A Green Shoot from Jesse’s Stump
1A green Shoot will sprout from Jesse’s stump,
from his roots a budding Branch.
2The life-giving Spirit of God will hover over him,
the Spirit that brings wisdom and understanding,9
The Spirit that gives direction and builds strength,
the Spirit that instills knowledge and Fear-of-God.
3Fear-of-God
will be all his joy and delight.
He won’t judge by appearances,
won’t decide on the basis of hearsay.
4He’ll judge the needy by what is right,
render decisions on earth’s poor with justice.
His words will bring everyone to awed attention.
A mere breath from his lips will topple the wicked.
5Each morning he’ll pull on sturdy work clothes and boots,
and build righteousness and faithfulness in the land.
6The wolf will romp with the lamb,
the leopard sleep with the kid.
Calf and lion will eat from the same trough,
and a little child will tend them.
7Cow and bear will graze the same pasture,
their calves and cubs grow up together,
and the lion eat straw like the ox.
8The nursing child will crawl over rattlesnake dens,
the toddler stick his hand down the hole of a serpent.
9Neither animal nor human will hurt or kill
on my holy mountain.
The whole earth will be brimming with knowing God-Alive,
a living knowledge of God ocean-deep, ocean-wide.
10On that day, Jesse’s Root will be raised high, posted as a rallying banner for the peoples. The nations will all come to him. His headquarters will be glorious…
Woody Allen once quipped that the day may well come when the lion will lie down with the lamb, but the lamb isn’t going to get much sleep! Another take on the reading for this morning comes from the cartoonist who shows the lamb curled up with the lion – but with a balloon in which he whispers, “Help me!”
Edward Hicks famously painted a picture called the Peaceable Kingdom – and repeated those images nearly a hundred times throughout his life. If you know Hicks, his paintings show several barn yard animals, cows and sheep, lying down with a couple of lions and other predators. All of them are depicted with eyes that look like a deer’s when caught in headlights – that is they are totally shocked at the situation in which they find themselves.
What is going to make the peaceable kingdom a reality is not just the proximity of lion to lamb, it is also the change of heart, actual change in very nature that must occur. No parent is going to allow their child to romp and play over a nest of poisonous snakes (the infant and the adder’s den) without knowing that there is nothing in the nature of the reptile that would cause it to strike at the child. It must be a complete transformation of character that occurs on this holy mountain where nothing will “hurt or destroy.”
In his book, Peace, Walter Brueggemann, the Old Testament scholar, encounters the promises made in these very familiar Advent Verses with a very personal response: They are "…unheard of and unimaginable! All these images of unity sound to me [he says] so abnormal that they are not worth reflecting on.” The comedians have the same kind of skepticism or should we call it cynicism, but Brueggemann goes on, “… 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.”
The point he is making is that we are so adjusted to a world that is dog-eat-dog or more precisely, wolf-eat-lamb, lion eat-fatling, that we cannot fathom such a revolutionary – or absolutely alternative view of reality. Isaiah the prophet says, surprisingly says, we need to look for it – we need to expect it.
This is a passage of scripture read at this time of year, of course, because for through the ages of the Christianity, we have come to associate this passage with the birth of Jesus. The shoot sprouting from the stump of Jesse is a referral to the family of King David – when the angels sang to the Shepherds centuries later out in the field, they told them that they would find a “new born king wrapped in swaddling cloths…” and they would find him in the “City of David” which is of course a reference to the same line or lineage. It is the historical royal family of the ancient Kingdom of Israel – the rulers of which were never righteous for very long and did not rule with equity or anything like it for the poor. This new shoot in Isaiah’s vision is going to be different because it springs forth from the burned out ruins of that old kingdom. It is a green shoot making its way up through the ashes of the nation of Israel, which was in ruins, already divided and a vassal state of the Babylonians when Isaiah first spoke these words…a still a captive nation, now of the Roman Empire when the Angels greet the Shepherds 500 years or so later.
It is the notion of the kingdom that ties Isaiah’s prophetic words to the coming of Jesus – but it is the nature of Jesus’ kingdom message, which is bound up, with the full scope of the image that the ancient prophet was painting.
As modern witnesses to holocausts – not only Hitler’s but others such as Rwanda or the “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia or kind of terror or threat of terror which plagues the whole world today, what people do to each other is usually far worse—and far more sinister—than what can be witnessed in the animal kingdom. Animals do what they do to survive and mostly out of sheer instinct. People, on the other hand, regularly go against their better nature to destroy each other, and usually it is for revenge or power, not self-defense.
According to the prophecy, when true righteousness comes, animals will treat each other well. Will people?!
He shall not judge by what his eyes see,
or decide by what his ears hear;
but with righteousness he shall judge the poor,
and decide with equity for the meek of the earth…
One scholar reminds us that “as a text at the midpoint of Advent, Isaiah 11 reminds us that for all the ways we try to downsize Christmas and make it neat and tidy and local and mono-toned (all peace, joy, and cheer for a week or two), the coming of God’s Chosen Messiah is finally so much bigger than we usually imagine. It involves the poor and needy whom we do not usually see populating our churches. It involves the whole realm of nature, which we also conveniently forget about in our more human-focused moments. It’s just so much bigger than all that. It is the coming of Righteousness, and once we come into close proximity with that, everything looks different.”
Everything. That is what the Shepherds responded to on the hillside. The drama of an angel chorus that proclaimed peace and good will – and said that it was all wrapped up in a baby. This is not a prince, this is not an emperor although the terms, used to describe him, “savior” and “anointed one – messiah” and “Lord” were all terms used to describe Caesar Augustus at the time. This new born king was lying in a manger – a feed troth to be found in a stable, a place that any shepherd, usually unwelcomed in polite society of the day, would feel welcomed to go. This is something new – God usually thought to frequent the draped corridors of palaces and temples – is in the barn of an inn in a backwater place called Bethlehem. These are new relationships being offered…not just in the ways we relate to each other, but in the way that God proposes to relate to us.
Mahatma Gandhi said, “There are two kinds of power in our world: one is obtained by threats or punishment (this is royal power – the power of an earthly king or government); the other arises from acts of love.” It dawns on the shepherds and should dawn on us that this momentous, angel proclaimed birth, is about love. This new righteousness is a call to love, to show compassion, connection, presence - love is a necessity as well as a command. Only God knows how effective any of us will be at the matter of loving – but if the vision speaks to us, it tells us that it is powerful enough to transform the world.
In a television interview years ago, Steven Jobs, the founder of Apple computer, was asked: “You must be a driven man, is this what causes you to start companies…and push new ideas and products to market?”
Steven Jobs looked at the reporter and said, “No, I don’t feel like a driven man. I have such an exciting vision of what my team and I can accomplish that it’s like I’m pulled toward a magnet. I have daydreams where I am literally running toward an image of our goals. I guess I’d say, I’m a pulled man.”
The Shepherds were pulled to Bethlehem not just because they say the fireworks - the Angels and the Chorus – but because they caught the vision of something different, something radically new in the way things could be.
I hope all of us will feel pulled in the same way – to Bethlehem and to something new this Christmas – something transforming and new. “And a little child shall lead us.” Amen.
