Matthew 3:1-12 & Isaiah 11:1-10
“Bridge of Peace”
December 8, 2019
There’s an old story about a long haul truck driver who was exhausted from his many hours on the road. He pulls into an isolated truck stop and sits at the counter. Within a couple of minutes a waitress comes out from the kitchen and asks him, “What’ll you have?” The tired truck driver says, “All I want is a kind word and a piece of apple pie.” The waitress then goes into the kitchen and comes back out with the slice of pie and sets it down in front of the trucker and turns to go back to the kitchen. The truck driver chimes up and says, “How about a kind word.” The waitress comes back and leans over the counter and says, “If I were you, I wouldn’t eat the pie.”
Maybe that waitress and John the Baptist are relatives. John lays it on pretty heavy with the Pharisees and Sadducees who show up because they, too, want to be baptized. He depicts the coming Messiah as one who will torch all that is wrong with humanity. John is sharing a vision of Jesus here as one who will eliminate everyone who doesn’t meet a certain purity of heart and mind. Isn’t that tempting to consider – all that chaff we would want disappeared and then wouldn’t the world be a better place?
Just imagine getting rid of all the blowhards and holier than thou types we know, the ones who think they have all the answers while considering everyone else less than as well as the ones who are not holding up their end of the deal and are not bearing good fruit, chopping them down and adding them to the burn pile of the unfortunates.
John here is envisioning that Jesus is going to come and change the world. But John, in his earnest yearning for a better world, a world at peace, has got some of this Messiah business wrong. The change part – that is definitely what Jesus was about but the how that will happen – John has veered off message with that. Jesus won’t be coming to usher in a new world order with violence and separating wheat from chaff. Instead Jesus will enter into the world in the most humble of ways and will gravitate always toward those the rest of the world has little or no use for.
John appears to be using righteous indignation to usher in the realm that Jesus will proclaim and that begs the question – when it comes to changing things up will it happen with the tough love approach of John the Baptist who is ready to take an axe to all that is wrong in the world or as the saying goes, do you catch more flies with honey than vinegar? Maybe that’s why we have this frankly frightening image from John contrasted here with the passage from Isaiah that envisions a world of beauty and peace.
As an alternative to the fire and brimstone approach of John, Isaiah paints a vision of peace that sounds magical and almost fairy-tale-like in its depiction of the laying down of defenses between lion and lamb, leopard and goat, lion and calf, bear and cow. In this hopeful image, all of our parental instincts are to be ignored as we let our babies play with snakes. Isaiah brings us from the place of fear to the place of freedom. Out of a hard, lifeless, left behind and for all intents and purposes finished stump – all but abandoned and deemed useless there is a tiny green sprout, a sign of new life. We hear this poem of the stump of Jesse and we are filled with the possibility of peace. We find it in the hope of the Messiah, the one who will come planting the seeds of a new world order. Isaiah is foretelling the fall of Assyria here but all is not lost for the people of Judah for a second David will come from the long line of ancestors and he will bring peace with him. And what about us? Are we drawn more to the axe and burn image or the seeds of hope and peace image? Where are the places in our world right now where peace is most needed? Will drastic measures be required to usher in such a peace?
As Christians we believe that Jesus was sent to bring about such change, to be a beacon of hope and a bearer of peace. The birth of such a peacemaker, such a change agent is what we anticipate while we already know the result. We are in the midst of a second Advent, an awaiting of a new creation. John the Baptist gave a preview of Jesus who was to come very soon after him and with Jesus would come the Kingdom of Heaven. John’s calls for repentance were heeded by some but largely ignored. For much of the past 2000 years we have dwelt with the words of God’s peacemaker, Jesus. But much of what Jesus promoted has been overlooked or excused away or skirted around. He called for a view of the world in which the meek were lifted up and the poor were viewed with righteousness. He called for a new order which we continue to struggle with and sometimes outright resist to this day because it is hard work to hold onto that image of peace in the day to day grind of taking care of our families and our homes while looking out for our neighbors. Holding onto images of peace and using those to guide our steps can seem really out of touch or lofty or impractical.
John is full of tough guy talk for the Sadducees and Pharisees. They, after all came to him as known entities representing established religion, confident that they were living righteously because they followed all of the rules. What John is trying to say is that all that will not be enough. Jesus will come to bring a peace so vast and broad and that can only happen when the world order these religious leaders hold dear is upended. The peace Jesus brings is represented in his healing and his teaching and his death. His life is marked by a generosity for those others consider throwaways. This peace that Jesus ushers in will mean that all of those who want to follow the way he carves out will need to live side by side with each other and with God.
Maybe you’re like me and sometimes take on some of John’s perspective, especially when folks don’t live up to the expectations that we have of them which of course we justify by saying that we only have their best interests at heart. The peace that we seek might come from both the beautiful vision that Isaiah draws for us with so much potential for growth coupled with John’s earnest desire to speak up and follow through not necessarily with anger like him – calling folks a bunch of snakes is not going to endear them to us – but with an assurance that the new Kingdom that Jesus ushers in is one that is so important that we commit to following his lead mindful that it will not always be easy.
And still sometimes we get glimpses of that peace we yearn for. Yesterday one such glimpse was the coming together of folks of all ages and singing abilities, as sun set, to sing familiar carols, bringing disparate voices and experiences around a tree. This was coupled with the lighting of the other trees, bringing a peak at a measure of peace in our little town.
The repenting or turning around that John emphasizes is part of our preparation once again for Jesus to enter into our lives. Maybe a way to bridge these two images is to spend less time fearful of the end of the present order of things and more time yearning for the world filled with justice where the least of these are raised up and where the wrongs are righted and all lives are equal in dignity. If we hear the cry of John to turn around and the promise that Isaiah offers together we might just find the light in the darkness as well as healing and transformation that Jesus came to proclaim as ours – yours, mine and every other beloved one. This is the good news we can share, today and always. Amen.