Neill Morgan
Sermon Delivered December 9, 2007
11A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. 2The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. 3His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord. He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; 4but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked. 5Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist, and faithfulness the belt around his loins. 6The 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. 7The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. 8The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den. 9They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
10On that day the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples; the nations shall inquire of him, and his dwelling shall be glorious.
4For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.
5May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus, 6so that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
7Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God. 8For I tell you that Christ has become a servant of the circumcised on behalf of the truth of God in order that he might confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, 9and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. As it is written, “Therefore I will confess you among the Gentiles, and sing praises to your name”; 10and again he says, “Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people”; 11and again, “Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles, and let all the peoples praise him”; 12and again Isaiah says, “The root of Jesse shall come, the one who rises to rule the Gentiles; in him the Gentiles shall hope.”
13May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.
3In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, 2“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” 3This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’” 4Now John wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. 5Then the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and all the region along the Jordan, 6and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.
7But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? 8Bear fruit worthy of repentance. 9Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. 10Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 11“I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. 12His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
Us and Them
There are two kinds of people in this world: Us and Them. That is one pervasive view throughout the Old Testament, parts of the New Testament, and among us today. In the Old Testament, we see it spelled out in the stories of Us, the nation of Israel, entering the promised land and taking it from Them, the Canaanites, the Amorites, the Hittites, the Jebusites, etc. It is further spelled out in the story of the monarchy when the second King of Israel, David, the one who represents Us, slays the champion of the Philistines, Goliath, the ultimate Them. The story of the exile is told from a similar position: They, our enemies, the Assyrians and the Babylonians, took Us and put us in a foreign land.
In the New Testament, the division between Us and Them forms the political background: there is Us, the people of Israel, and there is Them, the Roman government. By the time the gospel according to John is written, the division between Us and Them has shifted to Us, the disciples of Jesus Christ, and Them, the Jewish leaders who kicked us out of the synagogue. By the time the last book of the Bible is written, the Revelation to John, the Us and Them rhetoric has reached a fevered pitch, with Us being the faithful church and Them being the Roman administration persecuting the church.
The Us and Them view of the world, however, is a view that God sent prophet after prophet to contradict; finally, God sent Jesus to show: there is not Us and Them – there is only God who is good, and there is us, all of whom stand in need of God’s grace.
When disaster struck New Orleans in the form of hurricane Katrina, the purveyors of Us and Them theology saw nature confirming their view: God preserved Us, the inland righteous, and punished Them, the New Orleans homosexuals, transvestites, welfare-receiving poor, and assorted weirdoes. The Mississippi coast, with the highest concentration of fundamentalist Pentecostal Christians in the world, was an unfortunate case of collateral damage.
On the international scene, all wars are fought on the basis of Us and Them, We and They theology. There is Us, who have the right to do what we are doing, and there is Them, a people or a nation who do not have the right to do what they are doing, even if it is the same thing We are doing. In the Us and Them, We and They theology, we are sane and they are crazy, we are right and they are wrong, we are normal, and They are fundamentally different from Us. We value the lives of our children, and They disregard the value of human life.
In our Us and Them theology, we, like Isaiah, look for the righteous leader, that shoot from the stump of Jesse, who will
“strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,
And with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.” (that is, Them).
But then, the prophet Isaiah abandons this whole idea of Us and Them. He soars into a vision that calls us beyond our puny human notions of differences and describes a time in which,
“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.”
It is a beautiful vision that has earned its way into artistic depictions from the classical to the impressionist to the Hallmark Christmas card.
But what does it mean? Is the peaceable kingdom of Isaiah a prophetic call to a different way for human beings to relate to one another? Or, is it a far-off hope, a wisp of a dream to hold onto until God brings the world as we know it to an end and sets everything right?
Biblical scholar Christopher Seitz reminds us that the words of prophets that turned out to be unfulfilled were not preserved. Unless there was some sense that the prophet had accurately described what God was doing in their own time, they did not regard it as a word from God. Therefore, in a time when data storage was expensive, the unfulfilled words of false prophets were left to deteriorate.
The imagery, of course is poetic. As the folk musician Chris Smither says,
“Lions don’t eat cabbage, and in spite of that old adage,
I’ve never seen one lie down with a lamb.”
But animals in Isaiah’s prophecy function like talking animals in movies. Movies with talking animals crack me up. “Dogs and Cats,” “Snow Dogs,” “Lady and the Tramp” – all those movies make me laugh, but it’s because the dogs and other animals represent human beings. They say things people would say if they found themselves in a dog disguise.
Isaiah, too, uses aggressive animals such as the bear and the lion, the serpent and the leopard, to stand for human beings. Isaiah’s contemporaries would have recognized them as the aggressive leaders of nations, both Israel and the nations that surrounded Israel, and the lambs and the children as the people of the land who were politically powerless. They were regularly devoured by the lion of Assyria or the bear of Persia or that evil serpent, Egypt.
Here’s the difficulty: Even taking Isaiah’s vision poetically, it is hard to point to a time anywhere near Isaiah’s lifetime when it was fulfilled. When this vision of peace was so elusive, why was it preserved? The usual approach to prophesy is articulated in Deuteronomy 18: 21-22.
You may say to yourself, ‘How can we recognize a word that the Lord has not spoken?’ If a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord but the thing does not take place or prove true, it is a word that the Lord has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously; do not be frightened by it.
What that tells us is that the people who lived seven hundred years before Jesus was born had at least an occasional glimpse of God at work in the world building peace among disparate peoples. Here and there, the walls dividing Us and Them were breached, at least enough to hold on to this hope for the fulfillment of Isaiah’s vision of a peaceable kingdom.
As Christians, we have seen God at work to build this vision into a reality in the person of Jesus, Immanuel, God-With-Us, born as a little child to lead not just one people, not just one nation, but all peoples, all nations. In the presence of Jesus Christ, the Us and Them theology falls apart.
From the standpoint of the religious establishment, God sent Jesus to be born not of Us, the righteous well-to-do, but of Them, the poor young couple who had no place to rest and give birth but among the animals. And it was not among the predatory animals that he found his place, not the lion, the bear and the leopard, but with the lamb, the cattle, and the oxen.
When the little child was born in Bethlehem, the vision of Isaiah, at least for a night, was fulfilled. Surrounded by a world of vicious and predatory kings, the Roman emperor Tiberius, Pontius Pilate the governor of Judea, and Herod the ruler of Galilee, Jesus was born and laid in a manger, the child who would lead the people of God.
The message of Advent and Christmas that is too easily forgotten in the contemporary fever of shop till you drop or max out your credit cards is this: Christ came for all. Whenever we begin to think in terms of Them and Us, Isaiah’s vision of God’s peaceable Kingdom calls us up short.
Us Presbyterians and Them, the other Christians; Us Americans and Them, the rest of the world; Us, the righteous and Them, the lost; Us, the Christians, and Them, the Jew, Muslim, Hindu, or atheist -- God obliterates even those distinctions with the birth of Jesus who was born, lived, and died to save all sinners.
Whenever we try to hold on to Christ, to own him, possess him, wave him in the face of others as proof of our Us-ness, we forget the very thing for which Christ came, to call all peoples, all nations, to him. Christ is not for us to hold as proof of our righteousness; rather he is for us to proclaim to the whole world, in what we say and what we do, as evidence of God’s righteousness.
A teacher of English as a second language in South Carolina told the story last night on the radio of her students’ first experience of snow. Her class is made up of students from all over the world. Many of them are children of immigrants who have come to the U.S. for work – children of engineers and doctors, professors and technicians. But, a large number are refugees from the Congo, a group of children and youth who have been emotionally ravaged from the uncivil war of that nation. As they have learned enough English to describe what they have been through, many of them tell of watching so many people get killed, even their own family members, they have become numb. These children tend to stay to apart, separated by an emotional wall between Us and Them, between the normal and the traumatized, between the hopeful and the hopeless.
Last week, it began to snow. It is a rare thing in South Carolina, and students from the Congo had never seen snow, so she took them outside. There was enough snow on the ground that they could pick it up, pack it into soft little snowballs, and then . . . well, they did what comes naturally to children who have rolled snowballs. They threw them at each other; tentatively at first, but then, she said, when they saw that it did not hurt, these sad children she had never seen smile in the three months since school started began to laugh and play until a voice interrupted their reverie: “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” The assistant principal put an end to the shenanigans with a reminder that throwing snow is against the rules.
“Of course it is,” the teacher reflected in her commentary. “I should have known. But, I don’t regret it.”
Breaking down the walls between Us and Them, like a laughter-inducing snowball fight in the schoolyard is against the rules of this world. The seats of power will crumble when we cut loose and find the joy that God gave us in Jesus. If ever the world catches hold of the vision of peace in Isaiah fulfilled in the birth of Jesus, look out.
Not only will the lion lie down with the lamb, but Israelis will share neighborhoods and schools with Arab Palestinians; Iraqis and Iranians and Americans will work together to build nations; Presbyterians and Baptists and Catholics, high church classical music hymn-singing traditionalists, and arm-waving, guitar-playing praise-song singing anti-traditionalists will worship together.
And lest we think that Isaiah’s vision of peace is pie-in-the-sky somewhere-over-the-rainbow vain hope, let us remember this: Who would have imagined, ten years ago, when Belfast was burning, that the Protestant and Catholic populations of Ireland would forge a peace? That 2007 would be the year that the British army presence would withdraw from Northern Ireland?
Building peace, whether among nations and cultures, or within families or churches, is challenging, sometimes frustrating work. Breaking down the walls between Us and Them, seeing ourselves as children of the same God revealed in Jesus Christ, is our calling. The good news is that it is a joyful calling, full of moments of grace as welcome as a child’s first experience of snow.
Thanks be to God. Amen.