sermon by Torin Eikler
Isaiah 11:1-10 Matthew 3:1-12 Romans 15:4-13
When I was in seminary, my summer internship was in Clinical Pastoral Education at Beacon Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis. CPE is chaplaincy training and it involves some of the most rigorous self-reflection and analysis that I know of. It is a grueling process in which you examine pastoral conversations with patients over and over while your teachers and peers pick them apart looking for any hidden issues that you may be bringing into your ministry. Some people joke that after that experience, you need therapy as a bit of a break, and I understand exactly what they mean.
John
was from Vietnam. As a child, he and his
siblings lived with his mother in a small village that had grown up in the
forest. It was a community of single
women who had come to live there with their families during the war. After the fighting ended, a few of the
husbands who had survived trickled into the village, but it remained
predominately women and children.
Since
they had picked the location for safety, it was buried in the thickest part of
the trees twenty rugged miles from the nearest settlement, and a deep and
fast-flowing river cut across the path.
The only way to contact anyone else was to make the difficult hike and
cross the river on a slender bridge made of three ropes tied so they hung in a
“V” with one rope for the feet and one for each hand.
For
whatever reasons of his own, John told us relatively little of his childhood,
and what he did share seemed to center around that bridge. He described how moss and mold grew on the
constantly damp ropes, making them slippery and hard to hold on to. He talked about how the bridge swayed in even
the slightest breeze. He helped us
understand how hard it was to cross the ropes with the added burden of supplies
for the village. And he shared his
memory of one time when he saw another child fall into the river and get washed
away.
You
might think that John saw the bridge as a dangerous and scary thing (I thought
so as I listened to him talk.) But that
wasn’t his perspective at all. He respected
the bridge … liked it even. It was small
and dangerous, but it crucial.
You
see … on one side of the bridge was his home.
It was a peaceful place where everyone got along pretty well. The children played happily together despite
the dangers of the jungle where they lived.
The adults worked together to make life run smoothly. Everyone had seen
enough suffering to value life in all forms, and nobody was concerned with
getting ahead or accumulating more than they needed (at least in his memory). They were one big mostly-happy family.
On
the other side of the bridge was the rest of the world. The war-torn remnants of a people trying to
survive and piece their society and culture back together. He knew it as a strange place – a place of
danger and uncertainty. But it was also
the place of extra food and other necessary supplies. His village … his family could not survive
without it, and the bridge held the two worlds together.
There
are two worlds described in today’s scriptures as well. The first is the world that John the Baptist
lives in. We’ve heard a lot about this
world in our church lives. It was
dominated by the Roman Empire with soldiers stationed everywhere. The Jews had been allowed to keep their
religion and their traditions as long as their leaders didn’t step too far out
of line, but the people were kept subdued by Roman laws and taxes that sapped
their vitality. Most of them weren’t
very happy with the situation, and there several uprisings had been put down by
the Romans over the past hundred or so years.
Apocalyptic thinking was fairly widespread and the belief that the
Messiah would come soon to set the people free was equally common.
Part
of the problem, it seems, was with the Jewish leadership itself. They were widely seen as cooperating with the
Romans. That was undoubtedly received by
some Jews better than by others. But if
John the Baptist and his popularity are any indication, quite a lot of people
had very strong feelings that their leaders were … let’s just say … a good deal
less than the holy and righteous men they claimed to be.
It
was not a peaceful or idyllic
world. People were downtrodden and
hungry. Many were put to death in
horrible ways … sometimes for what would seem to us to be minor transgressions. There was the constant threat of a crackdown
by the Empire to teach some upstart a lesson.
And nobody really knew who to turn to or who they could trust. It doesn’t sound all that different from the
world we live in today, does it?
The
other world is the one envisioned by Isaiah.
This one was idyllic. In some
ways it was a return to the way that Genesis pictures the newly-minted
creation. Back then, lions and wolves
and leopards lived peacefully alongside lambs and goats and calves and everyone
(people included) had been given “every green plant for food.”
It
was a peaceful world where people from all over the earth came and lived
together in peace, and justice reigned.
The poor were fed. The weak were
protected, and the wicked were “taken care of.”
A beautiful vision, and not so different from how we think of the kingdom
to come today, but there was one central thing missing … the right king.
In ancient Israel, the king was anointed as the
representative of Yahweh and hence regarded as a sacred person. Most
ancient Near Eastern cultures shared a similar concept of monarchy as a divinely
appointed institution. As such the king upheld the social order. The care of the poor and weak and the
building of temples served to prove their divine appointment. As God's
anointed, Israel's kings not only enjoyed a unique intimacy with Yahweh, they
embodied Yahweh's blessing and inheritance. …[1]
The line of kings had been
broken when the last king of the royal line was led off to captivity and the
kingdom came to an end. But there
remained the hope that from the "burned-out stump" of the royal house
God would still raise up Isaiah’s ideal king … a messiah … a perfect king sprung from the line of
Jesse – a king who finally fulfilled the potential of his ancestor David,
ruling with wisdom, insight, and compassion and recreating the world as God desired it to be. [2]
John the Baptist saw things
differently. He knew Jesus … was Jesus’
cousin, and as he stood there with the river’s water flowing around his own
legs, he preached about the fulfillment of Isaiah’s promise. In coming of that man he saw the coming of the
Messiah, but he knew that Jesus would not be the king that people were
expecting – not a king at all in the way that we think of kings.
In the end, Jesus did not even
come as John the Baptist expected. There
was no axe and no threshing fork. There
was no fire to burn away the dead weight of humanity’s long journey away from
the Garden’s peaceable kingdom. Instead
there was only a man born in a stable who grew into a prophet and a
teacher. There was only a leader who
understood that you cannot create a peaceful world through violence … a Messiah
who bridged the gap between what was and what could be by building a community
of people who tried to bring the two worlds together by the example of their
living.
No comments:
Post a Comment