We have two readings
today from first Isaiah that, like last week, move us from a God of retribution
and judgment to a God of something more. I know this is hard to do in this
season of holiday everything. Honestly, the radio station Kate uses at the
coffee shop—a certain not-to-be-named one out of Grand Forks—switched to Christmas
music on Friday… November 15—and we aren’t even remotely in advent yet!
Nonetheless, you are already being bombarded by advertisers trying to tell you
that Christmas is right around the corner, which makes it particularly hard to
do the necessary work of putting ourselves in the sandals of people who didn’t
have Jesus yet.
In fact, this is the yearly ritual
of Advent in a nutshell, but by the time we reach December it’s probably
fruitless to pretend that Christmas isn’t coming, so what hope we have for a
real Advent lies in November. Advent is about anticipation, but it is not a
clear anticipation; it should be as if we are about to hear the Christmas story
for the first time. Advent is the season in which we should all become children
again, wondering and marveling in the mystery of what is coming.
This is the mentality we need to
bring to Isaiah’s passage about the stump of Jesse. The stump is dead, as
stumps are. Jesse was David’s father, a nod to the lineage of the kings of
Israel. That line of kings started with David, but now it’s dead. It’s a stump.
Yet, Isaiah anticipates a shoot springing from the stump—a sign of life from a
thing most assuredly dead. And what will this shoot do?
Oh, just judge the poor with
righteousness and work for the equity of the meek; he’ll merely kill the
wicked, and embody righteousness and faithfulness. In short, Jesus is coming to
turn the world upside-down—not reform it, not to tweak it. Jesus is coming to
turn everything around. The funny thing is we think that sounds great. There is
a reason that Isaiah and the other prophets talk as much about the coming judgment
of God as they do about the grace and love of God. It’s both. It starts with
judgment before it can ever move to grace. The advent of God coming into the
world is the harshness of the law first, Gospel only thereafter.
This week somebody asked the Twitter
universe for their best three word sermon. This spawned a whole host of
hilarious, unrelated commentary from people who had little interest in actual
sermons, but it also got me thinking about the ideal three word sermon. A few
people responded with some variation of “God loves you,” which is very true and
seems good at first, but it doesn’t really capture who God is or what that
matters. At its worst, it can almost feel like a throwaway sentiment—“God loves
you” now get off my lawn! Or something like that. Other folks went for
something like “He is risen!” which I think is much better on the whole, but in
this advent season it’s not really where the story lies. For Easter, yes,
that’s the sermon, but in advent? What’s the perfect sermon for times such as
these?
After thinking about it, I came to
the conclusion that the ideal sermon is one that works for Advent because it
works for the whole year and the sermon is this: You are forgiven.
Why is that an ideal sermon? Because
it begs you to consider a few things: Firstly, that you are in need of
forgiveness; that you aren’t perfect; that to some extent you are the people
that Jesus is coming for in judgment. You are the ones who face the specter of
damnation because you haven’t lived up to the standards that God levies on us.
Jesus isn’t about cheap love and certainly not cheap grace. If you want
salvation on your own accord, you have to be perfect. No more, no less.
So, when you aren’t perfect—even
just a little imperfect—then you are a sinner, and what happens to sinners?
Well, end of life, end of the story… at least that’s how the story goes until
Easter morning. You see, you need to know how impossible it is to achieve
salvation on your own so that you can know the impossible cost of the gift of
salvation that you have through Jesus Christ. This isn’t God filling in the
cracks of your broken self. Your broken self had been reduced to dust so that
the only hope for it is resurrection.
That’s it. So, the most impossible
words of grace are these: You are forgiven. Not because you deserve it, but
because Jesus died for you. Grace isn’t cheap; it is free. It is yours,
thoroughly and completely, no strings attached.
You need to understand both: You are
a sinner drowning in the ocean, and Jesus provides is the lifeboat coming to
save you. But there’s something else you should realize. You should understand
that even when you know this in your heart you will continue to swim away from
Jesus even still, because you still won’t trust him. Every Christian is willing
to use Jesus to get out of the ocean, but every Christian finds herself back in
the ocean before ever allowing Jesus to take her to shore. Your salvation is
not even dependent on grabbing on to the life preserver. Your salvation is
yours kicking and screaming like Jonah, and wishing that God showed more
vengeance to the people you don’t like.
That’s the kind of God we are
dealing with here—a God who saves sinners, not the righteous—a God who
understands that from the very beginning (because he was there after all), human
beings will always choose the worst option. The story of Adam and Eve is our story; we always take the fruit.
Every time.
In Advent, we stand on the precipice
and wonder, honestly, if that’s all there is. Sure, we may be in the boat at
the moment, sailing heavy seas. We may have an inkling that there is one coming
to quiet the storm, the only one who can save us from what is to come, but do
we truly believe it? Can we ever really trust in it?
I’m struck every time we read the
Apostles’ Creed that this is the creed of the church and not individual
believers, because I know we are saying those words out of the religious duty
we feel. “I believe in God, the Father.” Do we? “I believe in Jesus Christ… I
believe in forgiveness of sins… in the resurrection of the dead.” It is the
creed of the church and not individual believers, because even on our better
days we wonder if it’s too good to be true.
That’s it. That’s what the prophets
are hinting at: It’s too good to be true. The idea that we are actually
forgiven is foreign to us. We don’t trust it, because either we are
introspective enough to understand the depths of our depravity and how little
we deserve that forgiveness, or we aren’t the least bit introspective and we’re
suspicious that nobody else is either, so we don’t trust it, because we don’t
trust anyone. It doesn’t matter if you are an altruist or a narcissist, you
don’t trust forgiveness and you don’t trust grace, because you are human. And
that’s more or less the defining characteristic of humans: We only trust ourselves,
because we have been hurt by others and hurt by chance, so we act as if the
only one worth trusting is ourselves, and we act as if we are immortal and as
if we are in control of everything even when all the evidence in the world
suggests otherwise. That anybody would give us a gift we don’t deserve no
strings attached is impossible.
The prophets are only hinting at
this, though. Isaiah is offering a vision of this future vine sprouting from
the stump, but even Isaiah doesn’t really know what this means. A messiah is coming?
Sure, but what of all this language about striking the earth with his rod? Why
the language of war? You see, even the prophets didn’t quite get it. Jesus was
coming into violence, but it was the violence of a world fighting back against
the thing it fears most. Jesus was coming with a kind of self-sacrificial,
left-handed power that would cause all the powers-that-be to revolt in disgust.
Jesus was coming to become the kind of king who dies, not the kind of king who
kills. The prophets were saying this, but it is in, with, and under their
words. The rod that Christ would wield is the cross, and on it he would die.
Strange. This is advent. A strange
time where we proclaim a mystery that doesn’t resemble the God we want but who
may be precisely the God we need.
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