A sermon for the Second Sunday of Advent in Lectionary Year A (O Root of Jesse; Isaiah 11:1-10; Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19; Romans 15:4-13; Matthew 3:1-12)
I have some deep, visceral, and thoroughly mixed emotions associated with this Root of Jesse text from the Prophet Isaiah.
This year in our repeating lectionary cycle was also the year I took my first preaching class. One of the first sermons I ever gave—it must have been nine years ago now—was on this text.
As part of our preparation, we had to memorize and perform our chosen passages for our classmates. And here is where the trouble began for me. Hebrew poetry is both lovely and often extremely repetitive.
[sing]
The beginning of a verse sets out and feeling or idea *
the conclusion repeats or expands the message.
The wolf shall live with the lamb *
the leopard shall lie down with the kid
the calf and the lion and the fatling together *
and a little child shall lead them
This poem is a beautiful but detailed list of messianic virtues and clothing, followed by another list of improbable animal and behavior pairings. It was a disaster to try to memorize, at least for me: counsel and might *then* knowledge and fear; cow, bear, lion, ox; child, asp, child, adder.
I remember, I can feel, the tense muscles and the pounding heart and eventually the watery eyes that accompanied my shameful attempted recitation. I won’t soon forget what it felt like to fail to speak the words of perhaps our most treasured prophet to a room full of eager disciples who had had no difficulty embodying their own proclamation.
A part of me would like to unambiguously loathe this text, and that assignment. But the story is more complicated.
A couple weeks later, I got to preach. I’d been assigned the short message at our delightfully informal family service, and that meant sitting in the aisle with the children of the parish and playing with the biblical passage together.
I knew we would be sitting down, so it had occurred to me that we could embody this text by each becoming one of the animals in Isaiah’s imaginative tableau. I spent the evening before making oversized animal ears for us to wear while we chatted about God’s hope for creation: cotton ball sheep ears, Sharpie-spotted leopard and cow ears, pointy gray upright wolf ears.
It was a bit of a gimmick. But it worked, and it was fun, and I remember it fondly.
In fact, it helped redeem the ordeal I’d been through a few weeks earlier. Both stories are now a part of my story. Both moments exist together in my body’s experience of this text: terror and humiliation, joy and playfulness.
**
Deep, visceral, and thoroughly mixed emotions are also part and parcel of the Advent experience:
- the excitement of anticipation and the tedium of waiting;
- our longing for God’s deliverance and our anxiety about God’s judgment;
- our unambiguous experience of the Good News of Jesus’s first coming on the one hand (the star! the manger! three gifts! more cute animals!) and on the other hand our confusion and dread at being asked to take as Good News the apocalyptic announcements of Christ’s impending return. Here there is mostly ominous symbolism and decidedly un-cute animals and other beasts.
Isaiah’s portrait of the promised messiah and messianic age captures this tension really well: “the Root of Jesse,” as the prophet calls this messiah, will tend to poor people and put an end to inequity, and will strike the earth with an iron rod, putting the wicked to death entirely. I’m not so sure I’m not among the wicked.
John the Baptist, in pointing to the coming of Christ and its implications for the weak and for the powerful, puts on the hairy mantle of that earlier prophetic tradition.
In the gospel story we heard at daybreak, what looks like a kind of riverside hippy renewal gathering quickly sours, at least for some. John calls out the hypocritical religious authorities who show up, calls them a brood of vipers, implies God is standing ready to chop them down at the roots. I’m not so sure I’m not among the vipers.
**
The spiritual challenge of Advent is learning to hold *all* the Good News of our experience of God’s good creation and message of love and redemption: abiding promise alongside temporary disappointment, boundless mercy alongside ample capacity for evil, a peaceable kingdom of safety and reciprocity just beyond the painful transformation we must pass through together in order to see and embody such a world.
How do we find our way to this holy even-handedness? I believe part of the picture is by reflecting faithfully and often on the ups and downs of our own experience and of our shared lives. We find wholeness and clarity through integrating our many pleasurable and painful experiences of life abundant:
Here is my story so far. Here’s where I’ve followed Jesus’s leading. Here’s where I’ve missed the mark. Here’s what I still can’t understand or accept, at least for now. I will with God’s help.
Through grace and Jesus’s presence with us, this honestly about the truth of our lives and of the world can help us heed our prophets’ calls.
O Root of Jesse, rallying your people around God’s banners and bringing leaders everywhere up short: Come without delay and deliver us. Amen.
Image credit: “Rambling Roots” by judy dean via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)