A sermon given at
First Presbyterian Church, Spring City, TN on December 4, 2016 before the ordination of Lesa Frady and new ruling elder.
Readings:
Paul says of the writings of old,
“4For whatever was written in former days was written for our
instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the
scriptures we might have hope.”
In
other words, we should heed what we read in Old Testament scripture that helps
us understand how to live the Christian life today. One of my pastor friends
goes a little further, and I agree with him, that we should pay attention to
everything in the Old Testament that helps us understand God’s grace, but we
should be very careful about how we interpret passages that do not do this
clearly, because as Jesus said, he came to fulfill the law; and therefore, his
interpretation takes precedence.
Paul’s
advice is noteworthy today. I did not
plan it this way for our readings to be from Isaiah written about 2,500 years
ago, but both Isaiah and the Romans passage carry a lot of meaning for us on
this special day. We are serving communion, The Lord’s Meal, and we are going
to ordain a Ruling Elder. We were going to receive a new member and baptize another,
but a family emergency took them away today.
Ordination, like baptism, and reception of new
members, involves promises by the individual and by all of us in the
congregation. To get to the guidance on these promises we are about to make, I’d
like to give you a little background on the way this part of Isaiah is written.
Particularly look at the way the text is typeset to
indicate special meaning. If you look in your bible at Chapter 11 of Isaiah, you’ll
see the first ten verses are set out in a different way than the last two
verses I read. (In this case my links to the Oremus Bible Browser will not
help, it simply puts everything in block text format. You must resort to real
print or another link such as the Bible
Gateway to see what I mean. I've tried to do that in this post.)
The first 9 verses 1 are typeset in the form of lyrical
poetry, or a hymn, while verses 10 and 11 are set in prose, or block book
format. The English words don’t rhyme to give you any idea it is poetry, but
remember the verses were written in Hebrew and the words were chosen to sound
like or rhyme with other Hebrew words. The bottom line is that we need to
recognize it is poetry.
I mentioned last
week when I read the lyrics by the Blind Boys of Alabama that music and
poetry put aside the concrete nature of things and capture the emotional sense
of meaning of things. Like the two Christmas hymns we sang today, they are full of
visual imagery, the things you think or imagine, opposed to things you read,
touch or feel. The prose (verses
10, 11) are concrete, matter of fact. Prose is quantitative, while poetry
is qualitative. In Isaiah and other scripture, the prose and poetry interact to
give an emotional reaction to a concrete statement. They are a type of
liturgical call and response.
The lectionary committee chopped
the leading prose that introduces the lyrical verses and that obscures the way
the poetry and prose interact. For
example, if you have your Bible open, look back in chapter 10 to verses 20-27. This block of
prose makes a practical point,
“The Lord is going to use Assyria to purify Israel
and Judah. It will be brutal
and only a remnant of God’s people will remain when it is all over, but then the Lord will turn his eyes to
you and remove the burden of Assyria from you.”
Then the next 16 verses from 10:28-11:9
are a sequence of poetry or song capturing the elation and joy over the message
of relief from war and return of a few contained in that earlier block of
prose.
I can almost imagine Isaiah singing
these words, waxing poetically,
“The Lord will hack down the thickets of forest with
an ax and Lebanon with its majestic trees will fall. A shoot will come out of
the root of Jesse, a branch shall grow out of his roots.”
(If you go to the Bible
Gateway link, you’ll see the translators preserved the lyrical format of
Isaiah and it gives extra emphasis to the proclamation.)
This is a great celebratory
proclamation of the future Messiah coming from the Hebrew lineage after the
decimation of Israel and Judah. If he had used prose he might have said, “After
I remove the wicked for their evil ways, the Messiah will be born out of the
line of Jesse, the father of David as a Savior of Israel and Judah.” I think
you are more likely than not to remember the imagery, “The Lord will hack down the thickets of forest with an ax and Lebanon
with its majestic trees will fall. A shoot will come out of the root of Jesse,
a branch shall grow out of his roots,” than my prose rendition.
Now, if you look at verses
10,11, you see Isaiah reverts to prose again. Here he tells the people that
every nation will inquire of
righteousness from him, and he will gather his people together. Then in verse 12, Isaiah breaks out again
into poetry describing the glory of this event of the homecoming of Israel and
Judah after the turmoil of war.
The key point of the entire
poetical discourse is that the coming Messiah will be a sign of righteousness for
all nations. The Messiah will be a semaphore, a signal, calling his people back to him. Now
you can see why I chose the sermon title, “God’s Semaphore.”
But if the Messiah is a semaphore,
a sign, to what details is the sign pointing? What are the instructions?
Let’s go back to verses 1- 9. “A shoot will come out of the root of Jesse,
a branch shall grow out of his roots” probably intended to make deep
connections with the Hebrews. Since Jesse was a Hebrew, and father of David, it
reminds the people that God’s promise to the two nations of a covenant and a
king remains valid. This coming Hebrew messiah will save his people. It is a message of hope for the future during
the turmoil and suffering in the scourge of war with the Assyrians that they
are about to lose.
There is another twist. To a well-read
Hebrew, that the priests certainly were, and to a congregation that listens carefully to
the priests, this verse about a stump, or root, also brings back memories of
Job.
Job is one of the most difficult
books of the Old Testament. Scholars debate its translation from Hebrew even today. But it is peculiarly clear that Job was a Gentile,
not a Hebrew, who “was blameless and upright and turned away from all evil.”
God presents Job as the example of a righteous person, a Hebrew’s Hebrew who was not even a Hebrew.
Unjust calamities of the worst sort fell
upon Job in aclassic "why do bad things happen to good people" story. He experienced such suffering that almost any person would
cry out in objection to God. Yet Job remained, not patient, he was hardly
patient at all, he remained faithful
to the Lord through every trial.
in Chapter 14, In the midst of his
misery, Job
lamented that he would not see a resurrection
that would relieve him of this suffering,
“Though
(the root of a tree) grows old in the earth, and its stump dies in the ground, 9yet at
the scent of water it will bud and put forth branches like a young plant..but
mortals die and are laid low….”
Do you
see the connection to “A shoot shall come out of Jesse…”
that answers Job’s lament?
Job’s lament comes from the deepest
despair in suffering, yet somewhere in Job’s spirit he found the faith to say “I
know my Redeemer lives and in the end he will stand on the earth.” (Note Job has lapsed into poetry.) Job reflects
an ultimate example of faith in deliverance that Jesus asks us all to strive to
keep foremost in our mind, but few of us do it consistently or well.
Verses
2-5 of Isaiah 11 describe the qualities of the Messiah. He will have the spirit of the Lord on him, the spirit of wisdom to counsel and fear
the Lord. He will judge the poor with righteousness and the meek with equity. Righteousness and faithfulness will be
his clothes.
…Now…What would you say was a
central part of the teaching of Jesus to his disciples? It was to “do as I do.”
Paul got that message. In his letter to
the Romans, he says (Romans 15:5-7),
“May the God of steadfastness and
encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with
Christ Jesus, so that together you may with one voice
glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Welcome one another, therefore, just as
Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.”
But what of Isaiah’s talk in verses 6-8 about the
wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the
calf and the lion together, the cow and the bear shall graze, 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? We could go two directions to explain that.
We could take it literally, but if we look around we don’t
see any peace or leopards eating a cow’s diet. None of this has happened. Some
of it is physiologically wrong. Leopards and bears don’t have the kind of teeth
or digestive systems to eat straw.
The question is, why should we take it literally?... It is
written as poetry and it conveys a message of peace is symbolic language. I
think the way we should take this language of imagery is that it tells
us the Messiah brings the time of peace from God even in times of strife. This
is the heart of the Christmas message, “Peace on Earth.” Death and sin have been defeated in the reconciliation
of God and humanity through Jesus Christ. Perhaps Jesus is talking about a new
kind of peace.
If there is peace, it ought to begin with me, as the
hymn goes, not with cows and lions. Peace ought to begin in each one of us
in the congregation.
…Now we are getting to the connection of these passages to ordination,
baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and receiving new members.
This message that peace begins with Jesus “in you and in me”
is the important message for today as
we ordain a new ruling elder.
When
we ordain someone as elder and when we baptize and receive new members, I will
ask the person and you, the congregation to promise to do some things. You tell
me whether these questions expect the addressee to walk in the ways that Isaiah
and Paul described.
I will
ask our new elder if she agrees with Paul that the scriptures give us hope because
they are the authoritative witness to Jesus Christ. That is, that scripture
reveals the relationship between God and humanity that culminates in Jesus
Christ.
I will
ask her if she will fulfill her ministry in obedience to Jesus Christ and if in
her own life she will seek to follow the example of Jesus Christ. Isaiah described the qualities of Jesus that Paul put in a personal context,
we are
“to live in harmony
with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus, 6so that together you may with one voice glorify the God and
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
The
ordination question is, “Will you pray and serve people with energy,
intelligence, imagination and love?”
The congregation does
not get off without some promises. I will ask you, the members of the congregation,
who by the way are all ministers, if you accept our elder as an elder called by
God through your voice to lead us in the way of Jesus Christ? I will ask you if
you promise to pray for, her encourage her, respect her decisions and follow
them as they guide us to serve Jesus Christ, who by the way stands alone as the
Head of the Church. In baptism (by the way we believe there is only one
baptism), I will ask if you promise to treat the person as your own child,
providing nurture, support, love and instruction in the way of Jesus.
I will remind you to
rejoice in Paul’s continuing words in verses 7- 8 that acknowledge the
fulfillment of Isaiah’s message that a shoot shall come from the root of Jesse.
Paul says,
“7Welcome
one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God. 8For I tell you that Christ has become a servant of the
circumcised on behalf of the truth of God in order that he might confirm the
promises given to the patriarchs.”
Friends,
this is our duty. We must support our new and current ruling elders, each new
member and each baptized member, not just to follow them as leaders of initiates,
but as an act by each of us to become an active part of our ministry in Spring
City and in the world at large. Let us all be a semaphore to the way of Jesus
Christ in the world. AMEN.
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