Being Rooted
Isaiah 11:1-10 & Matthew 3:1-12
December 4th, 2016 – Advent 2
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In some ways, human beings have changed immensely in the last 2000 years. And in other ways, we are exactly the same…full of the same arrogance and isolation, the same inclination to greed, the same love of power, the same resistance to the things that make for peace…still the same sin that keeps us from seeing one another as God sees us – siblings, all children of God’s beautiful and diverse creation, all loved and lovable, all deserving of basic human rights and dignity. We still get our priorities WAY out of order. AND we still have trauma and stress with which we have to live.
Danish philosopher, theologian and social critic, the great Soren Kierkegaard, once wrote, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” As we get through Advent we often have to face a version of this phenomenon in the form of the words of the prophet Isaiah. For we get an earful near Christmas time of, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel”, or “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.” These are, of course, references to Jesus, right? No. Isaiah’s references are to his time, only his words were well known to the disciples of Jesus, and since they, like we, lived forwards and got meaning backwards, in the days post-Easter, when Jesus’ disciples were filled with grief and hope, they sought meaning in their own scriptures, just like we do when we’re feeling distraught or lost.
So they began to read Isaiah as predicting Jesus, and it helped give them a toe-hold as they tried to understand not only what the life of Jesus meant, but also his death, not to mention his resurrection. The writers of the the gospels reinterpreted the prophets for their own time and place because human beings have changed a lot, and also not at all. And there are times for us, maybe more so lately, when we return to scripture, to prayer, or a glass of scotch, to help us cope with stress, with turmoil, with our world seemingly turned upside down. These stories, the accounts of our spiritual ancestors, help us affirm hope just they have done for others throughout history. They help us to feel rooted, to remember the sources of our nutrients and what can still feed us when we feel spiritually malnourished.
Isaiah’s vision, delivered at a time of great crisis and trauma, sees wolves and lambs living together, the calf and the lion and the fatling together…the predators turned vegetarians, the snakes rendered less yucky (yes, I said less, even Isaiah’s dream has it’s limitations). And bringing this kind of peace? A shoot from the tree of David, the penultimate king of ancient Jewish imagination, the leader by which all other leaders are judged. The spirit of the Lord rests on this Davidic branch, and the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the awe of God.
It’s an absurd dream, really. Wolves don’t lie down with lambs. It ain’t happening.
And it seems a strange mix this morning with the words of John the Baptist, who promises one who…”will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His 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.” But let’s be careful readers again and look at the verses just before our segment from Isaiah today, verses 33 & 34, the very end of chapter 10:
Look, the Sovereign, the Lord of hosts,
will lop the boughs with terrifying power;
the tallest trees will be cut down,
and the lofty will be brought low.
He will hack down the thickets of the forest with an ax,
and Lebanon with its majestic trees[a] will fall.
Neither dream, it would seem, the dream of Isaiah or the dream that John eventually hints at, comes without some…well, maybe we’ll call it judgment, we’d certainly call it discomfort. The path to the kind of peaceful unity portrayed in the words of both Isaiah and later Jesus, includes some kind of purge, a hardcore spiritual juice fast cleanse, which seems to happen, at least the mystics have discovered, by digging through our roots and pruning our souls . We are, it seems, both wheat and chaff, and the chaff must be swept away, or shoveled into the fire, or pruned from the limb…choose your metaphor. The axe must cut out whatever in us does not bear good fruit.
And while I have experienced this as a spiritual truth, I also know that we have to be careful with such instruction. For the idea of “dying to self” has been used for centuries to control the lives of women, people of color, the poor, different gender expressions and sexual identities. Those on the margins have been told that their suffering is required by the gospel, and that they should accept that graciously.
This morning I want to say that I think that especially right now, as we all regroup, form and strengthen our communities and reach out to be and to seek good allies, we need a good, healthy internal process of refinement…a way to do some pruning that benefits everyone. We need to do some good soul-searching and to redefine and reinvigorate our moral compass. But when such refinement reinforces a sinful tendency towards self-destruction, when it is not life-giving (I don’t mean painless, I do mean not life-giving) then it is not of God. There is a reason that a common metaphor for this work is fire…fire can help and fire can destroy. It’s how you use it that matters. And what I’m suggesting is that now is the time to prepare ourselves to produce good fruit, first as individuals and then as community. And this will require some controlled burns, some careful management.
In a time in which I think that we need community more than ever, it is good for us to understand that we really don’t build community with purity, but instead with dedication to a constant process of repentance, a commitment to knowing our own story and to hearing someone else’s for we are all in need of God’s grace and the blessing of God’s diverse and good creation. Unity is such a misleading word. We might like the sound of it, but we seem unable to get to it as human beings without some sort of unifier…we think alike, we look alike, we talk alike. We always forget the main unifier – we are all created by a God who made us each in the image of divinity. So when we see someone that’s not like us, they are like us, we just need to redefine us…
God knows this is hard. God does know that this is hard, which we trust because we faith this story of Jesus, Emmanuel, God-with-us, the Word made flesh, the divine in human skin, come to us in vulnerability, in touch with our suffering. So let us seek to practice our refining tools in Advent. For, as John reminds us, it’s not enough to simply claim spiritual ancestry, we have to actually practice it. It’s not enough to say your Christian, you have to actually practice your faith. So read your devotionals. Come to the “Sweet Hour of Prayer” on Wednesday night or Friday morning. Take social media fasts, invite someone from church you don’t know well to coffee and dedicate yourself to hearing someone else’s story face-to-face. Listen more. Talk less.
Come to this table where the wolf and the lamb eat together, come…let us prepare the way of the Lord.