Heeding the prophets
Commentary
Object:
In the Book of Common Prayer, the collect for Advent 2 reads: Merciful God, who sent your messengers the prophets to preach repentance and prepare the way for our salvation: Give us grace to heed their warnings and forsake our sins, that we may greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer. This prayer aptly describes the themes in our lessons today. Give heed to the prophets and repent. Through repentance we are prepared to greet Jesus, judge and savior, with joy.
But the prophets are tricky. Their messages are of comfort and joy, yes, but also of fire and destruction. The prophets preach comfort to those already destroyed, destruction to those too caught up in their own selves to see the injustices they live. How we preach these passages will depend in part on who is in our pews and in what condition are their lives. Put together, our scriptures today contain the full prophetic message of calls to repentance, judgment and destruction, and the restoration of holy community.
Isaiah 11:1-10
The book of Isaiah comes to us from perilous times. Scholars generally agree that this longest of the prophetic books is composed of writings from three different historic periods. First Isaiah (chapters 1-39) dates to the life of the prophet Isaiah in Jerusalem in the second half of the eighth century BCE, while Second (chapters 40-55) and Third (56-66) Isaiah are more recent, dating to the sixth century BCE during the Babylonian exile and the rise of Cyrus of Persia. Today's reading comes from First Isaiah, when Isaiah the prophet lived during the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah as kings of Judah (approximately 742 to 701 BCE). During this time Assyria annexed the Northern Kingdom into their empire, and the threat of the Assyrians to Jerusalem and Judah loomed large. Isaiah boldly named the injustices of the ruling elite in Jerusalem and prophesied that God would use the Assyrians to eradicate this unjust and faithless society. After Judah's destruction by the Assyrian armies, God would in turn judge and destroy the Assyrians, and a faithful remnant of Judah would be left to establish a righteous society. It is this prophecy of a new, just society springing from the ashes of the old, corrupt one that we hear today in Isaiah 11:1-10. It is an inspiring vision of comfort and peace, but it is one that arises after a terrible judgment. The growing shoot comes from the roots of a mighty tree that has been felled: the house of Jesse, the father of King David and of the long line of Davidic kings, who ruled for close to 500 years (ca. 1010 to 586 BCE). In Isaiah's vision, the restoration of society will be so complete that not only humans but all animal life will exist in harmony with one another. Predator and prey will lie down together, the lion will eat straw, and even poisonous snakes will pose no threat. The very youngest and weakest will be safe. All creation will be in accord with God's ways.
Romans 15:4-13
In this selection from Paul's letter to the church in Rome, we hear Paul's interpretation of Isaiah's prophecy in light of the Christ event. No longer is it "on that day the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples; the nations shall inquire of him, and his dwelling shall be glorious" (Isaiah 11:10 NRSV). In Paul's recounting, this verse becomes "the root of Jesse shall come, the one who rises to rule the Gentiles; in him the Gentiles shall hope" (Romans 15:12 NRSV). Paul is clear in this pericope that the Gentiles are part of God's saving plan. While Isaiah speaks to the saving of Judah, Paul speaks to the saving of all people, Jew and Gentile alike. For Paul, Christ has worked through the Jews to reach the Gentiles. In writing this letter, Paul was likely addressing some level of conflict between Jewish and Gentile Christians in the church in Rome.
Scholars date Paul's letter to the Romans to sometime between 55 and 58 CE, after a ban against Jews in Rome issued by Claudius in 49 CE was lifted by Nero in 54 CE. Imagine the challenges of welcoming and reincorporating a portion of the community that had been exiled for five years, as Jewish Christians had been from Rome! Paul's prayer for harmony and unity in 15:5-6 implies that these qualities may have been especially needed in the Roman church, as does his exhortation in 15:7 to "welcome one another."
In verses 8-12 Paul proceeds to honor the Jewish foundation of the early church before interpreting Jewish scriptures and history as leading to the inclusion of the Gentiles through Christ. The concluding verse, "May the God of hope fill you with all joy and hope in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit" (15:13 NRSV), has become a blessing in its own right in many Christian traditions. This text may be of special import to communities struggling to reconcile newcomers and old-timers, either in a congregation or a neighborhood. It can speak to struggles around immigration and who is "in" and who is "out" that are current in our national life.
Matthew 3:1-12
If the prophetic word thus far has been one of comfort and joy, John the Baptist's message in today's gospel is anything but. Here, we hear strong words of judgment and destruction, the ax cutting down the tree, fire burning the chaff. There is no sprout arising from the stump of Jesse as in Isaiah, no joy and hope in believing as in Paul's letter. The peaceful serpents in Isaiah's vision of the restored kingdom reappear as the threatening "brood of vipers" aspersion John casts at the Pharisees and Sadducees. While the need for repentance was implicit in the prophetic words of Isaiah and Romans, here in the gospel they are explicit indeed.
Even more disturbing, at least for those of us who spend much of our time in the religious establishment, it is not the grievous sinners who are condemned but the religious leaders of John's and Jesus' day. Those who thought they were being faithful to God (and who prided themselves on that) are those who come in for the severest condemnation. As Isaiah directed his strongest prophecy to the ruling elite who ignored and abused the poor, so John severely addresses the religious leaders of his day who care more for keeping the rules and their own privileged positions than enacting God's mercy.
Application
As I write, the world is beginning to receive news and photos of the terrible destruction wrought by Typhoon Haiyan in the central Philippines. Rescue operations are mobilizing; our churches are taking collections and sending funds for relief. But who knows by Advent 2 if our attention will still be on this region and its recovery or on some new calamity or world event that has eclipsed media attention to the Philippines?
Surely, the people of the ruined city of Tacloban know the absolute destruction of which the prophets speak. Even storm shelters were swept away by this fiercest of storms in a region that regularly weathers Pacific typhoons. In addition to material aid, they need the assurance of comfort, hope, and restoration that we find in Isaiah: A shoot shall come out of the stump (the living tree cut down and obliterated); new life will flourish. The people of the Philippines know this cycle of destruction and restoration all too well, through many trials and tragedies: typhoons and earthquakes, landslides and the devastation of war.
My grandparents were missionaries in the Philippines, and my grandmother wrote of returning there after World War II: rusted hulls of half-sunk ships in the Manila harbor, steps going nowhere where lovely Spanish houses once stood, chimneys standing with hearths in midair above ruined gardens. She wrote too of the sprout beginning to spring from the stump: "I hear the laughter of naked children playing in the drenched ruins of a Manila church now their only home. Let the razed city rise. Let the thin child be born" (Dorothy Lee Richardson, The Half-Seen Face [Bauhan Publishing, 1979], pp. 67, 70). The Filipino people did recover from the devastation of World War II, and yet new tragedies continue.
Few if any of us are preaching this Sunday in the Philippines, though some of us may serve Filipinos in our congregations. What of us, who pray in our pews, send aid, some of us worrying about those we have not yet heard from, but most of us continuing unscathed in our comparatively secure lives? The prophets call us not only to aid, but to justice. While science cannot say that any particular weather event is caused by global climate change, we know that climate change is likely to bring more storms of the magnitude of Typhoon Haiyan. We know too that it is the poor who suffer the most from and have the fewest defenses against changing environmental conditions. Where sea levels may rise, those with means can move away from the coast. Poor fishermen and their families have fewer alternatives. Where rainfall patterns change bringing drought or flood, those who rely on farming to feed their families will suffer first. Look to the most polluted places on earth and there you will find the poorest of the poor, making their homes as best they can in the places others scorn. The magnitude of global environmental issues can feel overwhelming. We can read the reports and despair, or we can see all this and hear it and repent.
What does repentance look like? It can be in small measures or great, but it means living a more examined life in our homes, communities, and congregations. It can mean doing an energy audit (and following through with appropriate action steps) of our homes or church facilities -- the latter very seldom designed for energy efficiency with soaring ceilings and single-paned glass windows. It can mean attending more fully to use, reuse, and appropriate disposal of everything from kitchen waste (in compost) to paper (buy recycled, use two sides, then recycle again) to coffee hour supplies. It can mean walking, carpooling, biking, helping neighbors run errands, planting a garden at home or at church to feed ourselves or the hungry. These are disciplines of incarnation, embodied living in this world, that are part and parcel of following the incarnate God we know in Jesus. Those in our congregations with their own prophetic calls may teach the rest of us about political involvement for effective legislation on issues of environment and justice for the poor. Resources for further learning abound in many of our denominations and beyond.
An Alternative Application
A deep and personal fear may be raised as we hear the prophets, and especially John the Baptist, in our readings today. And that is the fear of God's judgment, which for some parishioners may translate into an overall fear of God and an unwillingness to be seen and known by God. The fiery language of John the Baptist overlaps with images of hell from Dante's Inferno and later cultural sources and whatever fire-and-brimstone messages we have heard in our lifetimes. It can be a long journey of the heart and spirit from fearing God's judgment to welcoming it. Several realizations have helped me along this way.
The first realization is that judgment is necessary, not antithetical, to a loving God. One of my clergy friends is fond of saying, "God loves us as we are and God loves us too much to leave us as we are." We all are broken and sinful, and for a person, a relationship, or a world to be restored, that which is broken must be mended and that which is sinful must be changed. Heaven would not be heaven if we were all there as we are now! Healing and repentance are necessary to a full life with God. Diseased branches must be trimmed from living trees so that they may flourish and bear fruit. When we are walking down the wrong path, God calls us to turn back (repent) and walk in God's ways.
Another helpful realization for me about images of God's judgment is that fire can be purifying. Distant as we are from the world of ancient Palestine, many of us don't have the same sense of the world and fire's place in it. Most of us growing up in the United States have been taught to fear fire: fire drills at school and Smokey the Bear impressed us at early ages with fire's danger. But fire has a regular part to play in many of the world's forest and grassland ecosystems and in some traditional agricultural systems. It returns nutrients to the soil and clears the way for new growth. The cones of some pitch pines in the New Jersey Pine Barrens are made so that they will open and release their seeds only after they experience the high temperatures that come with forest fire. (This is true for many other plants in fire-adapted ecosystems; the scientific term is serotiny, for any of you wishing to research additional examples.) I have seen charred trunks in Australian forests sending out strong green shoots of new life, even as the forest is still smoldering. The local raspberry farm near our home in Massachusetts recently put out its annual call for volunteers to cut down the old canes and burn them, so that next year's growth can arise unimpeded by old stalks or latent diseases.
For those moved to consider the experience of God's judgment in preaching this Sunday, I offer what is for me the truest description I have yet found of what it is in this life and may be in the next. It comes from the closing pages of novel in which the narrator, an old man who has been recounting stories from his boyhood, muses on what has become of his now long-dead relations:
One by one, the sharers in this mortal damage have borne its burden out of the present world…At times perhaps I could wish them merely oblivious, and the whole groaning and travailing world at rest in their oblivion. But how can I deny that in my belief they are risen? I imagine the dead waking, dazed, into a shadowless light in which they know themselves altogether for the first time. It is a light that is merciless until they can accept its mercy; by it they are at once condemned and redeemed. It is Hell until it is Heaven. Seeing themselves in that light, if they are willing, they see how far they have failed the only justice of loving one another; it punishes them by their own judgment. And yet, in suffering that light's awful clarity, in seeing themselves within it, they see its forgiveness and its beauty, and are consoled. In it they are loved completely, even as they have been, and so are changed into what they could not have been but what, if they could have imagined it, they would have wished to be.
(Wendell Berry, A World Lost [Counterpoint, 1996], pp. 150-151)
In this season of Advent, may we heed the prophets and prepare to gladly welcome the light that has come into this world.
But the prophets are tricky. Their messages are of comfort and joy, yes, but also of fire and destruction. The prophets preach comfort to those already destroyed, destruction to those too caught up in their own selves to see the injustices they live. How we preach these passages will depend in part on who is in our pews and in what condition are their lives. Put together, our scriptures today contain the full prophetic message of calls to repentance, judgment and destruction, and the restoration of holy community.
Isaiah 11:1-10
The book of Isaiah comes to us from perilous times. Scholars generally agree that this longest of the prophetic books is composed of writings from three different historic periods. First Isaiah (chapters 1-39) dates to the life of the prophet Isaiah in Jerusalem in the second half of the eighth century BCE, while Second (chapters 40-55) and Third (56-66) Isaiah are more recent, dating to the sixth century BCE during the Babylonian exile and the rise of Cyrus of Persia. Today's reading comes from First Isaiah, when Isaiah the prophet lived during the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah as kings of Judah (approximately 742 to 701 BCE). During this time Assyria annexed the Northern Kingdom into their empire, and the threat of the Assyrians to Jerusalem and Judah loomed large. Isaiah boldly named the injustices of the ruling elite in Jerusalem and prophesied that God would use the Assyrians to eradicate this unjust and faithless society. After Judah's destruction by the Assyrian armies, God would in turn judge and destroy the Assyrians, and a faithful remnant of Judah would be left to establish a righteous society. It is this prophecy of a new, just society springing from the ashes of the old, corrupt one that we hear today in Isaiah 11:1-10. It is an inspiring vision of comfort and peace, but it is one that arises after a terrible judgment. The growing shoot comes from the roots of a mighty tree that has been felled: the house of Jesse, the father of King David and of the long line of Davidic kings, who ruled for close to 500 years (ca. 1010 to 586 BCE). In Isaiah's vision, the restoration of society will be so complete that not only humans but all animal life will exist in harmony with one another. Predator and prey will lie down together, the lion will eat straw, and even poisonous snakes will pose no threat. The very youngest and weakest will be safe. All creation will be in accord with God's ways.
Romans 15:4-13
In this selection from Paul's letter to the church in Rome, we hear Paul's interpretation of Isaiah's prophecy in light of the Christ event. No longer is it "on that day the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples; the nations shall inquire of him, and his dwelling shall be glorious" (Isaiah 11:10 NRSV). In Paul's recounting, this verse becomes "the root of Jesse shall come, the one who rises to rule the Gentiles; in him the Gentiles shall hope" (Romans 15:12 NRSV). Paul is clear in this pericope that the Gentiles are part of God's saving plan. While Isaiah speaks to the saving of Judah, Paul speaks to the saving of all people, Jew and Gentile alike. For Paul, Christ has worked through the Jews to reach the Gentiles. In writing this letter, Paul was likely addressing some level of conflict between Jewish and Gentile Christians in the church in Rome.
Scholars date Paul's letter to the Romans to sometime between 55 and 58 CE, after a ban against Jews in Rome issued by Claudius in 49 CE was lifted by Nero in 54 CE. Imagine the challenges of welcoming and reincorporating a portion of the community that had been exiled for five years, as Jewish Christians had been from Rome! Paul's prayer for harmony and unity in 15:5-6 implies that these qualities may have been especially needed in the Roman church, as does his exhortation in 15:7 to "welcome one another."
In verses 8-12 Paul proceeds to honor the Jewish foundation of the early church before interpreting Jewish scriptures and history as leading to the inclusion of the Gentiles through Christ. The concluding verse, "May the God of hope fill you with all joy and hope in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit" (15:13 NRSV), has become a blessing in its own right in many Christian traditions. This text may be of special import to communities struggling to reconcile newcomers and old-timers, either in a congregation or a neighborhood. It can speak to struggles around immigration and who is "in" and who is "out" that are current in our national life.
Matthew 3:1-12
If the prophetic word thus far has been one of comfort and joy, John the Baptist's message in today's gospel is anything but. Here, we hear strong words of judgment and destruction, the ax cutting down the tree, fire burning the chaff. There is no sprout arising from the stump of Jesse as in Isaiah, no joy and hope in believing as in Paul's letter. The peaceful serpents in Isaiah's vision of the restored kingdom reappear as the threatening "brood of vipers" aspersion John casts at the Pharisees and Sadducees. While the need for repentance was implicit in the prophetic words of Isaiah and Romans, here in the gospel they are explicit indeed.
Even more disturbing, at least for those of us who spend much of our time in the religious establishment, it is not the grievous sinners who are condemned but the religious leaders of John's and Jesus' day. Those who thought they were being faithful to God (and who prided themselves on that) are those who come in for the severest condemnation. As Isaiah directed his strongest prophecy to the ruling elite who ignored and abused the poor, so John severely addresses the religious leaders of his day who care more for keeping the rules and their own privileged positions than enacting God's mercy.
Application
As I write, the world is beginning to receive news and photos of the terrible destruction wrought by Typhoon Haiyan in the central Philippines. Rescue operations are mobilizing; our churches are taking collections and sending funds for relief. But who knows by Advent 2 if our attention will still be on this region and its recovery or on some new calamity or world event that has eclipsed media attention to the Philippines?
Surely, the people of the ruined city of Tacloban know the absolute destruction of which the prophets speak. Even storm shelters were swept away by this fiercest of storms in a region that regularly weathers Pacific typhoons. In addition to material aid, they need the assurance of comfort, hope, and restoration that we find in Isaiah: A shoot shall come out of the stump (the living tree cut down and obliterated); new life will flourish. The people of the Philippines know this cycle of destruction and restoration all too well, through many trials and tragedies: typhoons and earthquakes, landslides and the devastation of war.
My grandparents were missionaries in the Philippines, and my grandmother wrote of returning there after World War II: rusted hulls of half-sunk ships in the Manila harbor, steps going nowhere where lovely Spanish houses once stood, chimneys standing with hearths in midair above ruined gardens. She wrote too of the sprout beginning to spring from the stump: "I hear the laughter of naked children playing in the drenched ruins of a Manila church now their only home. Let the razed city rise. Let the thin child be born" (Dorothy Lee Richardson, The Half-Seen Face [Bauhan Publishing, 1979], pp. 67, 70). The Filipino people did recover from the devastation of World War II, and yet new tragedies continue.
Few if any of us are preaching this Sunday in the Philippines, though some of us may serve Filipinos in our congregations. What of us, who pray in our pews, send aid, some of us worrying about those we have not yet heard from, but most of us continuing unscathed in our comparatively secure lives? The prophets call us not only to aid, but to justice. While science cannot say that any particular weather event is caused by global climate change, we know that climate change is likely to bring more storms of the magnitude of Typhoon Haiyan. We know too that it is the poor who suffer the most from and have the fewest defenses against changing environmental conditions. Where sea levels may rise, those with means can move away from the coast. Poor fishermen and their families have fewer alternatives. Where rainfall patterns change bringing drought or flood, those who rely on farming to feed their families will suffer first. Look to the most polluted places on earth and there you will find the poorest of the poor, making their homes as best they can in the places others scorn. The magnitude of global environmental issues can feel overwhelming. We can read the reports and despair, or we can see all this and hear it and repent.
What does repentance look like? It can be in small measures or great, but it means living a more examined life in our homes, communities, and congregations. It can mean doing an energy audit (and following through with appropriate action steps) of our homes or church facilities -- the latter very seldom designed for energy efficiency with soaring ceilings and single-paned glass windows. It can mean attending more fully to use, reuse, and appropriate disposal of everything from kitchen waste (in compost) to paper (buy recycled, use two sides, then recycle again) to coffee hour supplies. It can mean walking, carpooling, biking, helping neighbors run errands, planting a garden at home or at church to feed ourselves or the hungry. These are disciplines of incarnation, embodied living in this world, that are part and parcel of following the incarnate God we know in Jesus. Those in our congregations with their own prophetic calls may teach the rest of us about political involvement for effective legislation on issues of environment and justice for the poor. Resources for further learning abound in many of our denominations and beyond.
An Alternative Application
A deep and personal fear may be raised as we hear the prophets, and especially John the Baptist, in our readings today. And that is the fear of God's judgment, which for some parishioners may translate into an overall fear of God and an unwillingness to be seen and known by God. The fiery language of John the Baptist overlaps with images of hell from Dante's Inferno and later cultural sources and whatever fire-and-brimstone messages we have heard in our lifetimes. It can be a long journey of the heart and spirit from fearing God's judgment to welcoming it. Several realizations have helped me along this way.
The first realization is that judgment is necessary, not antithetical, to a loving God. One of my clergy friends is fond of saying, "God loves us as we are and God loves us too much to leave us as we are." We all are broken and sinful, and for a person, a relationship, or a world to be restored, that which is broken must be mended and that which is sinful must be changed. Heaven would not be heaven if we were all there as we are now! Healing and repentance are necessary to a full life with God. Diseased branches must be trimmed from living trees so that they may flourish and bear fruit. When we are walking down the wrong path, God calls us to turn back (repent) and walk in God's ways.
Another helpful realization for me about images of God's judgment is that fire can be purifying. Distant as we are from the world of ancient Palestine, many of us don't have the same sense of the world and fire's place in it. Most of us growing up in the United States have been taught to fear fire: fire drills at school and Smokey the Bear impressed us at early ages with fire's danger. But fire has a regular part to play in many of the world's forest and grassland ecosystems and in some traditional agricultural systems. It returns nutrients to the soil and clears the way for new growth. The cones of some pitch pines in the New Jersey Pine Barrens are made so that they will open and release their seeds only after they experience the high temperatures that come with forest fire. (This is true for many other plants in fire-adapted ecosystems; the scientific term is serotiny, for any of you wishing to research additional examples.) I have seen charred trunks in Australian forests sending out strong green shoots of new life, even as the forest is still smoldering. The local raspberry farm near our home in Massachusetts recently put out its annual call for volunteers to cut down the old canes and burn them, so that next year's growth can arise unimpeded by old stalks or latent diseases.
For those moved to consider the experience of God's judgment in preaching this Sunday, I offer what is for me the truest description I have yet found of what it is in this life and may be in the next. It comes from the closing pages of novel in which the narrator, an old man who has been recounting stories from his boyhood, muses on what has become of his now long-dead relations:
One by one, the sharers in this mortal damage have borne its burden out of the present world…At times perhaps I could wish them merely oblivious, and the whole groaning and travailing world at rest in their oblivion. But how can I deny that in my belief they are risen? I imagine the dead waking, dazed, into a shadowless light in which they know themselves altogether for the first time. It is a light that is merciless until they can accept its mercy; by it they are at once condemned and redeemed. It is Hell until it is Heaven. Seeing themselves in that light, if they are willing, they see how far they have failed the only justice of loving one another; it punishes them by their own judgment. And yet, in suffering that light's awful clarity, in seeing themselves within it, they see its forgiveness and its beauty, and are consoled. In it they are loved completely, even as they have been, and so are changed into what they could not have been but what, if they could have imagined it, they would have wished to be.
(Wendell Berry, A World Lost [Counterpoint, 1996], pp. 150-151)
In this season of Advent, may we heed the prophets and prepare to gladly welcome the light that has come into this world.
