This second Sunday of Advent opens with a messianic poem from Isaiah describing the  figure who is to come from David's line.

He will be filled with the spirit of the prophets, will establish a new society reflecting God's sanctity on earth. He will restore the peace of Eden. The same Spirit that hovered over all at the beginning, the Spirit that gave all creatures life, inspired the Judges and Saul, gives craftsmen their skill, gave leaders discretion, inspires the prophets: the same Spirit rests on the Messiah and in His era will be poured out on all. So the Messiah has the wisdom of Solomon, the heroism of David, the knowledge and fear of God in patriarch and prophet, in Moses, Jacob, Abraham.

The description of the Spirit's gifts described by Isaiah became our gifts of the Holy Spirit, seen now not merely for the Messiah, but for all the people of God; indeed, through them to spread out through all the world.

And our world is filled with the glory of God, the fruit of the Spirit manifest in compassion, in mercy, in healing. How great the glory of God in all who manifest the Spirit in love for the poor, the imprisoned, the addicted, the afflicted. In the cause of peace, of justice.

Surely the Spirit is manifest in art and in beauty, in communication, in the grandeur of a suspension bridge, an airliner, a mighty ship. The marvels in sight and in sound and how much else are surely the fruit of God's Spirit active in the world.

If we are called on to recognize the Spirit in the Christ, and see Him as He who is to come, and if we are called in Faith to receive the Spirit and manifest His presence by our own life in the world, are we not also bidden to have eyes of faith that see God revealed in the glorious works wrought through humankind? The more so if others do not. How great the glory of God in what He has done and in what He continues to do through creation and creatures.

We cannot assume that once the world was brought to be that God left it. How much easier to believe He continues in it, and specifically in His Son and those in love with His Son, and through them in all the world. We are Catholic.

But the Gospel portion today is troubling. John the Baptist castigates some who came to him. He called them a brood of vipers. Snakes, we might say, serpents.

And what is evil about a viper, that one is condemned by such identification? Nothing really. Vipers are not evil, we are. It is that we think of the viper as evil for his deathly poison. But he is not, not really. The Genesis story identifies the Evil One in the form of a snake, and by way of the snake the Evil One tempted Eve. And because the snake is low, secretive, sudden and dangerous, he makes a fitting player for Satan. yet the snake is not evil. Satan is.

And so we can understand the rest of Isaiah this morning in his describing an Eden:  like Paradise to come in which the wolf will live with the lamb, the panther lie down with the goat. The cow and the bear will graze and the lion eat hay like an ox, the infant play over the den of the adder.

Here is high poetry driving home a hard lesson -- for no wolf will live with the lamb. It is not the way of wolves. No panther lie down with the goat. Panthers do not live so. They are wild animals and their lives are violent. The handsome wolf kills the beautiful deer for food. It is his nature. He is not evil. He fulfills the law of his being.

We are evil. Which is what Isaiah is saying perhaps. We are not violent by nature. We do not live by killing one another. Called to be good, though, we lust and rape, we steal and defraud, we bomb and burn. It is our past time. Our hobby. Our business. Our method.

The Messiah came to live among us. He, richly endowed with the Spirit. It did not take Him long to find out what we are like. Yet He turned that tragedy into a triumph of mercy and forgiveness, of resurrection and eternal life. Although the wolf will no doubt live with the lamb before we beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into sickles, we are none the less called to live our true nature, as human, as immortal. We need not be a brood of vipers. The Spirit hovers over us, is active in us. If we acknowledge His presence and His power, respond to Him in our lives and in our world, then we build the Kingdom Christ came to Build.   Amen.