[Untitled]

Isaiah 11:1-10
Romans 15:4-13
The Second Sunday in Advent 2010

In my experience, it is a common homiletical hazard that sermon titles are required of me for purpose of worship planning long before the sermon is actually written. This congregation has become entirely too urbane and sophisticated to want to hear a preacher talk about “the word that the Lord has laid on my heart this morning,” so I will simply say, “Don’t bother asking what the sermon title in your order of worship has to do with the sermon you are about to hear.” I will only suggest that you do as I have done this week, and listen for a word from God.

Of all the beatific visions of the end in the Bible, this one in Isaiah 11:1-10 is my favorite. I don’t mean “my favorite” as in a favorite gum-chewing, lip-smacking, toe-tapping “Top-40” hit. I mean “my favorite” as the one that most strongly shapes my understanding of God and of the world and of the church and of you and me.

There are other beatific visions in the Bible, to be sure. There is the “new heaven and the new earth” in Revelation 21. There is the swords-into-plowshares vision in Isaiah 2 and Micah 4. There is Isaiah 40’s “Every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill shall be made low,” the crooked straight and the rough places plain that Gayle Gulley will sing in the Sanctuary shortly after 11:00 this morning. That aria is one of my very favorite parts of Handel’s Messiah. I suppose if I had grown up in Kansas, that might be my favorite beatific vision of them all, but as someone who has lived most of my childhood and adulthood alike on the eastern escarpment of the Blue Ridge, I need more topographical variety for a vision to be beatific. I need rocks, hills and plains to repeat the sounding joy. I need every mountainside to let freedom ring. Scripture provides us with a variety of beatific visions of the end, and for all their distinct particularities and qualities, all of them share three at least three features.

The first feature is peace. Peace. We light the candle of peace, and we sing, “O come, Desire of nations, bind all peoples in one heart and mind. Bid envy, strife, and quarrels cease; fill the whole world with heaven’s peace.” Whether your favorite biblical beatific vision of the end-time is the new heaven and new earth or the swords-into-plowshares or every valley shall be exalted, or the wolf shall live with the lamb (without having to replace the lamb every so often), your favorite vision of the end-time speaks peace to the world of fear and conflict and tension and war around you. And it speaks peace to the world of fear and conflict and tension and war inside you. Peace is one of the three shared features of every beatific vision of the end in the Bible.

A second feature of all of them is that the beatific end-time vision of God’s peace is ushered in by divine device, not human artifice. With Christians the world over we prayed from The Book of Common Prayer this morning, “We . . . eagerly await the kingdom of your Son, the Prince of Peace who reigns with you and the Holy Spirit now and forever,” in acknowledgement that it is not our kingdom or our power or our glory that ushers in peace. It is God’s and God’s alone.

You have heard me say this before, and you will hear me say it again. The fatal spiritual flaw of the liberal Christian theology movement of a century ago and the fatal spiritual flaw of the conservative Christian theology of our own time is that both of them erroneously assume that they can build the kingdom of God by controlling the kingdoms of this world. By controlling the congresses and courtrooms and institutions and armies of this world, they believe they can usher in the beatific visions of the Bible. When liberals or conservatives either one begin to think that way they commit idolatry by vesting more faith and more control in themselves and their respective theologies and ideologies than they do in God. We human beings want peace on our own terms and we want it now, and so we push God and God’s long-awaited vision to the side to worship and serve ourselves and build our own beatific vision of the end. But God’s peace comes to the world around us and the world inside us by divine device, not human artifice.

A third shared feature of every beatific vision in the Bible is that each one of them and all of them together fulfill the function of the apostle Paul’s observation in Romans 15:4, “For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.” So let me share with you this morning why when it comes to “the encouragement of the scriptures” and “steadfastness” Isaiah 11:1-10 is the beatific vision of the end-time that most speaks hope to me, the vision that most strongly shapes my understanding of God and the world and the church and you and me.

“The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion [shall feed] together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder's den. 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.”

It is often called “the peaceable kingdom,” this beatific vision in which carnivores and herbivores, predators and prey live in peaceful coexistence with each other. It is a picture of nature as you and I have never known it. You will not see it on “Animal Planet” or the “National Geographic Channel” or on “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom” (I know that last one dates me, but so be it.) It is a picture of creation as God visions it, as God redeems, restores, renovates and regenerates it. If it were a “reality TV” show, it would be called “Extreme Makeover: Creation Edition.” It is a picture of nature and society and humanity as you and I have never known them.

It suggests that some day in some way there will come a time and an eternity when, to continue the popular reality-TV allusion, a harbinger of completion will call out, “Driver, move that bus!” And with that call will come the removal of the impediment to our seeing and to our being in a creation of God’s visioning, of God’s redeeming, restoring, renovating and regenerating: a new heaven and a new earth, swords-into-plowshares, every valley exalted and mountain made low, the leopard shall lie down with the kid (and the kid will still be there in the morning).

Some of us are closer to that vision than others of us are. A couple years ago, our staff prayed for and visited a teenager who was hospitalized for months, first at Greenville Memorial Hospital and then at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston and then back at Greenville Memorial. More than once during that time the doctors called the family in because they believed the young man’s death was imminent. Late in his hospitalization and his genuinely miraculous recuperation, a few weeks before he was able to return home I asked his mother—who had literally been by his bedside for months—what had kept her going. What she said surprised me: “I already know how this is going to turn out,” she said. “God is going to heal my son. I want God to heal my son in this life, so I can take him home with me. But if that doesn’t happen, I know that God is going to heal my son in the life to come.”

You see, the driver had already moved the bus for her. She could already see her son redeemed, restored, renovated and regenerated; and that gave her steadfastness and encouragement and hope through an unbearable ordeal that was a parent’s worst nightmare. In the worst nightmares of the world around us and the world within us, the vision of the calf and the lion [feeding] together (not latter on the former) offers us steadfastness and encouragement and hope that our children’s lives and our own lives like the life of all creation, will be redeemed, restored, renovated and regenerated.

One reason I am especially fond of this particular vision in Isaiah 11:1-10 is that it emanates from a nightmare scenario. It begins with what looks for all practical purposes like a dead-end story. We have probably heard some of these words so many times that we are immune to their effect, especially this stuff about a root of Jesse and a stump and a shoot and a branch. I would remind you that it starts with a stump. The beatific vision in Isaiah 11:1-10 does not begin with a tree of life or a sapling or a seed even. It starts with a stump, a tree cut down, cut off, caput.

You may or may not remember that last month in a sermon on Isaiah 12, I said that in this portion of the book of Isaiah we are reading words spoken in and to Jerusalem in a time of great fear and uncertainty, a time of national and international terror and crisis and war. There were several times during the forty or maybe even fifty-year-long career of the prophet Isaiah that the hopes and fears of all the years had weighed heavily on Jerusalem and its people.

During the decades of Isaiah’s preaching, the powerful and ruthless Assyrian army, the greatest military machine the ancient Near East had ever known to that day invaded Israel in the north in 732 B.C.E., and then captured its capital Samaria in 721 B.C.E., and eventually besieged Jerusalem in 701 B.C.E. after decimating Judah in the south in a march with siege engines and infantry against walled cities that makes William Tecumseh Sherman look like a child playing with tin soldiers.

In whichever moment of fear and uncertainty, national and international terror and crisis and war these words of Isaiah were first spoken, it was as though there was nothing but a stump left, a dead-end story at the close of a nightmare scenario. And yet, in the midst of an unbearable ordeal, it is as though for Isaiah of Jerusalem the driver had already moved the bus, because beneath the stump he could see the root, and from the root he could see a shoot, and the shoot he could see a branch, and the branch became a sign that God was not finished with God’s people, collectively or individually, that God was not finished with God’s creation but that God had redemption, restoration, renovation and regeneration in mind.

When you are cut down and cut off, when it is as though your life or your faith or your family or your church or whatever is near and dear to you has been mowed down level to the ground, I would remind you that it starts with a stump.

More than ten years ago, I cut down two crepe myrtles in my front yard. I hated to do it because I love crepe myrtles, but in the typical overdo-it landscaping of suburban America, the original owners of the house Bev and I live in chose to plant a dogwood tree flanked by a pair of crepe myrtles. I’m sure they were an exquisite combination when they were young, but as they grew and aged, they became competitors for space and sunlight and moisture and nutrients. And as fond as I am of crepe myrtles, I am fonder still of dogwood trees; and so I cut the crepe myrtles down to the ground, leaving two stumps on either side of the tree. And for more than a decade, I weeded and wacked and mowed crepe myrtle shoots in my yard until this fall I finally hired a man to pull them out with a truck.

You see, all God needs in God’s creation, all God needs in our lives and our faith and our family and our church is but a stump with a root in order for life and hope to be God’s tenacious and ongoing words. In Romans 15, when the apostle Paul mentions “the root of Jesse” in verse 12, he cannot help himself but to break into a marvelous benediction in verse 13: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

The Advent message this year and every year is that God is not finished with God’s people, collectively and individually, and God is not finished with God’s creation. God still has redemption, restoration, renovation and regeneration in mind and under way. My hope and my prayer for you this Advent is that if only for briefest glimpse, God will give you the gift of being able to see beyond the stump, to see beyond the dead-end, beyond the nightmare, beyond whatever fear or uncertainty or terror or ordeal you may be experiencing to the beatific vision of God.

So, with apologies to Ty Pennington and the entire crew of the popular reality-TV series, I will be praying for you: “Driver, move that bus.” “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” Amen.

Bus photo from The Port of San Diego, used under license of Creative Commons.

This material is Copyrighted © 2010 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff.rogers@firstbaptistgreenville.com.