A Season of Newness: Preparing for Something New
Isaiah 11:1-10 & Matthew 3:1-12
A friend of mine has a small farm in southern Vermont. One of the projects that fills his weekends is burning out the stumps that litter his land. Those stumps are all that’s left of a number of trees that were cut down around the edge of his property. Once flowing with life, the now-dead stumpsstand as potentially dangerous obstacles to vehicles that travel on the farm.
As my friend has discovered, stumps never seem to fill a useful purpose. They stand as reminders of where death has replaced life, and they often stand in the way of efforts to build something new. Removing the stumps seems the most practical approach.
My friend’s farm provides a good way to imagine the situation of the Hebrew people during the time of the prophet Isaiah. Just before the reading we heard this morning, Isaiah announces God’s plan to cut down all the trees—a symbol of God’s judgment. And the plan doesn’t involve just a tree here or there; it’s more of a clear-cutting that will radically change the landscape.
The stump of which Isaiah speaks isn’t there by accident. It’s the result of God’s sweeping judgment across the land. And it’s not a pretty picture: a stump that appears beyond life or hope.
But Isaiah invites us to take another look. To move closer to the stump. To see if there might be any sign of hope—no matter how small or seemingly insignificant. To prepare for the possibility of something new.
And in case we miss it, Isaiah points our attention to a tiny shoot that’s growing out of the stump. This fragile symbol of life emerges from the most unlikely of places—a seemingly dead stump. A small sign of hope, sprouting from a site of despair.
For the almost quarter of a million Jews who were imprisoned in Buchenwald, that concentration camp must have felt like a site of despair. During the camp’s eight years of operation, it held Austrian Jews who were transferred from Dachau; Jews rounded up in mass arrests on Kristallnacht; Polish, Russian, and Hungarian Jews whom the Nazis evacuated from other camps as the Soviet army approached.
On April 11, 1945, American troops arrived to liberate the camp. FromBuchenwald the inmates were transferred to what were called displaced personscamps. In one such camp a small group of Buchenwald survivors dreamed of settling in Palestine and establishing a community there. Just three years later, the dream was reality.
Today the community continues to flourish with farming, three industries, and the birth of a third generation. And the name of this community? Netzer—the Hebrew word for a shoot or a twig. The community established by concentration camp survivors stands as a testimony to the power of hope—even in the wake of destruction and despair, even when that hope is as tiny as a shoot emerging from a seemingly dead stump or as fragile as a slender twig sprouting from burned-out roots.
The founders of this community dreamed of a different future. And that’s what Isaiah invites us to do. To dream of a future that reflects God’s hope for the world.
The first hearers of Isaiah’s invitation might well have been doubtful. The political situation of the people of Israelwas in total disarray. Outside powers threatened their weakened nation. Economic uncertainty had become the norm. The once-powerful dynasty of King David had crumbled.
But just when things seemed most hopeless and the future looked most bleak, Isaiah promises that God will send a leader who will rule with justice toward all and mercy toward the most vulnerable in society. The prophet promises protection and care for the little ones, the defenseless ones, the innocent ones. He urges the people to remember who they are as the people of God and reminds them that their power and their life come from goodness, not from greed.
These promises seem almost unbelievable. The order of nature that we’ve come to accept as normal will be reversed. The violence that we’ve come to accept as natural will be overturned. The rules of life we’ve come to live by will be changed—bent in the direction of gentleness and peace. Things will return to the way they were originally created to be, the way God meant them to be.
But such changes seem too good to be true. It may be nice, even comforting, to hear Isaiah’s poetic words about predators and prey living in harmony, but we’re reluctant to get our hopes up that anything like that actually could happen.
In his bookPeace,Walter Brueggemann writes about his own struggle with Isaiah’s promises:
Unheard of and unimaginable! All these images of unity sound to me so abnormal that they are not worth reflecting on. But then I look again and notice something else. The poet means to say that in the new age, these are the normal things. And the effect of the poem is to expose the real abnormalities of life, which we have taken for granted. We have lived with things abnormal so long that we have gotten used to them and we think they are normal.
During this Advent season, perhaps those words—along with the words of Isaiah—will encourage us to dream of a different future. To dare to hope that the “new normal” of our economy could come to mean something different from the order of things as they are now. To imagine a new world in which it would not be normal to hear about the latest death toll in Iraq or Central African Republic or seemingly countless other places around the world. To dream of a world in which the normal would be for everyone to have enough of the basics of life—basics that most of us take for granted.
To believe that God desires a better world for us and all of creation. To allow the vision that Isaiah offered to the people of ancient Israel to sustain and inspire us. To believe, as Walter Bruggeman writes, “the song of the promises and the image of the poets, the voices of [the prophets] and of Jesus, that a new world is about to be given, and we can trust ourselves to it and live as though in it.”
In this morning’s gospel reading we hear yet another voice. John the Baptist offers a challenge to the religious leaders of his day—and also to us.
In his rough-around-the-edges way, John contends that it’s not enough to claim that we long for a better world—one shaped by God’s reign. We have to do something about it. We have to decide whether to align our lives with what God is doing in our world or simply to go along with the way things are. We have to invest ourselves in preparing for something new.
John challenges his listeners to remember their faith tradition.The tradition that Isaiah represents. The tradition that repeatedly bears witness to the belief that what God is doing in our world is about mercy that’s tangible. It’s about creating justice—a way of life that makes it possible for everyone to thrive equally. It’s about generosity and kindness—not just in spirit but also in practice.
And what God is doing in our world affects the choices we make about how we live our daily lives. To some, this may not be good news. They’d prefer to keep what God is doing in the world in the realm of a nice idea that leaves you feeling warm and fuzzy inside. They’d rather not have to connect their faith with how they live everyday.
Maybe it’s this kind of disconnect that John the Baptist has in mind. He’s there to prepare the people for the coming of the Lord—for a time when wrongs and injustices will be corrected. A time when oppression and violence will come to an end.
Perhaps many of those who’ve come to listen to Johnfailto understand that the coming of God’s reign will mean they’ll have to change their ways—to “bear fruit worthy of repentance.” Because they’re part of an unjust system, they’ll have to choose to change their ways or to ignore what God is doing in the world.
That same choice faces us. As one writer notes: “Whether we like it or not, the repentance that God’s justice confronts us with is about choosing sides; it’s about where our allegiance lies. That starts with the kind of people we choose to be, but it also extends to what we actually do. . . . the coming of God’s justice and peace into this world presents us with a ‘road not taken’ kind of choice. If our allegiance is with the coming of God’s justice and peace in this world, then we need to face a hard reality: that choice entails choosing not to continue pursuing the selfish ways of this broken world. . . .”
During this Advent season, may we find ways to prepare for something new—in our lives and in our world. May we choose not only to dream of a new world but also tohelp make that dream a reality. May we make a connection between our faith and how we live our daily lives.
And may we take a closer look at the “stumps”that sit in the middle of ourlives. If a stump serves as an obstacle, may we have the courage and persistence to remove it. But if a stump has a small shootthat hints at new life, new promise, new possibility, may we have the faith to tend to that shoot—that tiny and fragile sign of hope—and to prepare for the newness that’s to come.
Kathryn Palen
December 8, 2013
CentralBaptistChurch
Jamestown, RI
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