Sermon - The Rev. Dr. Elise A. Feyerherm, December 4th, 2022

As a younger person I was fascinated by the famous image by the 19th century Quaker painter Edward Hicks, known as “The Peaceable Kingdom.” It depicts the scene we heard in Isaiah just a few minutes ago: “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. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den” (Isaiah 11:6-8).

The painting is done in what is sometimes called “primitive” style. Many of the animals face the viewer directly, their somewhat cartoonish eyes open wide; the figures are stiff, posed rather than natural. As I was looking for the image online I was perplexed to see that the pictures I found were not all the same; there were variations in composition and background. The one I knew the best hangs in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, but it turns out there are many others. Edward Hicks painted this subject over a hundred times between 1820 and 1849, and each one is a little different.

Hicks was a Quaker, steeped in religious testimonies of nonviolence, simplicity, and equality of persons. Isaiah’s vision of the peaceable kingdom encapsulated all that Hicks and the Quakers hoped for in this world. In each version the artist included scenes from American colonial and Quaker history, as a way of imagining how the peaceable kingdom might be manifest in this world. In one of the most famous versions, we see in the background a depiction of William Penn making his treaty with the native inhabitants of what became known as Pennsylvania. In other versions, Hicks puts Quakers in the background holding banners with the angel Gabriel’s announcement to the shepherds: “Behold, I bring you glad tidings of great joy – peace on earth and good will to men.”

During Edward Hicks’ lifetime, the reality of what he painted was elusive. The Quakers themselves had split in a bitter dispute about their faith; in many of the paintings the animals and the young children play under a tree that is itself split and broken, to symbolize the painful schism between Hicksite and Orthodox Quakers. The treaty that William Penn made in 1682 with the Lenape people, a covenant to live in perpetual peace, had been broken many times over.

Victoria Emily Jones writes in her Art and Theology blog that for Hicks, “all the intrafaith dissension he witnessed had destroyed his hope of ever seeing established in the here and now a kingdom like the one Isaiah envisioned. But that realization only caused him to cling to Christ all the more tightly.” I can see that in his paintings; over and over he imagined and brought to life the vision God had implanted in his heart, of little children playing with poisonous serpents, of predators and prey resting together without fear, of white colonists committing themselves to live in peace and justice with their native siblings. 

You could argue that “it wasn’t real,” that Hicks’ painting was simply a naïve escape from the harsh reality of this world. But I see it as something else; I see it as evidence of Advent hope. I hear the voice of one crying in the wilderness, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”

We live between two comings of Christ. The first coming, the incarnation of the Word as a human child, has already happened, has already changed the world by creating new possibilities. During Advent we are especially aware of and long for the final coming of Christ, when God’s reign of peace, reconciliation, and abundance will be fully realized. We see glimpses of this in the world around us, but like Edward Hicks, we find those glimpses are often overwhelmed by a sea of discord and violence and greed. Our whole Christian lives are lived, in a sense, in Advent expectation, because what we long for is not yet fulfilled, not complete. 

I might go further and say that not only is what we long for not complete, but that it sometimes appears irretrievably lost and broken. Russia is still invading Ukraine. The climate is still changing and the poor are bearing the brunt of it. White nationalism still promotes a message antithetical to Christ and the gospel. Synagogues still need to have police protection. This is not the peaceable kingdom by any stretch of the imagination. How do we sustain hope?

Maybe we should take our cue from Edward Hicks. Maybe, just maybe, we should keep painting. Perhaps not literally – although those of you who do paint, keep doing it! When the world around us looks like anything but the peaceable kingdom, my friends, we keep painting. We keep painting the peaceable kingdom as God has shown us it should look like, and we do it over and over and over again. 

We paint with our love, and with our livelihoods. We paint with our hands as we care for the young and the very old, easing pain and bringing comfort. We paint with our hearts as we bear one another’s burdens and weep with each other. We paint with hammer and nail, sheltering the homeless. We paint with every shared meal, every joyful song we sing.

Like Edward Hicks, we keep the peaceable kingdom alive by continuing to hold its image before our eyes and by building it in our midst in any way we can. Or, a better way to say it is that we offer our hands and hearts and voices to what God is already building in our midst. We keep on painting the picture God has implanted in our hearts. 

Centuries ago, when Israel and Judah were in exile, the stump of Jesse seemed all but dead. Jerusalem and the temple had been destroyed; the people had been taken away to a foreign land. It seemed impossible that any new life might spring up. But during that time, Israel kept painting its picture of the reign of God. It kept telling the story of God’s love and justice. It was during the time of the exile that the story of creation was reimagined and retold, with God creating order out of chaos and new life springing up from barren earth and humans being created in the divine image, and it all being very, very good. They kept holding the image of God’s promise, of the peaceable kingdom, before their eyes, and behold, a branch grew out of seemingly dead roots. 

The image we keep alive before us is the reality that forms and shapes us. I have no doubt that with every brushstroke, Edward Hicks kept alive in his heart the image of that holy stump. And by doing so, even if he knew he would never see the fullness of God’s reign, he prepared himself to receive it, and to be a part of it. So we keep painting. We keep painting a new version of the peaceable kingdom in our church, in our homes, in our communities, in the world, so that we will recognize it when it comes, and that we will be the kind of folk who are ready to live fully in it.

Let us pray:

God of the lion and lamb, you promise that your justice will come down as rain upon the mown field. Fill our hearts and our lives with the vision of your peaceable kingdom, that we may nourish it wherever we go, and be ready to receive it when it comes in all its glory; through Jesus Christ, the one who will come again, and who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, now and forever. Amen.