Matthew 3:1-12<\/a>)<\/p>\nHow many of you in your life time have lain an ax or chainsaw to a tree, or the menfolk around you have?\u00a0 As a ten year old child I always carried a pocket knife and many a sapling has fallen to my blade.\u00a0 I have created many stumps, some that sprouted back and some that did not.\u00a0 In my hand and imagination the fallen trees became spears, guns and knives.\u00a0 I employed them in cosmic battle with evil lurking behind weeds and rocks; fleeing before me through the forest. In those days, long before I had met and begun to understand Jesus, I understood John the Baptist.\u00a0 He and I were on the same page.<\/p>\n
We both operated in the wilderness; he the wilderness of Judea.\u00a0 Me, the wilderness just north of the house in the chokecherry infested place of enchantment we called \u201cthe trees.\u201d\u00a0 Two acres of growth so thick, adults had difficulty finding us and when the wind blew, the rustle of trees obscured all sound emanating from the world of responsibility.\u00a0 Yes, John the Baptist and I were both on crusades.\u00a0 We were righting the world of its wrongs, clearing out everything bad and warning all inhabitants of our imagination of impending doom if they did not yield to our righteous judgment.\u00a0 When the winds were howling and no adult could overhear us, my sister and I became \u201cThe voice of one crying out in the wilderness.\u201d\u00a0 In our fantasy we enacted the redemption of our world and almost always it required violence.<\/p>\n
Could it be that every child begins with John the Baptist\u2019s kind of thinking?\u00a0\u00a0 We all want to save the world and see the problem as good versus evil.\u00a0 If that\u2019s the problem the solution is obvious.\u00a0 Root out the bad, burn it; ban it from the earth, cut the bad tree down.\u00a0 The violence of the cutting is worth the peace when it is gone.\u00a0 This is at the heart of most of our movies, video games and literature; adult and children\u2019s.\u00a0 There is a cosmic fight between good and evil and we all know the side we are on.\u00a0 It is so obvious.<\/p>\n
It is only later that we begin to realize that the bad stuff is in us too.\u00a0 That makes getting rid of it much more difficult.\u00a0 But John the Baptist isn\u2019t there yet and won\u2019t ever get there.\u00a0 It will take Jesus to move us from John the Baptist to something far deeper that can actually respond to our problem.\u00a0 But I am getting ahead of our story.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, \u201cRepent for the kingdom of heaven has come near.\u201d\u00a0 John the Baptist is full of wrath and the people respond to it by coming out in droves.\u00a0 They picture this wrath sent down from God and look forward to seeing their enemies burning in it.\u00a0 Their only concern is making sure they are protected against the coming fire.\u00a0 When the Sadducees and Pharisees, the cultural leaders at the time, come, the ones the rest of the culture sees as the problem, John calls them \u201ca brood of vipers.\u201d\u00a0 Translated to our cultural context it would be like the Episcopalians and Methodists, the ones the un-churched see as the hypocritical problem, coming for inclusion and being told they are a snake pit.\u00a0\u00a0 In John\u2019s quest to purge the land of evil, they will be the first to go.\u00a0 With fiery eyes he anticipates the Coming One carrying a pitch fork and using it to separate the wheat from the chaff.\u00a0 The wheat gets stored in the granary of God\u2019s redemption while the chaff burns in \u201cunquenchable fire.\u201d\u00a0 Does this sound like radio and television evangelism?<\/p>\n
John the Baptist thinks \u201cThe Coming One\u201d is going to be like him only more effectively wrathful.\u00a0 \u201cI baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals.\u00a0 He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire<\/strong>.\u201d\u00a0 John can\u2019t imagine any way to cleanse the world of evil other than through more violence.\u00a0 He is right in thinking the world needs someone more powerful but as we have learned, his response of meeting violence with more violence only deepens the problem.<\/p>\nOn the \u201chow\u201d of it, John is profoundly wrong about how God should respond to our human dilemma.\u00a0 Being a man born before Jesus he can\u2019t imagine anything other than wrath for solving the world\u2019s problem with evil.\u00a0 His commitment to violence has cut-off his thinking, his imagination, and the scope of possibilities he can see.\u00a0 An ax or chainsaw set at the base of the tree will not solve the problem of trees being cut down.\u00a0 We are the ones who wield the ax and chainsaw.\u00a0 We are the ones who create the stump of Jesse and all other stumps.\u00a0 But God is the one who brings life after the cutting.\u00a0 God is the one that promises, \u201cA shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.\u201d<\/p>\n
We cut the tree and from the stump we leave behind God causes new life to spring up.\u00a0 Can you think of an image more apt for Jesus?\u00a0 Who put Jesus on the tree and cut him down?\u00a0 And then from the stump left behind a branch grows. Could the branch be the resurrected Jesus and our resurrected life in him?\u00a0 \u00a0This branch will appear from what looks like death and grow from the hidden root of the tree of life.<\/p>\n
Isaiah, like the Bible as a whole, presents us with text on the bridge that spans from the side that sees God as wrathful to the new shore where God has no wrath at all.\u00a0 Jesus is the one who finally completes the bridge and it\u2019s for that reason he came.\u00a0 Isaiah\u2019s language, being prior to Jesus, slips from one side of the bridge to the other.\u00a0 This is why we find him saying:<\/p>\n
\u201cHe shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\nBut in the very next verse he returns to the emerging view of God soon to be revealed by Jesus when he continues:<\/p>\n
Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist, and faithfulness the belt around his loins.\u00a0 The wolf shall live with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\nThe nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder\u2019s den.<\/em><\/p>\nHere Isaiah presents us with a vision of a world without wrath.\u00a0 We are camped on the forward movement of history with Jesus and his new kingdom.\u00a0 The lectionary passage ends before Isaiah can return to the old side of his bridge; the side where we make God violent like us.\u00a0 Being Advent and in preparation for Christmas the lectionary puts us with the non-violent Jesus who shows us the true character of God.<\/p>\n
I want now to give a very brief picture of what Jesus\u2019 non-violence, imperfectly applied, look like in our contemporary world.\u00a0 On Thursday of this last week, Nelson Mandela died.\u00a0 The Washington Post article, published in the Oregonian, had a section on Mandela that spoke to my heart.<\/p>\n
To a country torn apart by racial divisions, Mandela became its most potent symbol of national unity, using the power of forgiveness and reconciliation to heal deep-rooted wounds and usher in a new era of peace after decades of conflict between blacks and whites.\u00a0 To a continent rife with leaders who cling to power for life, Mandela became a role model for democracy, stepping down from the presidency after one term and holding out the promise of a new Africa.<\/em><\/p>\nMohammad Ali wrote:<\/p>\n
He made us realize, we are our brother\u2019s keeper and that our brothers come in all colors.\u00a0 What I will remember most about Mr. Mandela is that he was a man whose heart, soul and spirit could not be contained or restrained by racial and economic injustices, metal bars or the burden of hate and revenge.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\nOn July 11th<\/sup>, 1996 Mandela penned his thoughts on racism:<\/p>\nRacism is blight on the human conscience.\u00a0 The idea that any people can be inferior to another, to the point where those who consider themselves superior define and treat the rest as subhuman, denies the humanity even of those who elevate themselves to the status of gods.<\/em><\/p>\nOn October 29, 1998 Mandela expressed his views on the ending of apartheid rule:<\/p>\n
We are extricating ourselves from a system that insulted our common humanity by dividing us from one another on the basis of race and setting us against each other as oppressed and oppressors.\u00a0 The system committed a crime against humanity.<\/em><\/p>\nOn poverty, writing in July of 2005 he wrote:<\/p>\n
Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity.\u00a0 It is an act of justice.\u00a0 It is the protection of a fundamental human right to dignity and a decent life.\u00a0 While poverty persists, there is no true freedom.<\/em><\/p>\nAt age 90 and in 2008 Mandela wrote:<\/p>\n
As the years progress one increasingly realizes the importance of friendship and human solidarity.\u00a0 And if a 90-year-old may offer some unsolicited advice on this occasion, it would be that you, irrespective of your age, should place human solidarity, the concern for the other, at the center of the values by which you live.<\/em><\/p>\nMy final quote is from our beloved Archbishop Desmond Tutu:<\/p>\n
God was so good to us in South Africa by giving us Nelson Mandela to be our president at a crucial moment in our history.\u00a0 He inspired us to walk the path of forgiveness and reconciliation, and so South Africa did not go up in flames.<\/em><\/p>\nWith this quote we tie back to the dangerous ax we humans wield, the bridge of meaning the whole of scripture presents us, culminating in Jesus and his non-violence, and Nelson Mandela, one of Jesus\u2019 disciples, along with Gandhi and Martin Luther King, who lived Jesus\u2019 message in the context of our 20th<\/sup> century world.\u00a0 Amen.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Sermon text: Isaiah 11:1-10 and Matthew 3:1-12) How many of you in your life time have lain an ax or chainsaw to a tree, or the menfolk around you have?\u00a0 As a ten year old child I always carried a pocket knife and many a sapling has fallen to my blade.\u00a0 I have created many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a>