Isaiah 11:1-10 1 A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. 2 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. 3 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; 4 but 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. 5 Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist, and faithfulness the belt around his loins. 6 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. 7 The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. 8 The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder s den. 9 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. 10 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. 1
2016 12.04 Out on a Limb A few weeks ago my mother sent me this news clipping [SLIDE]. I know it s difficult to see clearly from where you re sitting. Even on my computer it wasn t that clear. That s because it s old almost eighty years old, in fact. The headline reads, Four Generations of Brinkerhoffs to Meet Today At Long Hill, With Great Grandfather Presiding. Brinkerhoff is my mother s maiden name. It s Dutch. The great grandfather referred to in the headline is my great great grandfather. The photo features four generations of the family: my great great grandfather, great grandfather, grandfather, and finally my Uncle Don my mother s older brother who was all of six years old. I never met my great great grandfather. He died long before I was born. At the time this photo was taken in 1939, he was already eighty-six years old. As an American history buff, it s fun for me to think of all the history that he lived through in those eighty-six years. He was born in 1853, which means that he was a young boy during the Civil War. At that time the United States had just thirty-one states! He lived through the invention of the telephone, electric light, automobile, and airplane. He lived through World War I and the Great Depression. And within a matter of weeks of this article appearing in the paper (it s dated July 16, 1939), Hitler would invade Poland, initiating the start of the Second World War. Amazingly, my great great grandfather lived another fifteen years, finally passing away in 1954, having lived one hundred years! While I never met my great great grandfather, I do somewhat remember my great grandfather, whom we called Gramp. I was eight years old when he passed away in 1980. Compared with his father, Gramp died quite young he was only ninetyseven! All I remember of Gramp is that he and my grandfather would visit our house once in a while to have coffee and cake. That s what Americans of that 2
generation did. They socialized over coffee and cake. When family came over, you served them coffee and cake. Coffee alone was not enough there had to be cake. My memories of Gramp are more impressions than concrete memories. The one specific memory I have and I m not even sure if it s genuine or if I just remember my mother telling me the story is a conversation between Gramp and my grandfather that took place at our kitchen table over what else? coffee and cake. Gramp had just finished his cake and was still drinking his coffee. His memory wasn t so good anymore, and so he asked my mother, whose name is Lois, Loie, when are you going to serve the cake? My grandfather had no doubt had to reckon with Gramp s failing memory on more than one occasion. So he said, with some exasperation, Dad, you just ate the cake! I did? Yes! Family stories like this are what tie generations together. They get told and retold, passed from one generation to the next. In the process they become part of the larger family narrative. These family stories tell us who we are and where we came from, literally and figuratively. My mother s family originally came from Holland. In seminary I took a class called Marriage and Family. One of the assignments was to trace our family history back as far as we could. I was able to trace the Brinkerhoffs back to the ancestor who left Holland to come to America in the seventeenth century. I loved delving into my family s history because I knew so little about it. The name for the study of family history is genealogy [SLIDE], but most people think of it in terms of their family tree. You can think of your first ancestor as the trunk of the tree. All the different branches represent everyone in your family (living and deceased) who can trace their roots back to that common ancestor. In today s scripture passage Isaiah prophesies about the family tree of David. As it stands at the time Isaiah is writing, the tree doesn t look very healthy. It s not a tree so much as a stump [SLIDE]: 3
1 A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. Jesse was David s father. According to the book of Ruth, he was a descendant of Ruth and Boaz. David was part of that lineage. And as king, he was the ancestor that future kings would cite to attest to their own authority. Being descended from the line of David was one of the prerequisites (necessities) to become king of Israel. But as things stand here in Isaiah 11, the family tree of David has been reduced to a stump. What happened? Isaiah was writing during a time of great upheaval in the region around Judah, the southern kingdom [SLIDE]. Remember, the once united kingdom of Israel was now divided between the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah. Judah and Israel, despite their common ancestry, were frequent rivals. In 734 BC they went to war. Israel and another nation, Aram, joined forces against Judah. In desperation, Judah appealed to the much more powerful nation of Assyria. Assyria came to their aid, destroying Aram and greatly weakening Israel. About ten years later, Assyria would finish the job and utterly destroy Judah s northern neighbor, taking the survivors into exile and erasing them from history. Assyria s victory reordered the regional power structure. The old order, with smaller independent kingdoms like Israel and Aram, was fading. A new superpower had arrived on the scene the Assyrian Empire [SLIDE]. In the midst of all this upheaval, the people of Judah were worried. They were afraid. By looking at the map, you can see why. Judah was a tiny blip of a nation surrounded by an everexpanding Assyrian Empire, an empire to whom they owed their survival. They paid for this debt by paying tribute to Assyria from the temple treasury. Judah had survived war with Israel and Aram, only to face an even larger threat in Assyria. Money would satisfy the empire for only so long. Eventually, as empires always do, their eyes would turn toward conquest. Living in the shadow of this 4
existential threat, the kingdom of Judah seemed destined to fall. The line of David would be cut off. This is the situation in which Isaiah is writing. Judah is in despair, without hope. The once mighty family tree of Solomon, David, and Jesse seems no more than a stump [SLIDE]. But it is in that stump that Isaiah sees the beginning of new life. From that lifeless stump will spring a new shoot, a new king for Judah who will become a source of hope not only for Judah but for the entire world. I don t think that I m spoiling the ending for you by saying that, for us as Christians, the new shoot is Jesus. There s a reason that we read Isaiah during Advent. More than any other prophetic book, Isaiah contains prophecies that point to Jesus. One of many reasons that we see Jesus in this passage is that the new king of whom Isaiah speaks would be unlike any king before him. For one, he would have an intimate relationship with the Spirit of the Lord [SLIDE]. The Spirit would rest on him. It would settle on him, guiding his every word and action. This new king would know the Lord in a most familiar way. In the Tea-ology book club that s been meeting this fall, our topic has been the Holy Spirit. We ve talked a lot about the relationship between Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Their relationship is one of intimacy. The Spirit is with Jesus before he is even born. Jesus is conceived by the Spirit. He is baptized in the Spirit. He is led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted before beginning his ministry. He begins his ministry by proclaiming that the Spirit of the Lord is upon him to preach good news to the poor. He heals with the power of the Spirit. And after his resurrection he even gives the Spirit to the disciples, for it is his to give because it is his Spirit. Jesus intimate relationship with the Spirit means that his life and his ministry are characterized by righteousness [SLIDE]: 5
He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; 4 but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; In this scriptural context the word judge doesn t mean only to make a decision on a legal matter. It also means to govern. If you think of the book of Judges, which Rev. Monny preached from two weeks ago, the judges of Israel were political and military leaders. Judges like Gideon, Deborah, Samuel and others led the nation in affairs of state as well as on the battlefield. But Jesus will judge not like any human judge. He will not judge by what he sees or hears, and thank God for that! The way you and I judge, or anyone else for that matter, is compromised by our many prejudices both those that we re aware of and especially those we re not. Even within the church we judge, for example, by appearance. One glance is enough for us to estimate someone s worthiness or holiness. It s a prejudice as old as the Bible. When the people of Israel lament that Saul has been rejected, they ask Samuel to appoint a new king. And so Samuel meets with Jesse and his sons. Seeing the oldest son, Samuel immediately thinks he has found Israel s next king. He certainly looks the part. He s tall, broad-shouldered, and his beard is of sufficient king length. I m not sure about that last part, but the point is that Samuel thinks that Jesse s eldest looks like a king: But the Lord said to Samuel, Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart (1 Sam. 16:7). Jesus does not judge by appearance but with righteousness, especially for the poor and for the meek of the earth those who have suffered the most from the unrighteousness of society. Meek is a word that we associate with timidity. In 6
common English timid is a synonym for meek. But when the Bible speaks of the meek it s not referring to an attitude. It s referring to the poor, to those who ve been worn down by grinding poverty, who ve been abused and oppressed by the powerful, who ve been neglected at best and victimized and discarded at worst. Jesus judges on their behalf by coming to earth as one of them, by being born not in a palace but in what was most likely a cave, and by having for his bed a manger, a place where working animals eat and drink. Isaiah speaks of the branch of Jesse as one who is even clothed in righteousness. What does a king wear around his waist? A belt to hold his sword. But in place of a sword this king wears something else [SLIDE]: 5 Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist, and faithfulness the belt around his loins. Now, before you challenge this image of nonviolence with the verse that comes right before it, yes, let s look at the second half of verse four: he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked. That sounds violent, but what is the weapon that the leader wields? It s not a sword; it s his word the rod of his mouth, the breath of his lips. His righteous words will cut to the heart of a corrupt, oppressive order. Just as the word of God ordered the world at creation, saying, Let there be light, so Jesus, the Word of God, will reorder creation by speaking. His words will fill the earth with knowledge of the Lord, turning right-side up what we have turned upside down, reordering what we have disordered. God s first act was to create order out of chaos, and God s final act will be to reorder the chaos that we have made. 7
What that will look like is described in verses six through nine [SLIDE]. Verses one through five focused on the ruler; verses six through nine focus on his rule. His rule is marked by a vision of peace radical, transformational peace: the wolf and the lamb, the leopard and the goat, the lion and the calf living side by side. It s a beautiful image, isn t it? But isn t it also wildly unrealistic? The lion and the lamb living in peace and harmony? I mean, come on! This is the stuff of Disney films, not the real world. Take it from a film director. Woody Allen is a famous director who has made dozens of films, many of them comedies. Even he is moved by this image of the peaceful kingdom described in Isaiah. He once said, I've always liked, someday the lamb will lay by the lion... but it won t get much sleep. That s funny, but it also misses the point. Isaiah is not describing the world as it is but the world as it will be when Christ s reign is fully realized. As Christians we live in this tension of the kingdom of God that is already and not yet. The kingdom is already here but it s not yet here in its fullness. The kingdom of God is here because Christ has come to the world to show us a better way. A way of love and sacrifice, a way of forgiveness and reconciliation, a way of hope and longing, and yes, a way of peace. Yet at the same time, Christ will come again to make all things new, to transform the unnatural order that we have made of his creation a world of human predators and prey, of victimizers and victims, of oppressors and oppressed. So what are we to do in the meantime? What do we do after the already but before the not yet? Do we sit on our hands and wait for his return? Come, Lord Jesus! Of course not, but then what are we supposed to do in this in-between time? To answer that question, and to wrap up this sermon, I d like to return to the image of the family tree [SLIDE]. The sermon title is Out on a Limb. It s yet another pun. I like puns. When you hear the word limb you might think of an arm or a leg, but trees also have limbs. Another word for tree branch is limb. To go out on a limb is to put yourself in a dangerous position by taking a risk. The image is of someone 8
climbing a tree and venturing far out on a limb that may not be strong enough to support their weight. In coming to earth to be God with us, Jesus goes out on a limb. He risks himself for us. He risks himself by putting on flesh, by emptying himself of power and putting on powerlessness. He lives for us. He dies for us. He is raised for us. In all this, he makes us one with him. By faith he incorporates us into his family tree. Israel s story becomes our story. Remember what I said earlier about family stories? They tell us who we are and where we come from. That Jesus goes out on a limb for us means that we are no longer strangers of God but family brothers and sisters brothers and sisters of Christ and of one another in Christ. Together we are rooted in his love. And as we are rooted in love, the Spirit of Christ calls us to go out on a limb to take a risk by trying to make his radical, transformational peace a reality in our homes, our schools, our workplaces, and our public spaces. What better time to do this than Advent, a season in which we celebrate the light that shines in the darkness? After all, all that s needed for a new shoot to emerge from the ground is a little bit of light. 9