Until Everyone's Free--December 13, 2022

Until Everyone's Free--December 13, 2022

"No lion shall be there, nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it; they shall not be found there, but the redeemed shall walk there. And the ransomed of the LORD shall return, and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away." [Isaiah 35:9-10]

When people who have been held captive are set free and get to go home, it's good news.  Full stop.

Sometimes I forget how often the Scriptures talk like that.  From the central story of Israel's past when a nation of enslaved people are finally set free from their bondage in Pharaoh's Egypt, to the voices of the prophets offering hope that exiles could come home from Babylon like here in today's verses from Isaiah, to Jesus himself taking up the mission of "letting the oppressed go free" [see Luke 4 with Jesus' sermon in Nazareth], the Bible keeps coming back to the good news of captives being set free to go home.

But for each of those moments of release, there is an awful lot of waiting that leads up to the announcement of homecoming.  For the enslaved Hebrews in Egypt, it was four centuries of living in slavery.  For the generation that was taken into exile in Babylon, it was seventy years before their children or grandchildren were finally able to make their way back to their old family farms and houses.  Over and over again, the Bible invites us to rejoice when captives are set free--but that also comes with the call to watch and wait and work for that freedom and homecoming.  They also call us not to give up hope.

When Isaiah offered these words about exiled people coming home--"the ransomed of the LORD returning to Zion with singing"--it was to help people who were waiting not to give up hope.  It was for people living in the in-between time, for people waiting for release, so that they wouldn't give up on the promise that one day they would be free and be home.  It was a reminder saying, "What you are going through now will not last forever; and you will be free."  He paints this picture like it's a scene out of a musical or a choreographed parade, where people burst into song as they go along their way, the joyful refrain echoing through the wilderness as they go.  Isaiah wants his listeners--who have likely known exile for most of their lives--not to give up and settle for what Babylon offered.  He wants them to keep reminding each other, "We will make it home.  We will make it home.  We will make it home."  He needs them to strive against despair on the one hand, and also not to fall for the false promises Babylon makes. So he keeps holding out this vision of a long procession coming home--in the hope that it will sustain them, so they won't give up or give in to the lure of the Empire's way of doing things.

Maybe you've been there too--not Babylon per se, but a time when it felt awfully tough to keep going.  There are times you have to keep telling yourself, or the people around you, "You will get through this."  Maybe you need someone else to remind you so that you'll believe it.  Maybe that's what we can take from these words from Isaiah, for our own times when we feel bound up and captive--to a job that feels like a dead-end, or to the rat-race routines of our lives that don't ever seem to let up, or the weariness of caring for someone through a sickness or a time of crisis.  When you're the one who is feeling weary and ready to give up, we need people to be Isaiahs for us--the ones who will speak hope back into our lives.  When someone else is struggling, you just might be the one to remind them, "You will get through this--I will go with you."  We can say those things to one another and mean them truthfully, because we are promised that the living God will bring us through.

When we are reminded that we're not alone, and that we will get through this [whatever "this" is at the moment], we find the strength for the next action, the next step, the next day. When we are the weary ones, the words come to give us strength.  When someone else is the weary one and you and I are at full strength, we are called to use our energy and resources to help the ones on the verge of giving up.  Like Fannie Lou Hamer put it, "Nobody is free until everybody is free." So voices like Isaiah's give us the courage and strength to keep going, so that we in turn can spend our lives helping to strengthen and encourage the ones around us still struggling.  But the hope is always that ultimately everybody can be freed... and for everyone to come home.

If Isaiah's words find you today running on fumes, let them speak hope into your life.  If his words find you today already firing on all cylinders, let the prophet's voice lead you to contribute some of your forward motion to help the next person in the procession. Maybe we can see all of our lives lived out as part of the unfolding homecoming parade of God's people--and to know we and all people are invited to walk in it.

Lord God, give us the strength to keep hoping, and the hope to keep walking where you lead us, until everybody is free.

Hope Under Construction--December 13, 2022

Hope Under Construction--December 13, 2022

"The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing....For waters shall break forth in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water; the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp, the grass shall become reeds and rushes. A highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Holy Way; the unclean shall not travel on it, but it shall be for God's people; no traveler, not even fools, shall go astray." [Isaiah 35:1-2a, 6b-8]

When you feel stuck at a dead-end, the hope of a new way home feels like nothing short of resurrection.

Twenty-five centuries ago, give or take, God performed just that kind of resurrection--a resurrection, not of dead bodies, but of direction for hopeless people. And it is worth retelling the tale, and how the prophets like Isaiah understood it. It is worth knowing this story because, in all honesty, some day you and I will find ourselves in a dead end and wondering where hope is to be found in the middle of nowhere--and whether it is worth the wait for the new road to open while construction is underway.

So, like I say, just over two and a half millennia ago, a minority community living in Babylon were on the verge of giving up hope. They had been carried away--or their parents had been carried away--from their homeland in Judah, and brought as spoils of war when the arrogant blowhard ruler of the Babylonian Empire, Nebuchadnezzar, had conquered their homeland, destroyed their capital and its Temple, and ransacked the most valuable treasures. The exiles were living in a foreign land, defeated and despairing. And as far as they could see, their hope was dead. They weren't sure if their God YHWH (the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) had been defeated by the Babylonian gods, or whether YHWH had just abandoned them for sinning so much, but the exiles were sure that things were done between them and their God. The covenant was broken. The Temple was in ruins. And they had no way of getting home, so long as Babylon held them in captivity and there was a vast desert between Babylon and their old homeland. Hope itself was dead.

And in the midst of that utter dead-end of a situation, God whispered in the ear of a prophet we know as Isaiah. And Isaiah dared to dream up nothing short of resurrection for deceased hope. Isaiah brought the message that God was going to make a way where no way existed, and that God was going to perform a resurrection of the destroyed nation. God was going to bring the exiles home, and along the way, everything that God touched would burst into life.  God would even pave the way for their homecoming: a new road was under construction.

Now, you can imagine that if you were convinced that your nation was functionally dead, it would sound like foolishness if someone said there could be a homecoming and a new beginning. And if there were a thousand miles of barren wilderness that separated you from your old homeland, you would say the idea of a pathway back home seemed preposterous. After all, even if for some impossible reason the Babylonians gave you permission to leave and go back home (and they wouldn't), you would have no idea how to get back (no GPS), and even if you knew how to make the trek, there was a literal desert of hundreds of miles between you and home, whose inhabitants were wild predators, and which offered no water, no food, and no respite along the way. Even if you ventured outside the gates of Babylon to try making the journey, you would surely die under those conditions... right?

So this is where the prophet speaks God's word of hope that takes the impossible and creates a new possibility, a word which takes the dead-end of the wilderness and dares to imagine life bursting out along the road God would build. At God's direction, Isaiah envisions a highway being laid out ahead of the people, going right from Babylon to Jerusalem. And everywhere God touches the ground to carve out that road, life breaks out--crocuses bursting up out of the cracked and parched ground... springs of water where there was nothing before... cattails and marsh reeds where there was only brown crabgrass. In other words, it is God answering every angle of the hopelessness with new hope. How will the exiles get home? God will make a road? How will they avoid getting lost on the way? God will make it so foolproof that even the most directionally-challenged guy who couldn't find his way out of a paper bag cannot get lost on it. How will the people survive along the way? God will provide water... which will provide plants... which will provide sustenance all along the journey. The ground itself will be transformed from death to life, and along with it, hope will be resurrected.

This is how God deals with dead-ends--in particular, how God deals with dead ends for people who are on the verge of hopelessness and who cannot see a way forward. This is how God looks out for the people on the margins, the people who, like the exiles in Babylon, are a small minority looking to keep their way of life going. This is how God creates new possibilities where all we see is the impossible. God resurrects hope by taking our dead-ends and making roads in the wilderness where the Empire-approved-GPS cannot chart a course to follow.

And in your life and mine, the same God is at work. The same God who promised homecoming for exiles, and the arrival of a Messiah to people waiting for generations for his coming, is the same God who resurrects our hopelessness into hope when we are desperate and can't find a way forward. This is who our God is, forever creating a way where there was no way, and forever creating hope for the folks who have been told by the powerful that their lives don't matter.

Now, where will this same God resurrect hope from hopelessness around you today?

Lord God, where we long for an end to exile, bring us home. Where we ache for a way out of the dead-end, lead us forward.

Wider Than We Imagined--December 9, 2022

Wider Than We Imagined--December 9, 2022

"On 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." [Isaiah 11:10]

The One for whom we are waiting is never just "my" or "our" private possession. He comes for the whole world, and his Reign isn't complete until it includes and enfolds the whole world.

That's what made the difference for Isaiah when he dreamed of a coming ruler who would renew the family line of Jesse and old king David.  He wasn't just looking wistfully backward for more kings like they'd had before, rulers of their own little nation whose care and provision stopped at the borders of the country. He was looking forward to God doing something new that would draw in and include all peoples, all nations, and all sorts of languages, cultures, and faces.  If all Isaiah had to say was, "One day we'll have another king like we've had all along, just more of the same," that would hardly have been news, much less something to hope for.  But the notion of God's Reign including everyone, and drawing everyone into God's good way of life, of abundant life for all, justice for all, and mercy for all... well, that was something startlingly good.

On the days when I am tempted to treat Jesus as my personal good luck charm, or my own sacred version of Santa whose job is just to fulfill my wish list, I need that reminder from Isaiah.  The good news of God's Reign isn't really good if it's just for me alone, or for me-and-my-little-group.  It's genuinely good when it reaches to include all of humanity, because my own life and well-being is inseparable from all of humanity.  We're in this together.

At its best moments, the people of ancient Israel knew and understood that their calling as "the chosen people" was never meant to put a rigid boundary on who was "in" and who was "out," but rather that they were supposed to be a light to the nations that drew everybody closer to want to be a part of God's ways of faithfulness and neighborliness.  When it forgot that calling and started thinking that God's goodness or care stopped at their national borders or their ancestral lineage, God had to remind them through the voices of prophets like Isaiah that God's love and care were always wider than any one people, tribe, language, or nation.

That's an important reminder for our time and place, too.  It is really easy and dangerously tempting to equate Me-and-My-Group with the Kingdom of God--to say that my country, my denomination, my political party, or my ethnic group are the only ones who really matter, and that everybody else is outside the scope of God's care.  It's easy to want to equate "my country" with the status of "chosen," and to assume that My Group is the only one favored by God [while simultaneously deducing that God must also hate all the same people I hate--isn't that convenient?].  But Isaiah reminds us here that the ruler we're waiting for isn't here to lead "My Group" to conquer and defeat everybody else, but rather at long last to gather all peoples together, and to include those who have been left out before.  

Our hope, in fact, as Christians hangs entirely on the beautiful promise that God has chosen to include us--people who don't trace our DNA and ethnic lineage from ancient Israel--in God's Reign.  From its very beginnings, the Christian church has been meant to be inclusive of peoples from every land, nation, tongue, race, culture, and background.  When our life together as church reflects that diversity, we become a witness to the watching world of how Christ will gather all peoples into his reign at the last.  When we become narrowly homogenous and filter out folks who are different from "my kind of people," we become an obstacle to others a getting a glimpse of that new creation.

Part of learning to watch and wait for Christ's coming in glory, then, is to learn how to love people who are different or "other" than my group or my little enclave.  When we see that God cares for neighbors near and far, and when we can spend our energy, time, and love for their well-being, too, we are in step with what Isaiah has been trying to get through to us.  We discover that the reach of God's goodness is wider than we imagined.  And when that happens, we come to hope for the fullness of Christ's Reign, where God's love enfolds the whole world, rather than just being the figurehead or mascot of my group over against somebody else's.

Today, let us dare to hope such a wide hope.  Let the prophet's vision stretch our love as we wait.

Lord Jesus, keep our vision as wide and expansive as yours, to share your love with all.

De-Weaponized Wolves--December 8, 2022

De-Weaponized Wolves--December 8, 2022

"They 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." [Isaiah 11:9]

To hear the Bible tell it, the way to peace isn't to arm the sheep so they can deter the wolves from attacking; it's for the wolves, lions, and bears to learn from the lambs how not to use their claws.  The vision the prophets give us is of a world in which we can all lay down our weapons, rather than one in which we've all got daggers at each other's throats.  In other words, the Scriptures envision a peace that doesn't have to come at the expense of anybody's livelihood--which means that genuine peace can never be separated from true justice and equity, as well.

There's a lot of really big, and really important ideas there in this passage from Isaiah 11 that we've been looking at for much of this week.  And an awful lot of it runs counter to the "conventional wisdom" of our time and place.  So often you'll hear it called common sense that you have to be ready to "get the other guy before he gets you," and that therefore you can only achieve peace by having everybody armed to the hilt and aware that anyone else can fire at you. It's a mindset that says, "To keep the lions from attacking the calves, let's just give all the calves claws and fangs," so now all the animals will be afraid of being eaten. It says that the only way I can be stopped from hurting you is to be afraid that you'll hurt me more if I try to. And it's a house of cards built on fear--it assumes that the only way for people to be truly in peace is for all of us to be constantly afraid that someone will get us that we'll be scared into not attacking first.  But that isn't peace--that the paralysis that comes from fear.  And it's certainly not what Isaiah envisions.

The other thing that Isaiah's vision points out is that genuine peace is not the same as bullies or predators silencing everybody else into submission.  The wolves or bears could threaten the sheep and cattle into being still and docile, but that isn't harmony.  That isn't the "shalom" dreamed of in the Scriptures.  Or as Amanda Gorman's poem, "The Hill We Climb," put it so potently, "Quiet isn't always peace."  The prophet isn't just looking for a world where bullies intimidate the rest of us into accepting their bullying, either.  That's why the Empires of the Bible were never really agents of peace--they insisted on dominating their neighbors and conquering them, not seeking their mutual well-being.  During the time of Jesus and the early church, Rome liked to imagine [and it told its subjects through imperial propaganda] that it was the bringer of peace--the "Pax Romana"--and that Roman rule would guarantee order and safety throughout the known world.  But it was never really peace, because the moment anybody stepped out of line, Rome reserved the right to crucify the troublemakers and plunder the people it ruled.  Whatever peace is, it is not domination.  It is not the way of empire.  I suppose that's why Isaiah doesn't envision peace by having the bears and lions growling at the sheep until they cower into submission.  Rather, they all learn to live side by side, without anybody threatening anybody else.

For us who are so accustomed to the thinking that we can only build peace through defeating or dominating somebody else, it will mean a whole new way of thinking.  It will mean a whole new creation.  But the vision Isaiah gives us is worth making the effort to allow it to stretch our minds and hearts.  The hope is not of a world where we are so afraid that anybody else could shoot me that I have to be ready to shoot them first, but of a world where, as the prophet says it, "They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain."  It is not a way of life built on fear to keep people from harming each other, but a way of life built on trust that we can each have what we need and live together.  It is a rejection of zero-sum game thinking that says your win has to be my loss, and my success can only come by your defeat.  Isaiah dares us to imagine that in God's order of things--what we sometimes call the Kingdom or Reign of God--we no longer have to live our lives ruled by such fear.  We can be the ones who anticipate that new way of life now as people who are brave enough lay down our weapons and to tell others, "I won't be the one to shoot.  I will risk being vulnerable enough so that you don't have to be ruled by fear of me."

If any of this makes us uncomfortable, perhaps it's worth examining why--and what we have really put our trust in.  If the coming of the Prince of Peace and this new order where wolves and lambs lie down together safely makes us squirm, perhaps it means we have built our lives on systems that depend on violence and fear, and we are afraid to lose our comfortable perches if we let go of those systems.  The prophet dares us to believe that it is worth it to let them go anyway.

May we be so brave.

Lord Jesus, disarm us in your embrace, and free us from being ruled by fear.

Gloriously "Unnatural" Relations--December 7, 2022

Gloriously "Unnatural" Relations--December 7, 2022

"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 grave, 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]

We need to have a conversation about the word "natural."

More and more I notice that the marketing experts use the word "natural" as an automatically positive adjective. You know the refrains; they are a popular litany in the religious liturgy of consumerism: "You should try this new herbal supplement--it's ALL-NATURAL!" or "Don't buy that brand of soda--you should buy this other one that is made with NATURAL sugar!" or "I don't get the store-brand, because I want the one with the packaging that says it's the NATURAL choice!" We get sloppy with our logic and accept the reasoning that anything you can call "natural" is automatically good, and anything that is "un-natural" is automatically bad.

Well, things aren't that simple. Sure, whole grains and sunshine are natural. But so is cancer. Malaria is natural, as is viral meningitis. So are lead, arsenic, uranium, and mercury. And on the flip side, you know what things are not found in nature? Vaccines, or water purification, or indoor plumbing. MRIs that catch tumors before they grow too big to treat are un-natural, too. And a good many life-saving drugs out there are things you won't find in nature, either.

Death is natural. Resurrection is un-natural.

Maybe things are more complicated that just saying "unnatural is always bad" and "natural is always good."

The natural world itself, for example, seems built on death... and therefore also on fear. In the animal kingdom, we say that there are two groups of creatures: the hunters and the hunted. You've got to eat your opponent or run from your opponent, but basically your choices in nature are limited to "fight or flight." We say things like "It's a dog-eat-dog world out there, and only the fittest survive--that's just the natural order of things." We seem to just accept that our lives should be lived forever under the cloud of fear of being eaten, and we accept just as easily the idea that you might just have to step on somebody else if they get in your way to climbing to the top of the hill. That's all just... you know, natural. The way it is, and the way it must always be.

Trouble is, God seems committed to making a whole new kind of creation--a resurrected creation--that looks, to our eyes, quite un-natural. Of course, to the person who's been sitting in a dark room all day, the brilliance of the daytime sun is going to seem too bright for their eyes. And for us who are accustomed to a world built on the fear of death, a new kind of creation will seem dangerously un-natural, too.

But look at the way the prophet Isaiah envisions the promised new creation that the Messiah will bring: it is staggeringly UN-NATURAL. All the creatures have exchanged their "natural" relationships as enemies for new and gloriously "un-natural" relations as friends now. Just look at how hilariously un-natural the whole scene is: wolves and lambs cozying up next to one another, and leopards and baby goats lounging next to the cows and bears, and nobody is eating each other!

Kind of makes you think that maybe what we are quick to label "un-natural" might not be "unacceptable" after all, but in fact might just be gloriously good!

The old logic of death, and the old engine of fear that kept the old logic churning, is gone. No longer is the assumption that it's a kill-or-be-killed world, and there is no longer the either/or choice of fight or flight. Instead, there is a new way of relating, a new way of being in relationship with one another--and it comes from learning the peaceable ways of God, according to Isaiah. At the coming of God's anointed one--the time when the long-awaited Messiah appears--creation itself will be turned inside out, resurrected, and pulled into a new form. Like the resurrected Jesus is able to pass through walls and go without being recognized, and yet is still clearly the same Jesus who was nailed to the cross, the new creation will be the same as this one--and yet resurrected. Transformed. Renewed. And yet, we aren't scared of the risen Jesus. We don't kick him out because his risen way of being human is "un-natural" or "abominable". No, his resurrection itself is gloriously unnatural!

My point in all of this is that the future toward which God is bringing all of creation sometimes seems scary to us because it runs contrary to what we are used to--what we call "natural," and yet it is a good and beautiful future. The idea of a peaceable kingdom can seem frightening to us if we are used to "peace" through the threat of death, "peace" at the point of a sword, or "peace" won through intimidation and fear. What God calls us into is a completely different way of relating to one another--a way grounded in the courage to be vulnerable and to let down our guard, rather than in baring our teeth at one another and needing to dominate others for fear that they'll dominate us.

The world around us seems run on the tired old logic that says, "You gotta get THEM before they get YOU!" and says it is only natural to see everyone else around you as a threat--either a predator out to get you, or other prey that can leave you to be eaten by a lion if they outrun you. But the God who raises the dead opens up a new possibility--a new way of living with one another, even if it seems to run counter to what everybody else swears is "natural."

Our hope as followers of Jesus is not that the coming Messiah will give us special weapons to give us an advantage against our opponents in a dog-eat-dog world. Rather, our hope is that the One we are waiting for is the one with the nail-scarred hands to prove that there is a new kind of creation in store for us, one that might not look "natural" at all, but is actually, with God's blessing and by God's design, gloriously "un-natural." It is the peaceable kingdom where old animosities are set aside, where old systems are done with and put away, and where God makes it possible for wolves and lambs, lions and cows, all to share a table.

Our Advent hope is for just such a promised future as that--a future of gloriously unnatural relations.

Lord God, make us new in your surprising love, and bring about your new order of things where old enemies can reconcile in peace.

The Hard Work of Hoping--December 6, 2022

The Hard Work of Hoping--December 6, 2022

"The 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. His 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; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth..." [Isaiah 11:2-4a]

It's easy to be jaded.  It's comfortable, or at least familiar, to be skeptical.  

Sometimes it feels like the legacy of my generation that we have learned to be pre-emptively cynical of everything and everyone.  After all, I grew up with songs like "I'm Only Happy When It Rains" [performed by a band literally named "Garbage"] playing in my freshman year of high school, as well as a slew of letdowns and disappointments from celebrities, politicians, and institutions of every sort. I've seen artists sell out for celebrity, sports heroes get caught for using steroids, and elected officials lie under oath. So disillusionment comes easy for me, and I'll also just come out and say that I've never known a politician or leader who didn't let me down in some way or another.  Every time some new charismatic figure comes on the horizon or some vibrant campaign comes along, I get myself ready to be disappointed, because they've just never measured up to the hype or lived up to their words.

So, like I say, it's easy for me to be jaded.

It's these prophets who keep poking at me, though.  These dreamers and visionaries, like Isaiah and Micah, or even grumpy old Amos, they keep holding out hope that things could be different.  They won't let me give in all the way to cynicism, because they keep dreaming of a new kind of kingdom... and a new kind of king.  When Isaiah first wrote these lines of poetry, he was daring to imagine a leader for his people who would at last live up to the hype, and more importantly, live up to the hope.  Isaiah was daring to imagine that after one disappointment after another from kings in David's line, and after one threat after another from kings of surrounding nations, that things could be different.  There could be a new administration--a new reign--that was just and wise, that was not concerned with looking "great" or "glorious" or "tough" or like a "winner," but rather with being good, deeply, genuinely good.  Isaiah dreamed that this hoped-for king wouldn't be swayed by power or money but would be concerned with making sure the lowly, the poor, and the meek would no longer be stepped on. It was a bold thing to hope for.

The people of Isaiah's day had plenty of reason to be jaded, too. They'd seen one king after another talk big about virtue and piety, only to have them all get sucked back into the old machine of power and wealth and war-making.  They'd seen kings mouth all the right-sounding religious words, draping themselves in shows of devotion and co-opting the Temple, the priests, and all the rest as props for to pretend to be pious, only to be just as corrupt and crooked as the last one... and they'd seen this play out over and over again, time after time.  It was easy in Isaiah's day to just give up hoping--or to decide that if every king was crooked, you had better at least find one who would be crooked for your advantage rather than somebody else's.  And over against that cynicism, Isaiah offers this vision.

Christians will likely hear in these words the kinds of things we have found in Jesus: one who is filled with the Spirit, who isn't fooled by appearances, and who is concerned for the poor and meek to be given justice.  And indeed, we are a people who believe that Jesus is the one to whom Isaiah's poetry was ultimately pointing.  But it's worth noting, all the same, that Jesus doesn't look like anybody's expectation of a king, either.  Jesus doesn't do the crown and white horse thing.  He doesn't conquer his enemies or plunder surrounding countries to build himself a fortress or palace.  He doesn't need his name carved in big gold letters or stone pylons, and he doesn't need people's fawning praise.  And even though Jesus doesn't look like our standard picture of a king, president, emperor, or prime minister, his very existence offers us an alternative to the rottenness we are used to.  Jesus didn't come to make himself a new Caesar or Herod, nor does he call his followers to do that either.  But his life, words, and way as someone who really and truly cared about bringing about the Reign of God, or what Dr. King used to call "the beloved community," all of those prevent us from giving up hope, even when everybody else in the headlines has let us down again.

If all we have is generational cynicism as a defense mechanism to avoid being let down again by the next person to make us Big Promises, we will end up not only not believing in anybody, but not living for anything.  We'll give up and shrug our shoulders in the sad acceptance that everybody's crooked at some point and everything will let us down.  And along the way a lot more people will be hurt or stepped on because we just stopped caring.  But prophets like Isaiah pull us back from the brink.  They make us do the hard work of hoping, and then they compel us to commit to the long task of waiting without settling for less than goodness, decency, justice, and equity.  Isaiah isn't here to sell us on a political party or a partisan agenda [our system of government would make very little sense to him, I suspect].  But he is here to keep us from settling for merely settling for a crook who will benefit you rather than a crook who will benefit somebody else.  Isaiah points us to a hope that it doesn't have to be that way, and to the One we name Jesus who makes an alternative possible. Isaiah won't let us get comfortably in cynicism, but to always keep envisioning, "This could be a world where nobody is stepped on; this could be a community where everyone has enough." If we've been raised to be jaded, that will take some unlearning.  But I do believe it's worth it.

Lord God, when we are ready to give in and give up, when we are ready to settle for less than your Reign of justice and mercy, keep stirring us up and pointing us back to Jesus.

Spades Not Swords--December 5, 2022

Spades Not Swords--December 5, 2022

"A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots." [Isaiah 11:1]

If somebody cuts down your tree, it's easy for your gut-reaction to be going over to his yard and cutting down one of his trees.  Revenge offers fast results that way, I suppose, but you'd still have no tree--so your enemy has still "won" the day if you follow that tactic.

God, however, has a different way of dealing with the loss of a tree--God grows a new one.  It's such a different kind of response than the "You-gotta-get-them-before-they-get-you" kind of thinking the world tends to operate with.  The way of retaliation--of answering evil with more evil--doesn't really fix whatever was broken in the first place, even if it lets you imagine yourself as a hero doing bold and daring deeds.  But to actually restore what is lost can't be done with a saw or a sword; it requires the patience of a gardener's tools to tend to a new shoot growing out of a stump.

Now, we could zoom out for a moment and consider that when Isaiah wrote this bit of poetry, he wasn't merely talking about the prize oak tree in the yard--he was using this tree and stump imagery to talk about the royal family line of old King David.  David was remembered as the youngest son of Jesse, and David's line began a dynasty in the kingdom of Israel and later its southern province of Judah.  For whatever good had come from David's rule [and to be certain, even "the man after God's own heart" was a pretty mixed bag in terms of his reign and character], things had mostly gone downhill in successive generations.  Over and over again, kings and princes in David's line had tried to build their own little empires, marching out their armies to conquer... and often getting driven back and overwhelmed by the neighboring nations they fought with.  Eventually, the bigger fish in the Mesopotamian pond started sniffing blood in the water, and they went after Israel and Judah.  By the time Isaiah wrote, the kingdom that had once belonged to David was headed sooner or later to being swallowed up by one empire or another, and the hope everyone had put in David's family line was sputtering out.

It would have been easy--and awfully tempting--if you were in Isaiah's sandals, to find a scapegoat to blame for all of that decline and to point your fingers at them as "the problem."  You know, to pick a foreign enemy, or a group in your own nation that made for an easy target, and just rile the people up against "THEM" as the ones we have to get rid of, because "They're the ones getting in the way of our greatness and our return to glory!"  And then you go and round up all the "bad people" whom you want to blame for your problems.  It's a tactic as ancient as old Pharaoh in Egypt, and it's been the playbook of ever demagogue since.  And it's tempting because it presents the world in oversimplified terms: they cut down our tree [whether "they" did or not is not often clear, but it's easier to believe there's a villain with a saw rather than that you hadn't notice your own tree was dying already], and therefore we have to go cut down theirs to get even.  It's offers a heroic-looking action to take--a crusade to cut down our enemies' evil trees!--that can be accomplished more or less quickly, so we can pride ourselves on getting results, too. You can imagine a prophet less faithful than Isaiah becoming the voice of warmongering and prodding the people to "take back" what they believe their enemies, real or imagined, have stolen from them. You could imagine a whole "tree-cutter" movement in ancient Judah all bent on wreaking revenge on "those people who cut down our tree first" and making them pay.  And you could then imagine an endless cycle of cutting down each other's forests in never-ending volleys of vengeance until there's not so much as a tuft of crabgrass left standing.  That does seem to be our tendency as a species.

Not so with the living God.  As Isaiah tells it, God doesn't say to the people, "They cut down our tree, so you've got to burn down their forest!" And neither does God let the destruction of Jesse's old oak be the last word.  God's defiantly hopeful protest is... a sprout.  Not a zombified, propped-up rehashing of the old, but something new.  God insists that death will not get the last word, that the empires of history will not stand forever, but rather there will come a new kingdom--a new reign, growing up out of the wrecked stump of Jesse's line.  Christians know him by the name Jesus, and of course the reign that he brings looks very different from the empires of Assyria, Babylon, and Rome, or even David's militaristic regime.  Christians see in these ancient words of Isaiah the hope of God doing something new, even out of the roots of the old.  What Jesus does is not to restore the old "greatness" or "glory" of national Judah or Israel, nor does he mount a campaign of revenge against those who felled Jesse's tree in the first place.  Rather Jesus is the sprout of something new...something that requires patience and tenderness to grow.

That's the thing about God's response to Jesse's fallen tree--it takes time.  Revenge is fast, but regrowth requires patience.  If all God wanted was a world full of stumps, that would have been easy and taken no time at all.  But if God wants abundant life for us all, it will require waiting--not idle waiting, but the active nurture of a shoot growing from an old stump.

We, it turns out, are part of what God has brought into the world in all that waiting.  The community of Jesus--who is the shoot that comes out of Jesse's stump--are meant to look like and live like Jesus.  So as Jesus offers an alternative to the world's "You-cut-my-tree-down-so-I'll-cut-down-yours" thinking, we too, are called to live that alternative.  We don't have to be ruled by needing to "get even" or to push ourselves up by pushing others down.  We are invited to live by the same kind of patient love that cares for a growing sprout rather than slashing and burning the neighbor's yard in the name of vengeance.  We are sent into the world, not with saws for cutting down the forests of "the enemy,' but with gardening spades to tend the soil of new trees growing up out of stumps in our mist.

We are called to practice patient love, in other words, because God practices patient love with the world.

What could that look like for us today?

Lord God, give us your kind of strength today to practice your kind of patient love in response to the world's violence and rottenness.