Strange Images of Hope

12-4-16 (Advent 2C)

Isaiah 11:1-10; Matthew 3:1-12

Strange Images of Hope

There’s a state park near my hometown in western Pennsylvania called Cook Forest.  It’s the largest virgin white pine and hemlock forest east of the Rocky Mountains and was even the site for a Cecil B. DeMille film called “Unconquered.”  Our family visited the park frequently to float down the river, to buy products from different local artists, and to enjoy the beauties of the forest together.

One of the stranger things that we saw in Cook Forest was a large rock left behind millennia ago by the glaciers of the Ice Age as they shifted and melted.  Now, there are a lot of these boulders and huge rocks scattered all over this area, but this one stands out in particular because it has a tree growing on top of it.  We talked to a park ranger about it once and he explained that trees will occasionally grow on top of the boulders like that almost by happenstance - a bunch of leaves fall on top of the boulder one fall and decompose, eventually creating just enough soil for a tree seed to take root and get its root system stretched down to the bottom of the boulder and into the ground.  Sometimes, he said, the root system is so persistent in getting itself down to the ground that it works its way down through a small crack in the boulder somewhere and then as it gets bigger, actually splits the boulder.

Every time I hear this familiar Advent passage from Isaiah, it’s the image of that tree growing on top of the boulder that comes to mind - “A shoot shall spring from the stump of Jesse.”  And all I see is that thick trunk, the spindly roots stretching all the way down over the boulder and down into the ground.  It’s a strange image, but at the same time it just seems somehow fitting when it comes to this passage.  Isaiah speaks to an Israel that sees itself as little more than a “stump” - This once mighty kingdom, this great and gorgeous dynasty tree whose trunk was the glorious king David was now just a “stump of Jesse.”  Their current king, Ahaz, had been a wicked and terrible king - he went against his heritage and worshipped foreign gods, he burned his own son as a sacrifice, built false idols, and desecrated the temple to build altars to other gods.  He led the kingdom of Judah into ruin and eventually into Assyrian slavery.  Isaiah speaks into a time when his nation is coming to the end of a tyranny that lasted 16 years.  He speaks into a time where the people of Israel and Judah have been plagued by kings who time and time again have either failed their people or have led them completely in the wrong direction, away from God, and into the arms of false idols and foreign nations - when even those that worshipped God and walked in the ways of their fathers still failed to live up to the legacy that had been left before them.

As the people see these things coming to pass, as they feel the oppression of the Assyrians, they yearn for a king who will lead them back into a new “golden age,” who would deliver them back into the open and waiting arms of a loving God.  They wonder what could possibly come out of a rotted stump, what life could ever come again from a tree whose roots have already had the ax taken to them.  But Isaiah sows words of promise in the midst of his warnings - he conveys the promise of a king yet to come, who will lead the nation into a time of prosperity and blessing once more.  Who will be the embodiment of Emmanuel, “God with us,” and lead the people with justice and righteousness once more.

But Isaiah’s words of promise are couched in some very strange imagery - Isaiah promises a kind of king who will be unlike anything the people have ever known before; a king who is so filled with righteousness and wisdom that in his kingdom, even nature is brought into peace - wolves living together with lambs, children playing with poisonous snakes and not being bitten, even vegetarian lions!  It must have seemed farfetched to those who heard it - the images are literally of a world turned upside down from what people know the natural order is.  And yet it is nevertheless this same image that would have given Isaiah’s people hope - whether they thought it exaggerative or genuine, Isaiah was giving his people a message that they had not been forgotten by God, nor had they been abandoned, but that God was still working in their midst and would provide them a king the likes of which they had been yearning for for so long.  It was a strange image of hope, but an image of hope nonetheless.

And that strange imagery of hope continues throughout the story of God’s people - after all, who would have thought that hope would be proclaimed in the shoutings of a man in the wilderness who wore camel hair clothing and ate honey and locusts?  Even if his appearance and behavior are a little unorthodox, John knows that the world is about to change drastically through the life and ministry of Christ - he understands the social situation in Jerusalem as it once again suffers under Roman oppression and longs yet again for the fulfillment of God’s promise of a savior.  And his understanding spurs him into action - he cries out his message in the wilderness in the same way as Isaiah describes, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord!  Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near!” and the people who hear his message respond and are baptized.  They hear something that has been missing somehow in that message, and they find hope in this call to repentance.

But John also has a message of a world about to be turned upside-down; John preaches a message of hope and anticipation, yes - but John’s message of the “one who is coming” for whom people need to repent and prepare the way contains a warning as well.  Just like Isaiah, John promises someone who is coming who will be righteous and just, but where Isaiah delivers a message of relief to a weary people, John is ringing out a wake-up call to a people who were growing complacent - as the Pharisees and Sadducees come to John to be baptized, he calls them a “brood of vipers” and tells them to bear fruits worthy of their repentance.  He calls them out for relying too much on their identity as Israelites as a source of their salvation instead of living into the covenant relationship established through the one who made them into a nation of believers in the first place.  And he makes it clear that the one who is coming after him will hold them accountable if they fail to live into the life of repentance and expectation - that the one coming after him comes “with winnowing fork in his hand” in order to separate the wheat from the chaff.  The image of a winnowing fork may be yet again a strange image of hope, but the call to repentance and the proclamation that the kingdom is here, and the one who is bringing that long-awaited kingdom with him is coming soon.

And speaking of the long-awaited Messiah… Jesus is himself perhaps the strangest image of hope we could possibly have.  As we find ourselves a mere three weeks away from celebrating Christmas, our thoughts are turned toward the manger - the strangest and most unlikely place for a king to be born.  We hear the strange and mysterious story of the virgin birth, a boy who is both the son of a carpenter and the son of God.  And then every Sunday as we gather for worship, we gather before the incomprehensibly strange symbol of our faith, the instrument by which the man we worship was put to death.  We gather before the cross, that central and most visible representation of our faith, which was itself an instrument of torture and excruciating pain, and it’s in this same instrument of death and agony that we find no end of hope - because the cross we turn our eyes to is an empty one, filled not with the reminder of suffering and despair, but with the eternal hope of the resurrection!

And so we find ourselves surrounded by these strangely beautiful images that echo all throughout our story, all throughout our faith.  May these images plant inside of us the seeds of hope each and every time we see and hear them.  May we look to the shoot that springs from the stump of Jesse and find hope - and may that hope, like the tenacious seed that lands upon a boulder, grow and thrive, taking root deep in our hearts.  May it break through all the things of this world that try to drive that hope away from us, and may we become ourselves strange images of hope to the rest of the world through the power of God at work in us.  To God be the Glory.  Amen.