invitation this Advent: Hope sees the storm all around us and still has the will to dream. May it be so with us. Amen.
[1] ChatGPT generated; based on actual facts
[2] Steimle, Edmund A. “Eye of the Storm,” A Chorus of Witnesses
[3] Carvalho, Corrine, Working Preacher commentary Isaiah 2:1-5, 2025
[4] ibid.
[5] Illustrated Ministry, The Will to Dream
[6] Ibid.
[7] ibid.
[8] https://blogs.hope.edu/peace-justice/events/shane-claiborne-on-beating-guns/
[9] https://allianceofbaptists.org/a-spiritual-emergency-demands-resistance/