“PROMISED”

A Sermon Based Upon Isaiah 11: 1-10

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

Sunday,   Advent B, December  21, 2014

“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. (Isa 11:10 NRS)

You’d better check your list twice, there’s only a couple more days of shopping left until Christmas.  Aren’t you glad?    

A few days before Christmas two men in Florida decided to go sailing while their wives went Christmas shopping.    While they were out sailing a terrible storm arose.  It was all they could do to keep their boat under control.  As they maneuvered their way back to land, their boat became grounded on a sandbar. They had to jump overboard and push with all their might trying to get the boat into deeper water. 

While they were doing this, the wind was blowing, the waves were rushing upon them and they were soaking wet, knee deep in mud. One of the guys looked at his buddy and said, “You know, it sure beats shopping!”

We all have visions of what Christmas should look like.   Think for a moment, about some of the most popular ones.   “I’m dreaming of a White Christmas.”   What about that tear jerker; “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.”   Then there’s the romantic one of “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire”.  Everybody has their own personal vision of what Christmas should be.  Few children today have ‘visions of sugar plums dancing in their head’, but I’m sure something is dancing up there, especially this week.  It’s almost Christmas!

What is your vision of the perfect Christmas?  The older we are, the simpler the vision gets, but sometimes, the harder the orders are to fill.   “I just want all the family to come home”,  but now, they have their own lives.”   Another says,    “I would like to have good health,” but that too could contradict this moment.   Dreams of peace and hope can get even more complicated.   Maybe there’s been a situation at work, a separation in your relationships, or maybe life hasn’t worked out as you’d hoped.  We all have our wants, our wishes, our dreams, our hopes and our prayers for Christmas.   Music, poetry and art, represent some of our dreams.  Who hasn’t received a beautiful ‘vision’ of Christmas, only to sigh and wish it could be so.  Even the greeting “Merry Christmas” is a vision and a hope of what Christmas could be, but unfortunately, at least for some, it isn’t so “Merry!”  It’s just wishful thinking.

Today, I’m not taking anything for granted.  We are getting very close to Christmas, so I want to talk about the big vision---the very big vision of what could be, and should be, but still isn’t.  It includes, but goes back even further than the greeting the angels announced on that first Christmas: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace…” (Lk. 2.14).  Long before there was Christmas, some 700 years before Jesus, there was this vision of Isaiah—a glorious dream that was, and still is the greatest dream of what the world could be, but still isn’t. 

NO ORDINARY PEACE

You may recognize this vision.  Perhaps you’ve even received a Christmas card of Isaiah’s “Peaceable Kingdom” as painted by early American artist, Edward Hicks.  

Hicks’ memorable painting was as idealistic, as it was hopeful and personal.  In a day long before printers, it is estimated that Hicks’ painted over a hundred different paintings with 61 different versions of this “Peaceable Kingdom”.   Edward Hicks was a Pennsylvania Quaker with a simple faith, but also with a not-so-simple hope.  His painting is not a vision of how things are, but of how things should be, could be, or as Hick’s hoped, might have been coming into reality in early America.  It was his hope, but it still wasn’t the way things were.

If you look closely at the painting, you will see all kinds of animals in the foreground.  Wild animals are standing peaceably with domesticated ones.  A child or children are dispersed among the animals without fear or threat.  In the background, William Penn, the Quaker who founded Pennsylvania, is signing a peace treaty with local Indians.  This was an expression of Hicks’ faith in both the dream of America and in his faith of a God who could lead everyone to make peace and invite God’s new kingdom to come.   It was this grand vision from Isaiah that he making him hopeful of how things might be.   Over the years, Hicks’ paintings have become priceless and timeless.  Of course, the names have changed, but both the animals and the humans haven’t.  This is why it remains a dream, a hope, a prayer, and has little to do with most of the realities we know, this Christmas or any Christmas.

It may have been much the same for Isaiah.   Certainly things were not very “peaceable” when Isaiah first painted his original vision.   The Assyrian army was on the warpath.  Perhaps they had already devastated the northern tribes, but their mighty chariots and deadly arrows were still threatening the peace of his world.   The truth of the situation was even worse than that.  As Isaiah expressed in Isaiah 10:5, God had allowed Assyria to march against Israel (his own people) as the ‘rod of his anger… against a godless nation (10.5).  Judgment is the kind of ‘truth’ no one wants to believe then, or now.  Most of the words and dreams spoken by prophets were unheard, until it was too late.

When we begin to look closely at this very radical vision of peace, we can quickly see that this is no ordinary peace.  This is not merely a peace that ends war or conflict.  This is not merely a peace that hopes for a better life or a better world.  This was Isaiah’s hope for the transformation of everything---a reverse of the curse.  You just don’t have wolves living with lambs, leopard’s lying with goats, or children playing with poisonous snakes, unless everything has been completely altered—that is radically transformed.  

When I too consider this vision, I can’t help but think how ridiculous all this sounds; either when compared with real life or even compared to the cartoons I used to watch as a child.  Remember how the Coyote was always after the Road Runner, or how Sylvester constantly tried to catch and eat Tweetie Bird, or how Elmer Fudd desperately wanted to shoot that “darn Rabbit”.  Even as unrealistic as some of those cartoons were they at least represented the world we all know all too well—a world of “nature, red-toothed and claw” and a world where children can mostly easily suffer and die.   Isaiah’s vision is not the world we know.  How crazy is it to suggest, that a child will one day “play over” a hole or den of snakes?  In a world like ours, we might imagine another approach: Why not kill all the snakes? 

But even though this is nothing like the world we know, it is a dream we would like to know.  We can connect to it.  How are you dreaming of something more, deeper, even more precious and peaceful than a just a ‘White Christmas?”   There is something captivating and alluring in this picture that captured the imagination the prophet and might even captivate us.  

Most of us may remember how heartwarming it was, when several years ago, a video came out in the news about the two Australian fellows, John Rendall and Ace Bourke, who  were reunited with the Lion they had bought at a store, raised from a cub in London, and had finally released back into the wild.   When they returned into the wild, a year or so later, to see how their Lion was doing, they approached carefully, not knowing for sure whether the Lion would remember them, or worse--eat them.   As you watched the Lion charge toward them everything was uncertain.  Could those humans “lie down” with that Lion? 

But the real question in the back of their mind and ours: Can love tame the wild of nature?  As the Lion leaped toward them we all were a gasp.   But beyond their ‘wildest’ dreams, and tamed ones too, that lion sprang on them with apparent hugs of affection.  We were not only relieved, but also amazed.  Could this dream come true?  Oh, by the way, they had given that Lion a name: Christian.

NO ORDINARY HOPE

Even though any truly tamed Lion is still the exception, not the rule.  It would be very dangerous for us to try such a thing, just as it would be to believe that such a radical, outrageous, transformative peace, like Isaiah’s vision, might become a reality in this world the way things are right now.  We all want to hope that the “wild” of nature or the wild of human nature, can and will, one day be transformed by God’s transforming love.  We all want both “heaven and nature” to sing  of God’s peace.   We even want to give ‘peace a chance’, but can peace have a chance in a world like ours?

I’m purposely ‘pessimistically optimistic’ because happened to Siegfried and Roy, or what happen to the face of the woman attacked by her friend’s pet Monkey, or why most Wildlife officials will deter you from owning a Lion, Tiger or Bear.  We want to believe that life can be transformed.  We want to believe that we are headed in a positive direction.  We want to believe that what comes ‘natural’ to us can be altered, converted or transformed?   What sane person wouldn’t want to believe this?  But also, what sane person would actually believe it?  Why would two crazy guys buy a Lion at a department store, make that Lion their pet, release it into the wild, and then go back into that wild hoping that their Lion might have the memory of an elephant or the reaction of a dog?   Don’t they know this is a cat?   Do they seem like people who grew up in a world of skepticism and science?    If you think Isaiah the prophet was crazy for seeing something like this, consider the foolishness of those two fellows?  We all know that people, like children, can get a little crazy at Christmas, but this kind of crazy is crazy; but it’s also a good kind of crazy.  It’s the kind of crazy that gets people killed.  

As crazy this sounds (it’s almost Christmas, so I hope you’ll understand you might believe most anything this close to Christmas), I believe that prophets, people and lion tamers, whether it be for religious purposes, experimental purposes, or even for entertainment purposes, are right at the heart of the greatest dream of Christmas---the dream of peace on earth and good will to all.   I believe that Isaiah’s vision is more than a nice, pleasant picture to put on a Christmas card as mere sentimentally.   I believe that this hope for a world transformed from the one we now know, experience and fear, is a dream that can be realized—not just tomorrow, but it can even be known today.   But how can I believe such a crazy notion?   

Back in October, Teresa and I visited a new dermatologist in Winston-Salem.   You wouldn’t normally think of having a religious experience in a dermatologist’s office, but that is what happened.   I was standing there listening to instructions from the receptionists (or not listening, as my wife says), and then my eyes moved from seeing the personal family photos to  scripts of paper tacked up on the board on the wall at her back.   Right beside some pictures of children (visiting Disneyland, I think) was a written copy of a familiar Christian hymn; all three verses.  Right beside that hymn was a hand-written quote attributed to South African civil rights leader Nelson Mandela.  The quote went: “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion.  People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart...”  (From A Long Walk to Freedom).

It helps me to understand that this peace Isaiah envisions--this belief in the coming transformation of all things, fits right into the grand vision of hope for peace found throughout the Bible as a whole.   Isaiah’s vision is an appropriate picture of how things ‘shall be’ because of how things once were—before temptation ruled, before sin destroyed, before the loss of innocence, before the knowledge of good and evil came into this world.   In short, what Isaiah envisions here, preserves a human memory of what has been lost, or what comes ‘more naturally’ as Mandela put it.   Isaiah’s hope for a world of peace may seem strange and crazy to us, but it is not strange at all to the God who created this world and us.  It’s helps me to realize, whether reading the Bible or the newspapers, to know that God had an entirely different vision of how things should be, and he also had a very different vision for who we could be.  Knowing that the world is a paradise lost, as John Milton once described it,  helps me to believe it can also be a paradise regained —a reverse the curse.  

Jesus too, in his own vision of coming of God’s kingdom, not only spoke about how things should be, but he also spoke of how things really are, and how things have sometimes gone wrong.   Recall in Matthew when Jesus spoke about the growing lackadaisical attitudes toward marriage of his day.  Some religious leaders came to him asking about whether a man should be able to freely divorce his wife for cause?   As Jesus answered, he also remembered: “From the Beginning, it was not so….”  (Matt. 19.8).   Jesus asked: “Have you not read that He who made them AT THE BEGINNING made them male and female?” (Matt. 19:5).    “It was because you were so hard-hearted,”  Jesus continues, “that Moses allowed you to divorce….  but AT THE BEGINNING it was not so.”   Once upon a time,  the ways things were was lost.

 “In the beginning” is also how Genesis opens, and that’s no accident.  In this “beginning” we also we see some idealized, Christmas card-like images of original people—the way we were, as the song says.  These original people are rather normally carrying on conversations with a serpent.   This Adam and Eve could casually talk to God on an evening stroll.   My goodness, the Genesis story even suggests that in the beginning, a man and woman could actually talk and understand each other!   Is that normal?  Cain had not yet killed Abel.  The world had not known a flood.  There were no giants in the land.   With all these kinds of strange, other-worldly images, and more, Genesis provides the ground for Isaiah’s hope.   As Genesis and Jesus both say, and as Isaiah here imagines: In the beginning, it was not so, and in the future it won’t be either.  Just as “in the beginning” when “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed it was very good” (1:31), Isaiah believed it would be that way again.   The strangeness of the vision captured this prophets eye, because his heart was captured by the creator God.

Will this vision capture and captivate us, this Christmas?  Can we gather around the tree and imagine that kind of peace in the world could be what God has already started among us?   It’s not an easy sell, is it?   The eternally depressed comedian, Woody Allen, once sarcastically gave his answer, "The calf might lie down with the Lion, but I bet the calf don't sleep at night."   To have a real hope for peaceful, 'predator-free' world---a world without threat, without evil, and without danger and without disappointment, is very much like a Christmas card, isn’t it?   It's beautiful to think look at, but it’s not the dog-eat-dog reality we know all too well.  

How do we get the hope, this vision and this dream of peace off the Christmas card and into our own lives?   Are you sometimes as ‘stumped’ by the way the world is, the way the world goes, the way everything remains the same, or gets worse?  Are you disappointed by the way both nature and human nature can be?   Will you get to sleep this night before Christmas? Or will creatures still be stirring in your house and the house of your dreams?  Will your Christmas be more like a ‘Night at the Museum’ than the “Night Before Christmas”?  

NO ORDINARY KING

Ironically, I think Isaiah wants us to be ‘stumped’ by this vision.  I think Isaiah wants us to be “stumped” so we realize just how far we are from God’s dream of what this world should be.   That’s exactly where this vision begins, with a stump---doesn’t it.    It begins with stump and “a branch” growing out of that stump.  It begins this way because, as Isaiah also preached (10:33), until the tall, opposing, self-sufficient, and egotistical trees are cut down, there can’t be any real hope for God’s peace to come---either in this world or in our hearts.  There is only one way this radical, transformative ‘heavenly’ and earthly peace can come to us.   And it’s not  just that ‘the tallest trees’ have to be ‘cut down’ or the ‘lofty’ must be ‘brought low’ but it is also, first and foremost, a radical, hopeful vision that somebody different—somebody very different, must rule and be king in our lives.

This somebody is who must rule, is the King only God can enthrone.   This king is one who can do what only God can do and bring a peace that only God can bring.    And this will be no ordinary peace because this it is no ordinary king.   According to Isaiah’s vision, only the king who has the “the Spirit of the Lord” and is ‘anointed’ by God himself, can bring this kind of other-worldly or ‘heavenly’ peace into the world.  Until God’s king rules; until God’s king rules both our lives, our politics and our world, we will not fully know this kind of peace.

So, before we close, let’s return to our Christmas Card, Edward Hick’s painting of the Peaceable Kingdom.  Once more let’s ask how we make this peace, Isaiah’s peace, down to earth for our lives and our world.  When Hick’s painted all those many versions of the Peaceable Kingdom, it was noticed that as he painted them,  all a hundred or so of them, that both the animals in the foreground and the people in the background grew larger, darker, more ominous, and stranger to the hope he too envisioned.  You could say that even all the way back then, the American dream has a very tragic way of becoming the American nightmare. 

This is they kind of human experience we all know, which only God can reverse.  God has come to bear the curse and to reverse the curse through Jesus, his chosen King, but how and when will this happen.   Will this world finally and fully let God’s king rule, “as far as the curse is found” or have we gotten so used to the curse that we’ve lost interest.  Have we lost interest not only for God’s dream for the world, but have also lost interest in God’s dream for ourselves.  It’s funny, maybe even sick, how people can go around celebrating Christmas and not even give one single thought or prayer to the God’s dream.  Can we, in a world like ours, do anything to make God’s dream come true in us?

Several years ago, PBS ran a special on how the first wild wolves were finally domesticated to become loving, faithful dogs---our best friends.  How did such a thing happen, when humans have taken wild animals out of the wild for years and attempted over and over to train and domestic them, but with no real success.  How did this change happen?  This is what the Scientists could not figure out.

Finally, one Scientist came up with a theory.  It’s just a theory now, but it makes all kinds of sense—both scientific and spiritual.   The theory is that no humans have ever domesticated wolves into dogs, no matter how much they tried, because the wolves domesticated themselves.  As  humans moved into settlements, the wolves gathered around realizing that the humans had something they didn’t:  food—free food.  The only way these wolves could get to the food, without risking their lives, was to come closer and closer and then get close enough to allow themselves to be domesticated by human love.  And this is exactly what the Scientist say happened.  No one domesticated the first wolves into dogs until the wolves were hungry enough to allow this to happen.  Wolves had to first want the transformation to happen.  They had hurt enough, be hungry enough and even be “dog” enough, to allow love to change their whole nature (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/dogs-that-changed-the-world/what-caused-the-domestication-of-wolves/1276/). 

I don’t think it’s any different for us.   My theory is that what keeps a Christmas world from getting off the Christmas card and into our lives has a lot less to do with God than it has to do with us.  We are the missing link.   Only God can change us; that’s true.  Only God can change the world, that’s true too.  But we have to be hungry enough, and we must come close enough, and allow God to change us first.  God doesn’t throw the bread to the wolves or the dogs, until they are hungry enough to come close enough to his transforming love.   Jesus himself proved this in his conversation with the syrophoencian woman (Mark 7l 26ff).  C

Could it still be that what keeps Isaiah’s vision of transforming peace from getting off a Christmas card is not a lack of God’s power, but our lack of desire?  Did you know that the most dangerous and disappointing animal in Hick’s painting is not the lions, tigers and bears, but it is the children themselves?  Those children who someday lose their innocence have the greatest potential to hinder God’s rule of peace in the world .  Again, it is no accident that at Christmas, when we talk of peace, real peace, God’s peace, we also think of a child, the child who grew to become God’s King, the King God chose to rule our hearts for the sake of peace.

But we must let him rule—in our world and in our hearts.  Are we still the stubborn trees that need cutting before God’s love and peace can blossom?   Are we the stubborn growth that has grown wild, living whatever way we wish, without giving thought to the one who created and called us to a much higher and holier level of life?   If you are ready for peace, God’s peace, John the Baptist says the ‘ax is lying at the root of the trees (Mt. 3.10).

What is God waiting on to make this vision of world peace a reality?   God could be waiting on us.   His peace may be waiting on us to get close enough for love to change our own hearts.  If that happens, you never know what might happen next.  The wolf might not only live with the lamb, but the wolf could become a lamb.  Can you see how far this could go?  Far as the curse is found, far as the curse is found.  Far as, Far as, the curse is found.”   Amen.