2nd Sunday of Advent
Isaiah 11:1-10; Matthew 3:1-1
December 5, 2010
A Poetics of Hope
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa
All of this sounds a little unlikely: wolves, lambs, leopard, kids, calves, lions, toddlers and poisonous snakes all sharing a peace-filled life. His images become even stranger when they are placed against the reality of life in Isaiah’s day. Judah, never a particularly strong kingdom, lived under the threat of invasion and domination from the empire du jour from the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys to the north and east. Perhaps it was the Assyrians, perhaps the Babylonians.
Isaiah saw tough times ahead and he wasn’t shy about making his opinions known. Judah was in deep trouble, he believed. Judah’s resources for withstanding such a threat were meager. The dynasty of King David the son of Jesse sure didn’t measure up to the way it used to be. The current king was no David son of Jesse. Jesse’s tree was rotten and hollow. It looked impressive enough, but it’s strength had long since dwindled. Any storm would blow it down. That’s what Isaiah saw.
His seeing didn’t stop with what his eyes could see, though. He saw with his heart as well. With his heart he saw what David’s dynasty could have looked like. He saw what the king should be. His vision was simple: kings would be great if they lived up to their own publicity. If the king judged by realities instead of appearances, if the king judged the poor with justice, if the king sided with the weak, if the king struck down the wicked strong, then there would be a peace worth having and living. If kings lived up to their own campaign promises, the peace would be so profound that prey and predator would live in peace. Bears and lions would even become vegans, if only the king did what kings were supposed to do.
But we could have told Isaiah that campaign promises are not kept.
I don’t know how you voted last month, but I can tell you that, even if your candidate won, when the 112th Congress convenes in twenty-nine days, the headlines will not read: “Wolf Lives with Lamb.”
No, we’re going to wake up on January 3 and find that the world has not changed all that much. We long for peace and for justice, but we will not for that reason awaken to find that our electoral process has yielded our hearts’ desire. Isaiah’s words were brave: “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.” But brave words don’t seem to have made the king a good king or dispelled the threat of conquest by foreign powers. Like Isaiah’s Jerusalem, we are stumped. All we have are Isaiah’s words. And they don’t seem to have changed much of anything at all.
Isaiah isn’t the only one who seems to think that human beings can take words and images and weave them together in speech and action and use them to change the world. Only John seems to use gesture as much as speech to face down the reality of his age. John wore garments made of camel’s hair (not to be confused with “camel hair”) and held them together with a leather belt. But get this: he ate locusts. Really?? Locusts?? Yep, grasshoppers. Now, that’s very odd. His rough clothing and his bizarre diet are gestures that are part of his message. Matthew’s Jesus tells us not to worry about what we are to wear or what we are to eat. John the Baptist acts out in unmistakable and unforgettable gestures what it would look to be Jesus’ disciples.
Even where John is serves as a gesture. He’s out by the River Jordan. John knew and so did his audience and so do we that the River Jordan was the place where the dream of the land of promise began to become a reality. The ancient Israelites—ancient even in John’s day—entered the land of promise by crossing the Jordan, by, in a manner of speaking, being baptized in its waters. For the ancient Israelites crossing the Jordan meant freedom from oppression by empires like Egypt where they had been slaves, it meant the chance to live in a community that was just, humane and neighborly, it meant leaving in a peaceable covenant with each other and with God. In a later day and against a later empire, John the Baptist gestured toward freedom, community and peace.
There is something peculiar about this idea that words have power, that images have the power to resist an empire, that gestures are not futile as we have been taught.
Come to think of it, how have we come to believe that gestures are futile, and speech is empty? Who has taught us these things? To whose advantage is it? If we believe that gestures are futile, we won’t make them. We won’t stand with John the Baptist with his odd clothing and even odder diet and make the gestures that make kings shake with fear. If we believe that words are empty, we won’t cry out the need and space for changing our ways as individuals and as a culture.
So we in the mainline churches have come to be silent. What have we gained from our silence? Whatever we have gained has come at a very high price. With very few exceptions we have no twenty-somethings. If you ask their generation why that is they will tell you that while they are fascinated by Jesus they want nothing to do with the church. “Why is that?” we ask. Because they grew up watching churches condemning people in the name of Jesus, dressing up intolerance as piety, and rejecting people who are different from them in the name of the gospel of love. They watched as some churches searched the Scriptures to justify their homophobia, their sexism, and their disdain for the poor.
“But we’re not like that,” we say. No we are not, but we were silent. And that is all that it took.
It turns out that words and gestures are important, far more important than we have come to believe. Tyrants go out of their way to make sure that there are no words but theirs, no gestures but theirs. Tyrants are afraid of many things. They are afraid of massed armies and lone assassins. But most of all I think they are afraid of poets. Tyrants want everyone to believe that the reality of their rule is the only possible reality. Poets won’t accept only one possible reality.
Freedom begins in poetic imagination. Imagination gets its life from words and gestures. Isaiah was a poet who imagined a world freed from empire. Isaiah was a poet who imagined a king who lived up to his own press releases. Isaiah was a poet who imagined a world in which the most basic distinction—the distinction between prey and predator—is set aside in favor of life in the beloved community. John the Baptist was a poet, too, a performance poet. He acted out the oddness of a life grounded in trusting God without deference to empire.
John saw how high the stakes were. He raved to the crowds who came to him that they were like trees about to be chopped down: “Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees,” he howled. “Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” Every fruitless tree is stumped. That’s what the poet John the Baptist says.
“But that’s not the end,” says the poet Isaiah. “Yes, David’s dynasty is stumped. Judah is stumped. Jerusalem is stumped. Even I am stumped,” says the poet. “But that’s not the end.”
Unlike John, who always seems to shout, Isaiah whispers, “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse.” Being stumped is not the end. “A shoot shall come out.” There can always be new life. Being silenced is not the end. “A shoot shall come out.” There is always the possibility that we may find our voice. There is always the possibility that we may find our gestures with meaning once again.
Take the gesture of this common meal. Jesus gave it to us and told us to observe it forever. So, we’ve done that even if we’re not sure why. For many years, centuries even, we have restricted it to a private transaction between us and God. It has become a stump. But we are rediscovering something. We are too aware that out there many people have far too little food, while many people have far too much. We are too aware that many live in great need and others in great plenty.
We find that our lives have been increasingly privatized. A generation or two ago we counted on and trusted each other to help us raise our children. We bought them bicycles and they rode all over town. We knew our children couldn’t go anywhere where someone wouldn’t know who they were. Now we no longer trust each other. Our children are under house arrest. Their worlds are smaller. Someone taught us to mistrust each other. And we believed that bad news. So now we’re on our own.
Our lives have become increasingly monetized. United Methodist pastors used to get a pension based solely on how many years they had served. Now it’s based on our salaries over the course of our careers. Pastors are no longer supported in retirement based on their faithful service. They are now rewarded in retirement based on the “success” of their ministry measured in dollars. Even we pastors have walked away from covenant community.
But today we gather around a table. Money buys no special access here. Rich and poor alike come to this table and are received in the same way. The poor get not one bit less than they need. And the rich get not one bit more. This meal is a gesture toward the beloved community.
In a world where we’re supposed to parcel up and sell out our communities so that a few people can make a lot of money, I have to say that this gesture has its work cut out for it.
But the poets teach us that this gesture is not meaningless. As we gather at the table we act if only for a few minutes out of a world differently imagined. There is a little play, there is a little wiggle room, there is a little imaginative space for us to dream a better dream. We may be stumped now, but that’s okay. We know what comes next.
©2010, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.
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