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Readings (click here for full text of the readings):
Isaiah 11:1-10, Psalm 72, Romans 15:4-13, Matthew 3:1-12
When I was growing up, I loved the certainty of math, because it was undeniable, and reassuring. The answer was either right or wrong, and if it was wrong, you could look back and see where you’d gone astray, and correct it. For the same reasons I hated poetry, with all of its ambiguity and multiple interpretations. With all of its uncertainty. Not to mention that I was really bad, embarrassingly bad, at interpreting poems. My worst poetry moment was my seventh grade English final, when our teacher asked us to interpret Robert Frost’s famous poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”:
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
The best that could be said about my interpretation was that it was unique. “The narrator was a postman,” I wrote – evidently recalling the famous vow that “neither snow, nor rain … nor gloom of night [will stay] the swift completion of [the mailman’s] appointed rounds” – who didn’t know whose mail to deliver to the house he’d stopped in front of. His “horse” – which I described as a personification of his mail truck, and I was pretty proud of myself for using the term “personification” – thought it strange that he would pause with so many letters left, and so he shook his harness bells a bit, or honked his horn, as the case may be. And eventually the mailman moved on, because he had promises to keep in the form of packages to deliver, and miles to go on his postal route before it was quitting time.
There are a lot of reasons why that memory came to mind this week. Winter seems to have arrived. I now live just up the road from Robert Frost’s cabin. And my mother, the former English teacher who must have been mortified by her son’s literal poetry interpretations, is visiting today.
I continued to think that way for a long time, not just about poetry which I went to great lengths to avoid, but also about religion. Not surprisingly, I ran in fundamentalist circles and hung out with people who would give new meaning to the word “literal” if they weren’t so violently opposed to new meanings. Let’s just put it this way, they honestly thought that the second verse of the Bible, which says that “the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters,” predicted the discovery of the helicopter. (That’s not a joke.)
Those folks, and the person whom I used to be, would have loved today’s Gospel. Front and center is John the Baptist, a fanatic, a zealot, a foe of ambiguity. Everything about him was concrete and extreme – from his camel hair outfit to his diet of locusts and wild honey. And his message was difficult to misconstrue, as he was not one to mince words.
He saw the Pharisees and Sadducees – the religious authorities, the pious elite – walking toward him, and he began to judge them from afar. Without any courtesy or pastoral sensitivity, he launched into condemnation, “You brood of vipers! Who told you to come here??” It’s doubtful he knew each of them individually – it was a classic case of guilt by association. You can almost hear him saying the words that have become so familiar to us these last few months: “If you’re not with us, then you’re against us. And if you associate with those people, you must be against us.”
He went on to undercut the foundation of their faith. “You trust that you’re OK because you’re descendants of Abraham,” John shouted, “but that doesn’t matter. Genesis says that Abraham was the ‘ancestor of a multitude of nations,’[1] so that’s nothing special. That won’t save you. Beware, be very careful, because the one who comes after me will cast the chaff into an unquenchable fire.”
Today’s Old Testament reading couldn’t be more different. Instead of being directed to the powerful authorities, Isaiah spoke to the hopeless and downtrodden in their moment of despair. The people of Judah had come a long way in the three centuries since David, the son of Jesse, had been their king. Once a strong and proud people, they were now a pawn in a war between more powerful nations. When Isaiah wrote these words Judah was under attack, and the people could sense that the end was near. Isaiah promised that God would raise up for them a king in David’s mold, a leader of wisdom and understanding, who carried with him the spirit of the Lord and would judge with righteousness. But instead Judah formed an alliance with the pagan nation of Assyria, and within a few generations Jerusalem was captured, Judah was no more, and the people of God were in exile, captives in a far-off land.
Then Isaiah breaks into the kind of lyrical and marvelous poetic speech that gave me fits:
The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion, and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
This sounds like heaven, like Eden or Utopia. No wars, not even any conflicts or arguments. Natural enemies live in peace. What was dangerous and life-threatening becomes nurturing and loving. As in much other poetry (as I came to learn later in life), the images are extremes. It’s not just that two different animals lie down together, but natural foes – predators and their prey – coexist in peace. The most vulnerable and precious of creation – the nursing child – is not endangered by the most deadly of creation – the asp. Even more, the child plays where the asp lives – death has not simply been replaced by the absence of death, but by the presence of life in all its fullness – eating together, playing together, raising each other’s children as if they were one’s own.
Today’s readings are opposites – judgment and condemnation of entire groups on the one hand, promises of incomprehensible peace and tranquility on the other. One says that when things are looking up, the world is really going to hell in a handbasket and you’d better have your house in order. The other says that even when we’re destined for slavery and defeat, ultimately God will save us, bringing supreme peace to the world, changing the rules so that enemies become allies, and violence is a distant memory. The voice of doom on the one hand, Pollyanna on the other. God as judge, or God as redeemer. One appeals to the fundamentalists and doomsayers, the other to the liberals and optimists.
So who do we listen to? Who do we heed? Honestly, I think we listen to the sentiments that agree with what we already believe. The literalists love the mathematical certainty of John the Baptist – you’re out, you’re in; you better be ready, because the judge is comin’. The poets love Isaiah – and his images of a world so different from our own that we scarcely recognize it, except in our deepest hopes and longings. We gravitate toward the person of like-mind, who says what we already think, whom we agree with, who confirms us. We aren’t changed by God; we’re just verified by the Bible.
In the end, nothing changes. Not our view of God, not our view of ourselves. And that’s why these are perfect readings for Advent, the season of preparation. Because we aren’t called to prepare for what is expected, or for what confirms who we are and what we believe. We must prepare to be changed, to feel different, to believe differently, to be different than we were.
In that respect John and Isaiah say the same thing – to be saved, we must change. The Baptist screams at the holier-than-thou types to “Repent,” which literally means to turn around, to change. “Whatever you’re doing isn’t working,” he might as well have said. “Don’t keep trusting in what you’ve always thought – the savior is at hand, and you must change or die.”
So, too, with Isaiah, who spoke against all the prevailing wisdom of his day. Current events pointed to doom, and Isaiah spoke of paradise. The signs of the times pointed to slavery and submission, and the prophet painted images of harmony and perfect freedom.
It seems that God is saying that wherever you are, you need to be someplace else. That bad omens bring good outcomes, that piety leads to eternal fire, that up is down and black is white. And I think God really is saying that, for a couple of reasons. First, it’s true, because for God who we are is simultaneously more than enough and never enough. In the wise words of Anne Lamott, “God loves us just the way we are, but loves us too much to let us stay that way.”
And, second, this yes-and-no, this always-and-not-yet, teaches us something very fundamental about the nature of God. Whatever we think about God, even if it’s true, it’s not the whole truth, for we aren’t able to fully comprehend God or God’s plan for us. That uncertainty leads many of us, myself foremost among us, to try even harder to know and completely understand, at the expense of faith, even when that means concocting absurd interpretations for divine actions, much like forcing square pegs into round holes, or postal service images onto the serene New England countryside. The contrast of John and Isaiah is a lot like the riddles, or koans, of Zen Buddhism, the most famous being “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Eventually you realize not only that there is no answer to the question, but that the question isn’t the most important thing after all. The most important thing is to know God directly, intimate as a lover and mysterious as a stranger.
And the way to know God that way is to listen for the softly spoken, to look for the faint and indistinct, to wait for the unexpected. We must let go of our preconceptions; we must take our eyes off the straight and narrow path, so that we’re able to see the wonders that have always surrounded us. We must look beyond claims of certainty and guilt by association, to see new life in the midst of death, hope in the midst of despair, as profound yet overlookable as the shoot coming out of the stump of Jesse, an ancient promise coming true, a king from the line of David, a king to change the laws of nature from war to peace, from survival to solidarity. And from that shoot a branch will grow up and roots will spread out below, and in that new life, Paul says, “the Gentiles,” the world, “shall hope.”
Perhaps the stump of Jesse lay in those woods I read of long ago, those woods so “lovely, dark, and deep.” Perhaps the lonely, burdened man sensed that within the cold and barren forest there was new life. He lingered there for just a moment before he attended to his obligations, and I guess all I’m asking us to do is linger a bit ourselves. Instead of focusing solely on the promises we have to keep, instead of heeding the Bible when it confirms us and disregarding it when it doesn’t, perhaps we can linger where we sense deep within ourselves that there is real meaning, at the risk of seeing God and ourselves in a different light, at the risk of having those promises not seem so important anymore, at the risk of being changed.
T.S. Eliot talked about doing just that, in a poem that, over time and with much change, I’ve come to dearly love:
The end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always —
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well.
[1] Genesis 17:5.
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