Lord of the Streets, Houston
December 7, 2025
2 Advent, A
Isaiah 11:1-10
Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19
Matthew 3:1-12
In the 1984 movie, Ghostbusters, Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, Dan Aykroyd, and Ernie Hudson played the heroes of the movie, the titular, “Ghostbusters.” They were three scientists and one brave man who joined up to get a steady paycheck, who fought ghosts together in New York. They were pretty good at it, caught a lot of ghosts and kept them locked away in their own custom containment unit.
Then, one of the city inspectors got upset with what they were doing, shut down the containment unit, releasing all the ghosts, and landing the Ghostbusters in jail. Then things went kinda wonky, and the mayor asked the Ghostbusters what they thought was going to happen. They described Biblical disasters: seas boiling, fire from the sky, 40 years of darkness, the dead rising from the grave, and then Bill Murray culminates their list of terrors with “dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!”
I bring this up because, one, wouldn’t you start a sermon by quoting Ghostbusters, and two, because that’s what I thought of when I read today’s passage from Isaiah. “The wolf shall live with the lamb,” and “the cow and the bear will graze together.” That’s crazy, and yet, Isaiah wasn’t mass hysteria brought on by ghosts, but peace brought on by God. Now to be fair to Bill Murray, “dogs and cats living together, [that would be] mass hysteria,” but the rest of it, the wolf and the lamb playing together, and the bear and the cow sitting down to a nice brunch, that’s how Isaiah described God’s peaceable kingdom.
We’ve got these beautiful images, crazy, but beautiful images of such a fantastic peace throughout the world that wolves even give up eating the yummy, yummy sheep. You ever had lamb chops? It would take divinely inspired peace for me to say that ain’t tasty any more, but those are the kinds of images Isaiah gives us for God’s peaceable kingdom.
“What’s God’s kingdom of peace going to be like?”, Isaiah asks us. It will be like a baby playing right beside a venomous snake with no fear of being bitten, because the snake would no more bite the baby than the baby would eat the snake.
Don’t try that at home.
Isaiah is giving us an image of what God’s peaceable kingdom could be like.
Now, we’re not going accomplish do this. We’re not actually going to be able to make bears eat grass or wolves frolic in the meadows with sheep. I don’t care how peaceful you feel, don’t anyone start the Rattlesnake-Nanny Childcare Center.
The image of the snake-baby-besties party is an image of just how deeply God intends to heal the world.
Remember the unfortunate events in Genesis 3? The serpent tempted Adam and Eve to eat the fruit which God told them not to eat, and as a result, the serpent would always be the enemy of Eve’s offspring. The serpent would bite our heals, and we would crush its head.
So, a baby playing around with a deadly snake? Yeah, that’s a reversal of Adam and Eve eating the fruit. A baby playing with a deadly snake is a reversal of the serpent tempting Adam and Eve in the first place. Isaiah’s images, which Bill Murray would call mass hysteria, are really a return to Eden. That is how much God intends to heal the world.
That is how much, one day, God will heal the world. It will be like Eden, once again, where we walk with God in the cool of the evening breeze. No fear. No worry. A life of love and being beloved. Being held. Being cared for. That’s what God will do.
With that return to Eden in mind, which God will accomplish, we now turn to John the Baptist, who said, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”
For us, my question is, “Repent of what?” Well, big picture, we have some pretty big ills in our society which need repentance. We have economic injustice, with the ultra-wealthy getting rich off of the labor of the working poor.
We have drug epidemics, gangs, organized crime selling poison to people, which is also economic injustice because the folks at the top of the drug game get rich by enslaving people at the bottom to the poisons, the drugs, they sell.
We have rents increasing so much that wages can’t keep up, so people are working hard and ending up on the street simply because they can’t make enough to afford a place to live.
Those are a few of the big societal ills of which we need to repent.
What about personally. Of what do we need to personally repent? In the face of all our societal ills, how about we repent of apathy and rage? We can get so angry at all the problems of our society that we get overcome by anger and turn to rage, leaving hurt and hatred in our wake. We can also become so overcome by the enormity of societal problems, that we choose to do nothing, because we can’t fix it, so why bother trying? Both that rage and that apathy, choosing to do nothing, are things for which we often need to repent.
Just because we can’t fix the world doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. We’re not going to achieve Eden, but that doesn’t mean we don’t strive for it.
Reading the latest Batman comic, Batman had to fight a basically unbeatable foe. After Batman won, Alfred was thinking about how he won, and he realized that for Batman, winning wasn’t the point because his fight was bigger than any war. His fight is “about doing what is right, no more, no less…He’s not fighting to win. He’s fighting to fight. The fight is the point. For home. For the people he loves.”
- Scott Snyder, Absolute Batman, Issue 14: Abomination: Conclusion, DC Comics, November 2025
That’s kinda like Jesus (minus the cape, and the cool weapons, and the massive violence). Jesus fought for a victory over sin and death. That’s an unbeatable foe, and yet Jesus won. Now Jesus won because he was God who became human, and as God, he united all sin and death to himself so that nothing can separate us from God. As a human being, Jesus trusted in God. Jesus trusted that one day, God’s victory would fully come to pass, and we would live together Isaiah’s vision of peace.
So, what was Jesus’ fight? To do what was right, no more, no less.
For us, too, as disciples of Jesus, we have a fight with sin and death, except that we don’t fight to win. Jesus has already won. We fight because it’s the right thing to do. We fight for one another. We fight for the people we love. We fight for people we don’t even know. We fight to live and spread as much of Eden as we can, knowing that we’re not going to win, and trusting that we don’t need to win.
We just need to fight with the tools of repentance and love. Love is our weapon which does not harm others. Love only does harm to sin and evil, by weakening it so that it no longer has a hold on us and on those we love. Fight sin and evil with love. That’s what John the Baptist called repentance.
Do you find that you are overcome by the sin and evil of the world? Do you find that rage and apathy lead your actions a lot of the time? Then set a new course for your life. Repent of anything that brings harm to others. Repent of anything that isn’t the way of love. If you don’t like where your life is headed, you’ve got to change what you do and how you do it. Let love be your weapon, a weapon which does no harm to others. Let love be your weapon, which does not insist that others follow you in love. Let love be your weapon, which is patient and kind. Let love be your weapon, which seeks not to blame everyone who is wrong around you, but seeks God’s help to change what is harmful within yourself.
Let love be your weapon so much so that a wolf living with a sheep, and a cow and a bear having a snack together actually seems possible. Let love be your weapon so much that a baby could play with a venomous snake and be fine (again, metaphor, don’t try that). Let love be your weapon so much that dogs and cats living together will still be mass hysteria, but you just won’t mind so much.
Repent, John said. Love. Let love be your weapon in the Batman/Jesus fight against sin and death, trusting that God has already won, so we don’t need to win. We fight simply because it’s the right thing to do. We fight for one another. We fight for the people we love. We fight for people we don’t even know. We fight to live and spread as much of Eden as we can, with no weapon except love.
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