Regime Change
Isaiah 11:1-10
Advent 2A
December 8, 2013
Advent 2A
December 8, 2013
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
“A shoot will grow
up from the stump of Jesse…He will judge the needy with righteousness…The wolf
will live with the lamb…the calf and the young lion will feed together, and a
little child will lead them…the root of Jesse will stand as a signal to the
peoples…” This is a lovely poem. It’s a fantastic poem. By that I mean that it is made of the stuff
of fantasies.
It is a dream barely
rooted at all in reality. “The wolf will
live the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the young goat, the calf and the
young lion will feed together, and a little child will lead them.” Really?
Ferocious meat-eaters and mild grazing animals—all younglings at that—will
live in peace?
Over the centuries
we’ve sanded this verse down until we’re left with “the lion shall lie down
with the lamb.” The phrase has a nice
rhythm and it has those alliterative l’s:
“the lion shall lie down with the lamb.” But whichever carnivore and whichever
herbivore you prefer, it’s still a pretty unlikely scene. Woody
Allen is supposed to have said, “The lion shall lie down with the lamb, but the
lamb won’t get much sleep.” He expresses
our skepticism pretty well.
But I think Woody
may have missed the point. This is poetry,
not a treatise on the evolutionary future of canis lupus or panthera
pardus. What we have in this poem or
song is a picture of a peaceable world or at least a zone within our world in
which violence has no place. “They won’t
harm or destroy anywhere on my holy mountain.”
The fantasy of this poem is of a world so transformed, so changed, that
even animals that get eaten and the animals that eat them will live together in
peace. And that picture is certainly
fantastic.
And, if you thought
that picture is unlikely, try the other major image that the poem plays with: human
governance that is just. This image is,
in anything, even more fantastic than the first. Human governance that is just? Have we ever seen it?
We know how the
world is. Those with power—and in our
day that means those who have money—do not use their power to make sure the
playing field is level. No, they use
their power to make sure that they keep their power. The very rich use their money to support
political leaders who will make and enforce laws so that they may become even
richer. Political leaders use their
power to secure money from the very rich so that they can buy advertizing that
persuades voters to vote for them so they can remain in power. This is, as far as I can see, the only
subject of bi-partisan agreement in the halls of power anywhere. This is how it works, so that what is supposed
to be a democracy functions best for the very rich and for the rest of us, not
so much.
But do not imagine
that corrupt government is only a modern thing.
Jerusalem was no shining beacon in the late eighth century bce either. The king was supposed to give justice whether
you were rich or poor, whether you were well-connected or marginal, like the widows,
orphans, and immigrants. Can you guess
whether that’s the way it worked out? Yeah,
you’re right. The king may have been
descended from David, part of his family tree, but it is clear that the wisdom
of Solomon was not part of the legacy that got passed along. In its core the family tree was rotten; it
was much weaker than it looked.
The poet has a
rather far-fetched fantasy. He dreams of
good government. He dreams a king who doesn’t
make his decisions based on appearances without regard for making friends with
the rich. He dreams a king who will
decide for the needy and for those “who suffer in the land.” He dreams a king who will prosecute the
bankers who launder drug money and jail those who write deceptive mortgages, rather
than settling for a cut of their illegal income as our Justice Department has
done.
Our translation says
that this king will judge with righteousness, that this king will wear
righteousness like a belt around his waist, but when we hear “righteousness” we
tend to think of private morality. The
prophet is not imagining a king who is a good person when no one is looking, although
that certainly isn’t a bad thing. Justice
is better word than righteousness here, I think. “Justice, justice, you shall seek!” cries
Moses in the Torah.[1]
The prophet dreams a king who not only seeks justice but does
justice.
This is the poet’s
fantasy: a world that is so transformed that the animals that usually get eaten
will not fear the animals that usually eat them and the poor and needy will
welcome the king’s decisions instead of dreading them.
That’s the poet’s
dream, the poet’s fantasy. Following his
example, we can dream dreams, too. We,
too, can imagine a better world and better lives for ourselves and children, for
our neighbors and their children, for anyone who shares this planet with us and
for their children. I dream that dream.
I dream a world in
which no child is afraid of her parents or her mother’s boyfriend. I dream a world in which no one who works
full-time has to rely on government assistance to feed their family. I dream a world in which our friends in El
Salvador do not have to fear being bullied by multi-national corporations and
the governments that support them. I
dream a world in which our young people do not have to sell their futures to a
bank in order to get an education. I
dream a world in which our nation’s and our world’s cultures and races and
religions and sexual orientations are embraced as a source of wonder and
delight and not a threat. I dream a
world in which we have ceased regarding the earth and the intricate and
delicate web of life that sustains us as resources to be used and untapped
wealth to be exploited and instead have regulated ourselves so that we live
sustainably in the world as its partner instead of as its exploiter. I dream a world in which we have learned to
say no to the consumer capitalist machine and have recovered the time we need for
rest, for reflection, and for deepening our relationships with each other, with
our world and with our God.
Yes, these are
pieces of my dream. I dream it because I
see the dismal brokenness of a world where that dream is only a dream. I dream it because I long for remedies to our
brokenness and relief for our suffering.
You dream dreams,
too. Our dreams, I am sure, differ in
the details and maybe even in substance, but we are dreamers, you and I. It is part of the boon and the burden of
being human. And our dreams have as
little and as much relation to reality as Isaiah’s dreams.
And yet. And yet.
There is one more image in this poem.
It frames the poem, since the poet speaks of it both first and
last. It is the bread for this dream
sandwich. At the beginning of our
reading we have, “A shoot will grow up from the stump of Jesse,” and at the
end, “On that day, the root of Jesse will stand as a signal to the
peoples.” Jesse, of course, was King
David’s father, so this image of the root or stump of Jesse must refer to
David’s dynasty. What is left of Jesse’s
line, David’s dynasty, is only a stump or root.
The tree is broken off at the ground.
The corruption at its core has led to rotten hollowness and the tree’s
eventual fall. That would appear to be
the end of dreaming for Judah and for its prophet.
But it is not the
end of dreaming. New life grows up from
stumps if the root is sound and new lift is possible for God’s people. The dream is not dead, not futile, if the
root is still alive and the poem calls us to imagine that the root is very much
alive. For the poet, new life is about
to sprout and that new life will bring with it a revival of hope in David’s
line, hope for just rule, hope for a peaceable world.
In the Christian
tradition we have identified this hope and indeed this very poem itself with
Jesus the Messiah. That’s why we read it
during Advent. At least looking back on
it we can see a certain pattern that we also see in Jesus. When we read this now, following this line of
reading, we see a partial fulfillment in Jesus and we expect a
complete fulfillment at Jesus’ return.
But there are other
ways to read this image. This week a
great tree fell who was also and in his own way a shoot from Jesse’s stump, a
branch growing of the root of Jesse. The
dream of just rule and a renewed earth were part of what shaped Nelson
Mandela. Of course, he has been the
focus of media attention the last few days.
He is dead, now, so it has become safe to remember the work that he
did. We can even do it selectively and
in a way that suits us since he is no longer in a position to contradict
us. Ever since Nelson Mandela was freed
from prison, we in the West have been domesticating him and now that work will
accelerate. The same thing is happening
to him that happened to Martin Luther King, Jr. He is being shaped into what will eventually
become an innocuous figure whose struggle for freedom for his people posed and
poses no threat to the deep structures of the way the world works. He is being turned into a saint, an object of
devotion. In a very real, though
symbolic way, this will be his second death.
If we stop with
this, we are left with a very passive reading—one where our role is simply to
wait. We ask, “Who are we waiting for?” Our tradition answers, we are waiting for Jesus
the Messiah, the Anointed One, the Christ.
Or we are waiting for the next Nelson Mandela, the next Martin Luther
King, Jr., or the next Monseñor Oscar Romero to be anointed. We are waiting for the next messiah (with a
small “m”) who can point the way and lead the way forward, who can help us
fashion our dreams, making a little change here or a little change there.
But we are also
anointed. We were baptized in water and
signed with the sign of Jesus. “The
Lord’s spirit will rest upon” this shoot that is to grow up from the stump of
Jesse, says the poet, but the Spirit rests upon us, as well. We were all anointed with the Spirit at our
baptism and renewed and strengthened in the Spirit at Confirmation and renewed
every time we come to the Table, every time we take our stand with God’s
people.
Read this way this
poem is no longer a call to waiting, to patience, or to resignation. Now this poem becomes a summons: We are the shoot that grows from
Jesse’s stump. We are the ones
upon whom the Spirit of the Lord rests, a spirit of wisdom and understanding, a
spirit of planning and strength, a spirit of knowledge and love of God. We are the ones who must see past the
glitter and the gloss. We are the
ones who must decide for the needy and intervene on behalf of those who suffer
in the land. We are the ones who
must call the unjust to account. We
are the ones who are called to renew the earth, and to banish violence from all
our relationships.
We are not
waiting for “the Messiah.” We are
not waiting for Mandela or King or Romero or anyone else. We are the ones we have been waiting
for. The only thing that is left to do
is to wake up. It’s time to wake up from
an unjust world’s long nightmare of inequality.
It’s time to wake up from a broken world’s long nightmare of war and
violence. It’s time to wake up from our
long sleep of patient resignation. It’s
time to dream our own dreams. It’s time
to cry out for justice. It’s time to be
the new life from Jesse’s stump. It’s
time to wake up.
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