sermon excerpts: "It's Not Natural"

Isaiah 11: 1-10
What Isaiah presents in his prophecy is a different world order. It is a lovely picture. It is a wonderful idea. If only wolves and lambs could coexist, bears and cows, goats and calves and lions all together in peace without bothering each other. Sure, it’s a dreamland hearkening back to the Garden of Eden, but it’s just not natural.

Prophets in the Bible, like Isaiah and John the Baptist, go against the grain. They speak against the way things are because they are not right, just or faithful. Isaiah refers to the stump of Jesse’s tree as a comment on the family tree of King David; Jesse was his father. In the time of Isaiah, an enemy empire had swept through the land, destroyed the Holy Temple and exiled the leaders of society.

It was a devastating loss, a time of discouragement and despair. The great tree of the land was gone. Nothing would be the same. Into this reality, Isaiah offers words of hope.

From the leveled stump of a tree, there is the promise of a greater and larger growth. “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch grow out of its roots”. We are reminded that there is more to life than what is visible to the eye. The vast, expansive root system is still working, beneath the scenes to gather and transport nutrients and water to what is left of the tree.

And in our day and age of declining involvement in church and busy schedules that take us elsewhere all the time, it very much feels like the tree of the congregation has been cut down. In our church we very much feel like a remnant or a stump.

The landscape is much different than what the original tree grew in. But new growth is about adaptation and indeed has very different vision than before. The root system is the same, but the trunk and the branches are going to be much different, maybe unrecognizable.

The church, and our local expression of it, is seeking to spring up from the stump of past glory. What that will look like, we’re trying to figure out. Maybe it’s more cooperation with other United Church congregations in the area, or working more closely with our Presbyterian (and Anglican) friends down/across the road. Maybe it will mean more use of technology; I hope it includes outreach and greater understanding of other faith traditions. Somehow it needs to connect body, mind and spirit. What all this relies on is the fact that the spirit of the Lord would be us.

We as ordinary everyday people also carry within us the spirit of the LORD. The Spirit of the Lord fills the people, bringing us to a new energy and expression of peace. Through Isaiah and John the Baptist, we are called to change. To do things that are not natural to us – to seek to make peace, work in cooperation and not competition. What if Isaiah’s scripture read: “the Presbyterian shall live with the Roman Catholic, the Anglican and Pentecostal and the United together, and a little child shall lead them”?

Or Muslim and Hindu, Buddhist and Christian? Then it doesn’t become so flippant and sarcastic, it become the real and desperate hope of so many people of faith. And if it is a matter of survival, we need to work against our natural instinct for self-preservation and be guided into a way of peace and flourishing that is built on knowledge of God, respect for others and ourselves and a willingness to risk. And a little child shall lead us.