These Stones
Isaiah 11:1-10; Matthew 3: 1-12

December 9, 2001

Most Advent Scriptures are not happy and joyous stories, like today's two passages from Isaiah and Matthew.

In their way these Scriptures appear to be like Dr. Seuss' The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. Almost anti-Christmas, they take all the fun and joy out. Yet in the end, the Grinch turns around and becomes good, his heart growing ten times larger. Advent prepares the way by getting rid of all the phoney Christmases.

Let's be Grinch. A popular theme has been the Jesse Tree on which children place ornaments representing the numerous Christian symbols which show the connection between Jesse, the father of David, and Jesus, a descendant of the House of David.

Isaiah, however, does not talk about a beautiful tree of Jesse, with large branches and luxuriant foliage, but the stump of Jesse, from which a fragile shoot will issue forth.

The people of Judah during Isaiah's time had been cut down to size by the powerful and aggressive Assyrians. The Assyrians had conquered and leveled the northern kingdom of Israel and were besieging the gates of Jerusalem when for some reason they simply withdrew. Judah was nearly annihilated, severely wounded, yet still by the grace of God alive. A stump, but there was still enough life to produce a shoot of green.

If you once were nearly dead, but now inexplicably alive, there is no end to the possibilities life holds out to you. Besides, God must surely be in the midst of this. The shoot of Jesse will be a wise ruler, a person of spiritual intuition and righteousness. Christians quickly interpreted the shoot of Jesse to be the Son of David, Jesus of Nazareth. He will operate in a way unlike that of other men and women, not by rote, but with passion.

The world will necessarily be a changed place. The wolf will lie down with a lamb, the leopard with the kid - and a little child shall lead them.

This is not a naive picture of some natural utopia. The naive ones are the grumpy old men who told me as a youth that my ideals would take a beating when they encountered the real world. These grumpy old men had indeed sold out to an unrealistic perception of this world in which greed and vice and the jungle of the marketplace were the best of possible worlds. There was no Advent or Christmas for these people, except as a market opportunity.

John the Baptist is the beginning of the Christian story. He is the one who prepares the way in the wilderness, the Advent man, but he is not much fun at all. Emerging out of the wilderness, John doesn't look right, probably doesn't smell right, and his message does not sit right with anyone who is sensitive. You have to radically repent and turn your life upside down. Baptism by water in the River Jordan is the symbolic act, but the real lasting baptism to come will be by the baptism of the Holy Spirit and fire. John has no soft words for the religious leaders, and if you do not behave differently from them, then you are no better than them and that's bad. John the Baptist is the Grinch, but it was the good people who were turning green at his words.

It doesn't matter if you've been a good member of this church for 150 years; it doesn't matter if you sit in these pews regularly for one hour a week for worship; it doesn't matter how much money you give to the church budget; it doesn't matter if you are the minister of the most important church in Regina.

If what you depend upon for prestige and validity in this world is your name and lineage - child of Abraham on the banks of the Jordan - then you're no better than these stones by the shore. God made water spew out of a rock in the Exodus wilderness. Making children, good disciples, out of stones is not any harder or less possible.

What matters is how you behave now, how you worship now, how you love and give now. You have to be prepared for the thief in the middle of the night - there is no comfortable sitting back and relaxing as a Christian. You can't be a Christian by rote.

Clifton Fadiman observed that "All of life is an earnest search for the right manila folder in which to get filed away." The only real concern is then under which letter we are quietly filed away.

With all this Good News, we are waiting every second for the unexpected to happen. When you repent, everything and everyone around you changes - that's the hard part of repentance. As Isaiah declares, a baby will lie down among the beasts in the stable and that little child will lead us.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan