Across the South Mountains, at Party Rock and now in Gatlinburg, the earth has been scorched by fires. It is, for the people living amid the embers, impossible to imagine what’s next.
In North Dakota, First Nations’ people are in their fourth month of protesting against the completion of a pipeline that threatens their water supply and sacred lands. Tensions have escalated, national guardsmen and water cannons have been deployed, and, as yet, there’s no resolution. It is difficult to see a way forward.
And here in the Carolinas, the announcement of no charges in the officer-involved shooting in Charlotte, the progress of the North Charleston police officer’s trial, and the beginning of jury selection in the trial of the Charleston shooter stubbornly force us to face the racial tensions that persist in our communities. Remembering our history and considering our present makes it challenging to envision a different and more peaceable future.
And those are just the headlines. Violence in nature, and in relationships, and in systems wreck lives. In our congregation(s) and neighborhoods, each of us probably can name at least one more place where hostility, enmity, or even death, has stripped us bare and left us low.
These are the very days the prophet Isaiah is addressing.
Confident that God is already working in the ashes and doing something new, Isaiah invites us to imagine impossible possibilities. Where we see only decay and detritus, Isaiah summons us to hope and expectation.
Here, Isaiah reclaims the covenant promises known during David’s reign, turns over our assumptions — what we think we know about how the world works — and invites us to wrap our minds,
and our lives,
around a new vision.
Whether it is in the war-torn kingdoms of ancient Israel and Judah, the charred landscapes of western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, on the snow-covered plains of the Dakotas, in the damaged trust of a community,
or in the wilderness of our very own pews,
God is reshaping us and our world.
More accustomed to seeing wolves in cartoons and lions and leopards in zoos, our modern ears don’t necessarily hear the audacity of the prophets’ words when he casts a vision where lion and calf, wolf and lamb, leopard and kid will lie down together.
But in ancient Israel, and in early Christianity, nature wasn’t peaceable or tranquil. There were predators and prey.
Centuries later, the animosity is captured in Aesop’s fable of a scorpion and a frog who meet on a riverbank:
The scorpion asks the frog to carry him across on its back. The frog asks, "How do I know you won't sting me?" The scorpion says, "Because if I do, I will die too."
The frog is satisfied, and they set out, but in midstream, the scorpion stings the frog. The frog feels the onset of paralysis and starts to sink, knowing they both will drown, but has just enough time to gasp "Why?"
And the scorpion replies: "It’s my nature..."The wild was something to be protected against and to be brought under dominion and submission.[i]
Isaiah challenges us to see something else in the wildness besides chaos, to hold together the ways in which the world is both fragile and majestic, terrifying and tenacious.
Up until now, our perception has been shallow and our vision has been faulty, marred by the brokenness around us, but now,
the prophet reminds us we are equipped for righteousness — our response to God — by faith, what Martin Luther described as “a living, creative, active and powerful thing.”[ii]
I believe that God is directing us to be as vulnerable as these creatures, willing to trust God more than we trust our human natures, to risk ourselves — our security or comfort, our sense of control and power — to make room for what God is doing now, at this time, in these days.
So the question this Advent is, “What might it look like for you, or for [y]our congregation, to respond to God’s direction? To recognize God’s movement and follow?” Where can we confess our surprise that God enters into our lives and takes on all of our fears and skepticism, all of our cynicism and pragmatism, and turns the world upside down, again?
Because that is what God has done throughout history, in the wilds of Israel, and again in Jerusalem at the cross. God’s nature has triumphed over our own, God’s love has stripped away our arrogance and superiority, and raised us up with Christ to new life, filled with impossible possibilities.
Let us pray…
Holy God,
You came to us in your child, Jesus
— the new branch growing from the stump of Jesse’s line —
and baptized us with Holy Spirit and fire.
Though he was killed, you raised him to life,
and clothed him in righteousness and faithfulness
so that as his reign dawns,
justice may sprout on the earth,
peace outlast the moon,
and the knowledge of your wonderful grace
wash over the earth as the waters cover the sea.
Fill us with joy and peace in believing;
that the Holy Spirit empower us and fill us with hope.[iii]
Amen.
[i] Walter Brueggemann. Isaiah.
[ii] "An Introduction to St. Paul's Letter to the Romans," Luther's German Bible of 1522.
[iii] Adapted from Laughing Bird Liturgical Resources, www.laughingbird.net/
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