it will be burned again,
like a terebinth or an oak
whose stump remains standing
when it is felled.
The holy seed is its stump." (Isaiah 6:13)
Isn't just that like God? Just when we have gotten used to despair and told ourselves to give up, God upsets our apple carts of desperation and pulls a new beginning out of nowhere. That is to say, if God is indeed going to pull us out of our comfort zones (as God does seem perfectly willing to do), then we should be ready, when we have gotten acclimated to despondency, for God to surprise us with a new reason to hope.
It's never merely cheap optimism or a spin-doctor's PR spin on bad news, and it rarely means we get a detour to avoid the difficult things of life. With our God it is always about coming through the valley of the shadow of death into the sunlight on the other side, rather than avoiding the ravine altogether. But God does seem to reserve the right to pull an impossible hope out of nowhere like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Just when we think that death is the last word on the subject and the grave is sealed tight, God speaks a word of resurrection and starts rolling away stones.
This verse from Isaiah is one of those moments, too. We've been walking through Isaiah's call story this week through our devotions, and we've seen how God has been pulling him out of his comfort zones throughout the encounter. First, we saw how he was utterly petrified just having the vision of seeing God in the temple. Then he was commissioned to be God's spokesperson, not merely a passive audience member watching God from a safe distance. And yesterday, hardest of all, we heard God warn Isaiah that his mission would largely involve speaking to people who would not listen to him, and that the result would be a whole nation devastated by exile and the invading Babylonians. That certainly was not the sort of thing any of us would exactly be "comfortable" with at first, and so part of what God had to do was to help it sink in for Isaiah just how hard and seemingly futile his job would be. Like building up a callus on your hands from repeated labor, Isaiah would have to develop a thick skin for his prophetic call, since God was deliberately sending him to a hostile audience. And I can only imagine that for Isaiah that came at the risk of being constantly on the verge of depression and loneliness. It must have been terribly isolating to be Isaiah and feel like you were the only one paying attention to the collision course your society was on, and it must have felt like he was doomed to watch his nation careening toward destruction while his people amused themselves to death.
It would have been hard enough to convince anybody in Isaiah's time that disaster was on its way--after all, the stock markets were healthy, business was booming, and the Babylonians weren't on anybody's radar yet. Other world powers and international rivals would come and go before the worst of what Isaiah warned about actually happened to Judah. And yet, even if he did manage to persuade some outlier to listen to him, and to take seriously that the nation was headed for trouble, it would have been nearly impossible to convince them that there might yet be hope, on the other side of exile, after all of the chaos and turmoil Isaiah warned about. But that's where today's verse ends--just a glimmer of impossible hope that comes on the other side of destruction. It emerges like a seed growing out of the dead stump where a tree used to be.
Honestly, you almost miss that there is any good news at all in this verse, because it only comes after the threat of relentless destruction first: even if a tenth is left standing, even that will be burned down again! Imagine being Isaiah and being told to tell his people that God was going to let their whole nation be obliterated by invading empires, and that God wasn't even going to leave ten percent in place, but was going to allow the nation as a whole to be overrun. And imagine that Isaiah knew he wasn't being sent to tell people this news in order to get them to prevent it from happening, or to put up more defenses against the enemies, or to make an alliance with some other nation in order to stop the looming threat, but rather that he was sent simply to say, "You can't fight this enemy with weapons or military might. But it's coming. The whole tree is getting chopped down and then the stump will be burned to ash." And then after all of that, imagine that God pushes the door into the future open just a crack--barely enough to see the light from the next room--and says, "But then there will be a seed in the stump." That's what happens in this final verse here.
That kind of hope--costly, fragile, and hard to believe--is what God brings here, and also, it would seem, what God tells Isaiah to bring to the people as well. Isaiah won't live to see it, and neither will the people he is addressing, but they may pass along the word of hope to their children, who may pass it along to their children and grandchildren, to sustain them until exile ends. And this hope, as I say, isn't a secret plan to avoid the hard stuff or circumvent the pain of their consequences for repeatedly turning from God's ways of justice and mercy, but rather it is a lifeline to hold onto like a rope in the dark. The hope is for a way through the disaster and out the other side, not an escape hatch to avoid it. As we followers of Jesus might say it, there is no resurrection without a death first, and an empty tomb first requires that there has been a cross beforehand.
But even if that hope is good news for us, even hope itself can be out of our comfort zone if we had conditioned ourselves to be hopeless. If we are finally resigned to the worst-case scenario, sometimes we almost don't want to risk believing or hoping that there could be a new beginning, because we don't want to get hurt or be disappointed again. And yet, God doesn't leave us in despair, but keeps pulling us, tugging at our sleeves like a toddler leading us into the next room, when we had just gotten used to staying in the darkness. Isaiah is given that bare spark of hope--a seed that will grow out of the old burnt stump--and it will have to be enough to hold on through his lifetime of ministry, through the years of being ignored, and then through his people's exile. The new sprout will not come by way of battle, monetary policy, or clever political deal-making. It will come, like resurrection out of death, when God calls forth new possibilities from dead-ends.
It's hard for us to live in that tension, too--the tension between honest assessment of the troubles around us and the hope that will accompany us through those troubles--but that is where all of our lives are lived as people of faith. We are held in the space of Holy Saturday, between the cross of Good Friday and the sunrise of Easter Sunday, always. And like Isaiah, we sometimes have to speak both a difficult word about the rottenness around us, in which we are all entangled and complicit, and also hold out a hopeful word that God can bring dead stumps back into green leaf as the old tree's composted limbs give rise to an acorn growing from the old roots. That is never easy, and it is most certainly beyond our comfort zones. But it is what we are all called to as the Spirit-filled people of God. Like the old line says about prophets being sent to "afflict the comfortable and to comfort the afflicted," we are sent both to be honest voices of difficult truths and authentic witnesses of life-sustaining hope that comes through the grave out into resurrection.
That's the job. Are we up for it?
Lord God, don't let us give up on your ability to bring life out of dead places and hope out of despair.
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ReplyDeleteOnly with God's direction, grace, and love!
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ReplyDeleteDear God, may it be so.
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