To turn, turn will be our delight . . .

Imagine, if you will, all the stumps of all the Christmas trees that have been cut down in the past few weeks and transported to every corner of our country and placed in many of our homes for the brief seasons of Advent and Christmas. And now imagine a tiny shoot springing up from just one of those millions of stumps, a shoot that has the potential of sharing its new life and it’s remarkable future with every tree that has been cut down and which will otherwise dry up and be useful only for firewood or landscaping mulch or paper pulp. That’s the prophetic vision that Isaiah shares with us this morning, in which Jesus is the unique and miraculous shoot and we are the dying trees that need to be grafted into that shoot in order to come alive again and to live forever.

In order to fully appreciate Isaiah’s vision, we must remember that God has used Assyria, the super-power of his generation, as the rod of his discipline, like an army of ax-wielding lumberjacks, clear-cutting God’s people from one end of their country to the other, allowing the Assyrians to take whatever they want as they leave behind a nation of stumps. Not even the royal house of David has been spared. Jesse’s own family tree, in spite of God’s promise to Jesse’s son, David, that his descendents would always sit on the throne of Israel, has been cut down in an act of God’s righteous judgment over his peoples’ persistent and stubborn refusal to honor and trust in God’s covenant.

In the face of this humiliating national landscape of stumps, of Israel cut down and cut off from any obvious hope for the future, Isaiah declares that a shoot will spring up from the stump of Jesse, a shoot that will change everything he has made, a shoot that will recreate his creation.

If Assyria was God’s stick, Isaiah’s vision is an image of God’s ultimate carrot, given to Isaiah by God to encourage his people to repent, to realign and redirect their lives in accordance with the incredible future that Isaiah describes, a kingdom of peace, where the wolf shall live with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the cow and the bear shall graze together, and the lion shall eat straw like the ox, and the baby shall play with the snake, and a young child shall lead all these transformed creatures, and all the nations of the world will also repent because they, too, will want to be transformed and to participate in such a peaceable kingdom.

One of my favorite hymns in our new hymnal is number 554. It is a dance melody that comes to us from the Shakers, a religious sect that has all but died out, probably most noted for its furniture and it’s shaking as sign of sin leaving the believer. Aaron Copeland adapted this melody in his famous orchestral suite, “Appalachian Spring,” which, in its own musical way, expresses a similar vision of an ideal world and a hopeful future like that of Isaiah. The text of that Shaker dance melody also captures the essence of Isaiah’s call to repent as the first step in entering this ideal place that is never as far away as we think it is:
“Tis the gift to be simple, ‘tis the gift to be free, ‘tis the gift to come down where we ought to be, and when we find ourselves in the place just right, ‘twill be in the valley of love and delight. When true simplicity is gained to bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed, to turn, turn, will be our delight till by turning, turning we come round right.

The repentance that Isaiah and John the Baptist call us to during this season of preparation for the coming of the shoot from the stump of Jesse is nothing more or less than the simple, but profound, act of turning away from what we think makes us happy, but actually ends up making us miserable, and turning, usually in the opposite direction, toward that kingdom of peace that the shoot out of the stump of Jesse, even Jesus, the incarnate Son conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary, will come to inaugurate.

Our challenge, as Christians, is to do just that: to turn and turn and turn until we come round right. A priest in Tennessee offered his own top ten list of the things we should turn away from and avoid during Advent in a Forward Day by Day pamphlet. It’s his own list of the things that many of us may need to repent of: Do not forget your rituals. Do not add to the frenzy. Do not forget your Bible. Do not try to be perfect for the holidays. Do not overdo your schedule. Do not overdo gifts. Do not go into additional debt. Do not expect the culture to follow your lead. Do not forget the less fortunate. And do not wait until Christmas Eve to come to church.

The author of that Shaker hymn is right when he says that it is a gift to be able to do such a simple thing as repenting. It is a gift to have the freedom to actually make a different choice about what we believe will lead us to true happiness, whatever season of the year we may be in. In that sense, we can’t even repent without God’s help.

The good news is the fact that there is no limit to what God can do. Just as Isaiah tells us that he can raise up a shoot from the stump of Jesse, so does John the Baptist remind the religious leaders of his day, who were more like poisonous snakes than sons of Abraham, that God can create a son or a daughter of Abraham from a rock as well as transforming even a snake into a creature who will no longer pose a threat to the innocent and naive. The venom these leaders have stored up for themselves to defend their positions of power, security and self-esteem actually undermine the very society they seek to build and to defend. It will be the Lamb of God, and not a brood of vipers, who will create the peaceable kingdom. The lion will lie down with the lamb precisely because the lion will come to appreciate the inherent strength of the lamb’s security that comes not from the self-protective poisons of a snake or the sharp teeth and claws of a lion, but from the Shepherd who will be with the lamb even in the valley of the shadow of death.

So let us not be afraid or despair if our hearts and minds are hard like rocks. God can transform our natures, whether they’re like the quick-tempered and willful nature of the lion or the melancholy and reserved nature of the wolf or the sluggish and greedy nature of the bear. It will be as newly made children of God that all the other aspects of our nature will be redeemed and led. So let us begin by embracing John the Baptist’s call to repentance, which is meant to prepare our hard hearts and stubborn minds, our sluggish bodies and desperate souls, for the even greater baptism of the Holy Spirit and fire, enabling us to turn and turn and turn in that baptism until our initial, clumsy acts of repentance become the simple and graceful dance with God and with all his creation. AMEN.