A Sermon By
John Brierly McCall, D. Min.
December 5, 2010
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Isaiah 11:1-10
Years ago I helped my brother build a rustic cabin on the shore of Cobscook Bay, almost up to Eastport. I put the emphasis on rustic because there’s no electricity, phone, or running water. My brother has a lot in common with Henry David Thoreau, but that’s another story. Last time I visited I saw something that amazed me as we drove down the long neck of land to their cabin.
Someone had put up a new fence that stretched for several hundred yards. They’d cut posts about four feet long from nearby woods and set them in the ground and then run just a single electrified wire to keep in a few horses that grazed contentedly. But the amazing part was that the wood posts looked dry and dead… dead except that out of the tops of many of them came small green, leafy shoots.
“A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots,” says the prophet. Jesse was the father of David, the great King who shaped the nation of Israel and whose legacy as a great leader and warrior lived in memory. Jesse’s home town was Bethlehem. So Isaiah told the people: from that heritage and from that place would come the salvation of all the people. From that heritage and from that place would come a ruler who would be so different that ancient enemies would be able to live in harmony: “Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist, and faithfulness the belt around his loins. The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together.
This promised one – this Messiah (which is the Hebrew word for “anointed one” or “savior”) – will be like the great David in another way. For David was called and anointed by God when he was just a child… Jesse’s son, the youngest of eight. So Isaiah echoes that saying: “a little child shall lead them.”
But why a child? There are many possible reasons. I like Carl Sandburg’s remark: “A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on.” In every birth God says yes, and tells us we can’t give up, can’t despair.
In biblical times and through most of the world’s history, children have been literally and symbolically powerless and vulnerable. They were among the ones who were to be seen and not heard. So too, were women, Samaritans, prostitutes, and tax collectors with whom Jesus shared meals.
Put another way: Isaiah – and later Jesus – was saying “if you think it’s impossible for lion and lamb to lie down together, let me make it even harder for your logical minds: imagine child as the leader, and an infant playing near the den of a poisonous snake and all dwelling safely together.”
The realm of God is not rational, linear, or predictable. It defies logic and reason. Proclaiming a vision of natural enemies lying down together, and a child leading them, says God isn’t taking things as they are, tweaking them a little here and a little there. God says the true realm defies logic altogether.
And don’t we believe, further, that the spirit and innocence and purity of a little child are sure signs of God’s presence? We believe that we can come closer to God, because God came so close to us in Jesus.
Another reminder of the power of powerless children come from the story of Ruby Bridges. Dr. Robert Coles was most recently an author and a professor at Harvard. In the early 1960’s, was a psychiatrist at an Air Force hospital in Biloxi, Mississippi. He had a particular interest in the way children respond to great stress. On one of his visits to New Orleans he learned that all the white students in a particular school were boycotting classes because a little 6-year-old African-American student had been admitted to the school under court order. Every day little Ruby walked through a gauntlet of jeering, swearing, screaming white folks – guarded by Federal and State Police; walked into the school building, and sat alone with her first grade tutor – the only child in the building. At the end of the day she walked out just the same way.
Coles wanted to know how she managed to keep going through such incredible stress. He contacted her family and asked for a chance to visit them. When he did he found a gracious, loving Christian family. They quickly were comfortable together and Coles asked some of the standard diagnostic questions: how’s Ruby’s appetite? Is she sleeping all right? Is she making progress with school work? He found to his amazement that there were none of the typical symptoms of stress.
One day, Coles observed that Ruby seemed to be talking to some of her taunters as she walked the gauntlet. He wanted to know what she was saying to them. When he asked she explained that she was praying for them… as she walked into school, out of school, and at bed time. “Why,” he asked? “Because if you’re going through what they are doing to you, you are the one who should be praying for them” she replied. Even on the cross, Jesus said “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing.”
Coles concluded the story saying: “What am I supposed to do with this information, with this little girl who prayed for her enemies? She had taken no courses in moral analysis or systematic ethics. Yet somehow she walked through a mob every day, praying for the people who yelled at her.“
Ruby Bridges is still living in New Orleans, and continues to travel the country as a speaker with the theme “Racism is a grown-up disease.”
So the prophet was bold enough to say: “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.”
Or, as our hymn says: “When God is a child there’s joy in our song; the last shall be first, and the weak shall be strong and none shall be afraid.”