Stumped

“Stumped”

Isaiah 11:1-10

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

12/8/13

“It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...”

Indeed, it began to look a lot like Christmas a few months ago. Now it’s almost everywhere. Garlands of artificial evergreen drape over railings and windowsills, on storefronts and front porches. Bright bows and flashing lights punctuate both the greenery and the darkening days of winter solstice. And in most Christian worship, songs of the nativity of Jesus are already being sung, even here, in the early days of Advent.

I pick our hymns, though. So one look at the bulletin and you will see that I have given in to temptation, as well – tired, I suppose, of fighting all the pressure that demands Christmas NOW. And I'm not talking only about WalMart, Lowes, and LL Bean.

Years ago, in another place, when I had chosen more Advent hymns than Christmas carols through the first two Sundays of December, someone dropped into the offering plate an anonymous note.

“It's Christmas time!” snapped the note in an elegant, feminine script. “We want to sing Christmas songs!”

One glance at the handwriting and I knew who had written the note – and why. Bless her heart. And the next Sunday all of ye faithful ones were coming, hearing angels on high, joyful in all our worldliness, and all of it in the not-so-bleak pre-winter of central North Carolina.

I love Christmas carols as much as anyone. And I know, too, that even more quickly than Christmas rolls around every year, it’s gone. In a flash, each Christmas becomes a memory that may linger for a couple of months, but mainly on credit card statements and bathroom scales. Very quickly, our minds hearken less and less to singing angels, to joy, and to silent nights than to all the loudness of day-to-day-to-day busyness. Besides, there will be, for most of us, probably, yet another Christmas season. And as of December 26, when Christmas has been declared “over” by WalMart, Lowes and LL Bean, we will have only nine months or so to wait before they announce the next one.

It’s been in the works for quite some time, but it does seem that the deal is pretty much done. In our culture anyway, Christmas has been sold to the gods of capitalism. Joy to the Bank.

I know: A preacher's criticism of the seizure of Christmas by commercial interests is about as cliché as fake snow and flying reindeer. I also know, however, that it smacks of the fair play of turnabout.

Somewhere in the fourth century AD, Christianity began to commemorate the birth of Christ with a specially designated mass. And the Church chose the timing for this new mass in part to counter pagan festivals being celebrated at winter solstice. One can almost hear ancient peoples bemoaning the loss of their connection to the earth and to its seasons because Christians have begun to focus their attention on a worship service, held indoors, where priests chant a dying language, as incense burns, and as the people perform a weird ritual that sounds for all the world like some sort of cannibalistic fantasy.

“Surely this Christ-Mass is corrupting our culture!” they might have said. “It’s distracting us from things that are good and true, healthful and hopeful – things that are earthy and real. All that we are, and all that we have held sacred is getting lost!”

If we paid closer attention to the deep spiritual roots of our Judeo-Christian tradition, as the ancient Celtic Christians did, we might find some new sprig of beauty in that which we now tend to dismiss as pagan tree-hugging.

“A shoot shall come out of the stump of Jesse,” whispers Isaiah many generations before the birth of Jesus.

Christmas begins with a stump. Its very origin lies in the cutting down of old ways and means, even the ways and means of what Christmas has become. If we don’t begin this glittered and pine-scented celebration stumped in some way, if we don’t recognize that the gift we celebrate comes to us as some fresh, tender growth out of a devastated clear-cut, then I think we have to ask ourselves if it’s really the birth of God’s Christ that we seek to proclaim through all of our songs and worship, all of our decorations and gifts.

There are plenty of lesser gods who are happy to receive our happy devotion – even if we offer it formally and by name to Jesus. It takes intentional and disciplined preparation to experience and bear witness to the God who is being revealed in Jesus of Nazareth. It takes a slower process, a gearing down in the midst of all the gearing up. It takes a well-tended Advent to experience as Good News the birth of the Christ who, as Isaiah says, will not be associated with human excess, the Christ who will scoff at every attempt to bribe him with wealth or even moral uprightness.

The God whose birth we celebrate at Christmas has a particular love for the poor, for the broken, for those whom the powerful dismiss and fear, for those who love without demanding to be loved in return. This God’s ways among us leave us stumped, because, at the core of it all, the God revealed in Jesus is so thoroughly gracious and forgiving as to seem un-principled – as to seem so, well, un-Christian!

On top of all that, much of what Isaiah prophesies sounds like some utopian dream. “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid…the cow and the bear shall graze…and the lion eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp… and a little child shall lead them.”

Isaiah sounds like he’s one pecan short of a fruitcake, doesn’t he? Why doesn’t he just say that the Peaceable Kingdom includes flying pigs and talking cabbage?

Perhaps we never feel so stumped as when we face the apparent polarities of life. Good and evil. Believer and non-believer. Conservative and liberal. Wolf and lamb. Calf and lion. Innocent child and poisonous snake.

When life gets reduced to some version of us and them, it always devolves into competition. It becomes a matter of winners and losers. And human beings tend to like that, I think, because when it’s clear who wins and who loses, we allow ourselves to feel some sense of absolute certainty – especially when we’re the winners. We win. God’s on our side. Who needs Advent? It’s Christmas, by God. We’re not stumped. We’re full-grown trees! Let’s buy lots of stuff, cloak reality in decorations, and start singing Christmas carols in October, because they’re the songs of winners.

But that’s a Christmas of our creation, isn’t it? Neither Isaiah nor Jesus leads us in that direction. Both of them challenge us to face conflict, to acknowledge and embrace the wolf and lamb, the good and evil, the left and the right within each of us. Christmas without Advent is all friendly beasts and nursing child. Christmas without Advent is all light and no shadow.

Jesus walks through a kind of Advent as he approaches the nativity of his own vocation. For 40 days he wanders the wilderness. For 40 days he confronts the wolf and the lamb within. While the fierce temptations wear him to a frazzle, Jesus manages to fend off the very human urge to turn his spiritual gifts into sources of self-serving wealth and power. The wolf, the leopard, and the adder – they’re all there, but through the Advent season of his temptation, Jesus harnesses, for ministry, even those shadowy energies, energies that, when given free rein, can become the Herods, Pilates, Pharisees, and Judases – within the world and within us.

If Jesus does not struggle with disciplined intention through those 40 days of vocational Advent, then the nativity of his first acts of ministry will become a flash in the pan. A well-meant, and not unimportant, but a forgettable footnote to history.

Instead, Jesus’ life and work become something utterly unique. They become, for many of us, an enduring and transforming miracle. They become so because in Jesus we get a glimpse of the magnificence of Isaiah’s Peaceable Kingdom.

Commenting on this passage, Paul Simpson Duke pulls it together when he observes that Jesus is the one “in whom the lion of Judah and the lamb of God are one. In [the Christ] Child we meet the divine vulnerability and the divine strength…”¹ bound together in one person, a person who lives with such fierce compassion and disrupting love that he changes the world.

“Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me. Let there be peace on earth, the peace that was meant to be.”

Theologically, this may be one of the best Advent songs ever written. Peace on earth begins with our making peace within ourselves. Wolf and lamb, calf and lion, child and asp pace about inside each of us. And to deny that reality is to deny the fullness of our humanity. To surrender completely to the wolf, the lion and the asp is to live in fear – violently and selfishly under the bright lights of Christmas in October.

To surrender completely to the lamb, the calf and the child is to live life on the Hallmark channel – selfishly and happily, two hours at a time, with commercials for Pop Tarts, Smart Phones and Dollywood every 10 minutes.

Peace on earth begins with Advent. It begins with acknowledging and harnessing the paradoxes within ourselves. Every last one of us is a cocktail of laughter and tears, vulnerability and strength, wholeness and brokenness, life and death. We just are. So when find ourselves judging those whom we hate or fear as dangerous wolves, or lions, or snakes, we are only judging and hating that very reality within ourselves. And there is peace for no one.

The Peaceable Kingdom of which Isaiah sings is the Kingdom of Peace which Jesus lives, preaches, and reveals. And he finds the wherewithal to do that because he does not give himself over to either one side or the other. Jesus lives the glorious wholeness and holiness of human life.

There is no happy, easy way for us to leave this text. It stumps us. It stumps us because it speaks a coarse and demanding Advent truth to us when we’d rather sit warm and snug behind the steam rising from a mug of hot chocolate, or inside the thick, eye-crossing sweetness of eggnog.

This Advent may you experience the blessings of being stumped – stumped by both comfort and discomfort, by the awareness of both acute suffering and great hope, by the wonder and the beauty of the Creation and by humankind’s selfish and short-sighted destruction of it.

May we also be stumped by the struggles of paradox within ourselves. That is to say, when we experience those toothy feelings of disgust, and fear, and judgment toward others, may we also recognize those aspects of ourselves that disgust us, that we fear, and judge. For until we Advent our way through our broken humanity, the new humanity being born within us will remain a lamb, a kid, a calf, a child – ‘gentle Jesus meek and mild.’ And more and more, Christmas will belong not so much to the entertainment networks and corporate interests, but to that bored and entitled abyss within us that never gets enough entertainment or enough stuff.

On Christmas Eve I will give you Christmas greetings, but until then, may you be utterly stumped. May you be stumped so that you will know where to look for that promised shoot of new life which is stirring inside you, and stirring in our midst even now.

A blessed Advent to you all.

¹Paul Simpson Duke, Feasting on the Word, “Homiletical Perspective,” Year A, Volume 1. Westminster John Knox Press, 2010. p. 31.