Isaiah 11:1-10 / Luke 10:21-24
Fairy tales make us smile, fairy tales like Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty.
They make us smile because the ending is so rosy, so dreamy, so happily ever after, and we feel nice about it.
But the real world is not a fairy tale and we don't usually end up smiling or happy ever after. In fact, it can be like happy never after.
What we heard from the prophet Isaiah seemed to be like a fairy tale.
The wolf lives with the lamb, the lion eats straw like the ox, infant plays over the cobra's hole.
A picture of serenity, a picture of peace and harmony.
But can it be true, can it ever be true? Or is it just a dream and a fairy tale?
We might say that it is not possible, and that is because we, too often, have experienced the hard knocks of the real world.
In this hard and real world, there are no dreams or fairy tales.
The story of Vincent van Gogh, the great Dutch painter, is one such case.
He actually produced 1,700 paintings and drawings before he died in 1890. However in his lifetime, van Gogh sold only one painting, and that for only a miserable sum.
So in the hard real world, dreams and fairy tales just fizzle out and vanish. Or is it so?
It is into this hard real world and that Jesus came to help us dream again, and to give us hope and to help us believe that the Kingdom stories are not just airy fairy tales.
So as we begin our Advent preparation, let us also become like little children of the Kingdom, children who want to dream, children who dare to believe that stories can come true, children who dare to hope against hope.
Just a final world about Vincent van Gogh. If he had stopped painting and drawing because his first work could not sell, then this world would be a hard and cold place without any art.