A sermon by Associate Minister Elsa A. Peters, December 9, 2007
Isaiah 11:1-10
There is an old story about a tree that “loved a little boy. And everyday the boy would come and he would gather her leaves and make them into crowns and play king of the forest. He would climb up her trunk and swing from her branches and eat apples.” And whether the story of The Giving Tree was read to you or you read it to another, you know that the “boy loved the tree…very much.”
And as things go when time passes, the boy grows up and their relationship changes. The boy no longer swings on the tree’s branches but starts to look for a place in the world. He wants money and a house. And the tree makes his dreams come true.
More time passes and the boy wants to get away from it all with a boat offered by the tree’s trunk. The tree and the boy are supposedly happy until the boy comes back with more demands. But now, the tree is a stump. There is nothing left to give. So, she tells the boy: “Come, Boy, sit down. Sit down and rest.”
It’s all she can say. It’s all she can do. Amid all of the other trees in the wilderness, this stump “appears beyond life and beyond hope.” Everything has been taken. It’s all gone to a boy that has grown old and sad.
Perhaps the boy has given up. Maybe he’s lost hope. Or the tree lost it. Or perhaps you have or maybe we all have. We’ve all grown old and sad. We stopped dreaming about what could be because something changed. Everything changed! War began. Neighbor turned against neighbor. The wilderness was destroyed. It all became beyond life and beyond hope. Or at least, it was for Isaiah who explained all of this by pointing at the stump.
Isaiah pointed at the stump to point to the truth of it all. Not about things to come – but about things as they were. Isaiah saw how things had changed. He watched war unfold around him. He witnessed the increasing hostility between the neighboring kingdoms of Judah and Jerusalem. So, the prophet Isaiah points to what is broken.
It might not have happened all at once. It may have happened slowly over time in those small moments that didn’t seem to matter. But, somewhere along the way, they stopped believing that there could be something better. Just as the warring kingdoms had accepted this, we accepted things as they are.
And then, suddenly, we found ourselves old and sad sitting on a stump in the wilderness assuming that this was normal. We gave up dreaming. And now, all that is left is a stump in the wilderness. Even for Isaiah’s hearers who knew that the wilderness had been destroyed, what comes next sounds ironic and a little naïve. Nonetheless, Isaiah promises that from this place beyond life and beyond hope, there shall come a shoot.
Not just any shoot. Not just any bud of hope – but the hope we’ve been waiting for all along. This shoot is the promise of God’s spirit resting upon one ruler that embodies wisdom, understanding, counsel, might and knowledge. With all of these qualities of leadership, this shoot – this one ruler – will reverse all of those things we have given up on. We will no longer be old and sad. We’ll find our dreams again because suddenly it will be normal for the wolf and the lamb to live together. There will be no alternative to a little child leading the menagerie. These are the “normal things… [which] expose the real abnormalities in life, which we have taken for granted.”
That’s how we found ourselves sitting on the stump feeling old and sad to begin with. We took it all for granted. We assumed that these abnormal things were just part of life. We forgot that these things aren’t normal. Perhaps like the boy who grew old and sad, we expected someone to always be there to offer wisdom and resources. Maybe we relied on it too much. Maybe we expected too much of them. And so, we accepted that the tree had been reduced to a stump. We just assumed that this was normal. And now, we’re amid the destruction looking for someone to come and clean it all up.
This is what Isaiah wanted. He wanted a ruler to come along and bring peace between the warring kingdoms. He wanted the world he knew to change. Maybe it’s not only war and peace for us. Maybe we’re looking for the world to make sense again. Maybe we’re looking for direction in our lives or hope on a dark winter day. Maybe we just want someone – anyone – to tell us that there is still hope. Like Isaiah, we want the word we know to change.
So, we tell an old story about boy born in an unexpected place to a world that wanted change. This boy is the promise of hope among all of the destruction that we know. And yet, this boy will not clean up all of the destruction from his manger. We already know that it won’t happen all at once. Two thousand years have passed since our vision of the shoot came into this world. This boy was not the leader that Isaiah expected – just as the tree was perhaps not what the boy who had grown old and sad had expected.
That old story ends with a happy tree. Nothing is said about the boy. The story ends when he is old and sad. There is no shoot among the roots. Just a boy who grew old and sad.
Our sacred story does not end when we are old and sad. This old story that we tell during the darkest month of the year does not leave us amid the destruction assuming that this is normal. The boy in the manger will not give you a house or money, but this is a child of hope. This child will grow to teach us to dream again. This child was born to remind us that the abnormal is normal. That the unexpected is expected. That the impossible is possible. Hope will be born again amid the roots of destruction. Hope will be born again – just as Isaiah promises.
Shel Silverstein, The Giving Tree (New York: HarperCollins, 1964)