Second Sunday of Advent

"A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a branch will bear fruit.... He will not judge by outward appearances, but with righteousness he will judge the needy. With justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth. The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together, and a little child will lead them."

It's the kind of story that mom and dad might tell to their child before he goes to sleep at night: "The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. The infant will play near the hole of the cobra, and the young child put his hand into the viper's nest, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea." And a little child will lead them.

And as you close your book, as she starts to fade away toward sleep, your little girl says, "Daddy, tell it again. I want to hear it again, about how the calf and the lion become friends and take a nap together." And the grown-up tells it again and again and again, until you can't stand it anymore.

Advent is the season of poetry, the poetry we seek and need as we go to sleep after a long day of life in what we call "the real world."

Sixty years ago, on a Sunday afternoon, December 7, 1941, students at Duke University filed out of the University Chapel. They had just listened to a recitation of the poetry of the prophet Isaiah, the annual performance of Handel's Messiah. They had heard, once again, Handel's reading of Isaiah's news: "Unto us a Child is born. Hallelujah!"

One of the students remembers the afternoon well. As they left the chapel, he says, they were surprised to see other students gathered around automobiles, listening intently on car radios to the news of the "real world." They had just come out from the poetry of the Bible and the music of Handel to the cries of war.

Their lives would never be the same after that day. After all, what match is poetry, even the poetry of Isaiah, when set next to the facts of life? About the same moment that the chapel choir had been singing that every valley would be filled and every mountain made low to make way for the salvation of God, cities in China and Europe and North Africa were being leveled for the kings of Gog and Magog, and civilization was marching back into the wilderness. What match is poetry when set next to September 11 and the war on terrorism?

Isaiah's poetry is wilderness verse: "The voice of one crying in the wilderness. Prepare the way of the Lord." And it was in the wilderness, too, that the Word of God came to John the Baptist. It was a Word that came to one who lived in a land that was far from God, far from home. Tiberias Caesar had ruled for fifteen years, Pontius Pilate was doing Caesar's bidding in Jerusalem, Herod was tap-dancing for Pilate in Galilee, and John was preaching in the Jordan valley and in the countryside of Judea and in Jerusalem. But he may as well have been by the waters of Babylon, where we sat down and wept with the psalmist and Isaiah hundreds of years earlier, because the priests of Judea still preferred the kings of Babylon and Rome to the King of Heaven, and the kings and generals and armies of this world still called the shots.

It was there, in this wilderness, in the wilderness of what we call "the real world," that the word of hope came to John in the poetry of Isaiah: "Prepare the way of the Lord...again. A shoot will come from the stump of Jesse...again. The Lord will come...once again. To set the captives free...again. The wolf will live with the lamb...again. And a little child shall lead them...once again."

William Willimon says that since he has become a grown-up, he has, by the grace of God, lost his "childish faith in the world as it is" and has regained his faith in the poetry and stories of hope he knew as a child.

The faith of "the world as it is" is what Chesterton called the faith of the world of "scientific fatalism." (Orthodoxy) It is the faith of determinism, the faith "that everything is as it must always have been" and as it must always be, the faith that "the leaf on the tree is green because it could never have been anything else," the faith that the apple on Isaac Newton's tree hit Newton on the nose because an apple must always fall down toward what is sitting under it.

Determinism, when applied to human society, is the faith that poverty is inevitable for some because wealth begets wealth, and the amount of wealth available is limited, and therefore those who are rich must be rich because they work hard and deserve to be rich, and those who are poor must be poor because they must have done something to displease God.

Determinism is the faith that there must be a war in Afghanistan because there were acts of terrorism in the United States, and there were acts of terrorism in the United States because the United States stationed troops in Saudi Arabia ten years ago, and the United States stationed troops in Saudi Arabia ten years ago because Iraq invaded Kuwait, and Iraq invaded Kuwait because.... And this "eye for an eye" is simply the necessary result of the "eye for an eye" that reaches all the way back to when the king of Gog first hit the king of Magog in the eye, and even earlier, because that's the way life is. Eyes that get hit require that another eye be hit.

Determinism is the faith that the goat can never lie down with the leopard, because whenever we have seen a goat try to lie down with a leopard, we have always observed that lunch happens, and that it wasn't the goat who got anything to eat.

Determinism, like theology, is the kind of faith that is best communicated by prose. It is the faith of history and logic: This is the way we have always seen the world work, therefore this is the way life will always be.

But the language of Advent is poetry, precisely because Advent sees an alternative world, a world which no prose can adequately describe. It is a world of freedom and possibility, a world in which things do not have to be as they are today just because that's the way we have always observed them, a world in which the leaf on the tree might just as well be gold as green, a world in which an eye does not necessarily require an eye, nor a tooth a tooth, a world in which the sun does not come up again every morning because it has to, nor the moon come up again every night because it has to, but because God speaks to them and says, "Do it again!" It is a world in which "the calf and the lion and the yearling may lie down together, and a little child will lead them," because that is the way God wants it to be.

Advent speaks of the freedom and newness of things to come, and uses the language of poetry, because Advent seeks to express the biblical belief that a leaf is green, not because it must be green, but because someone means it to be green the way the Prince means Sleeping Beauty to live when he kisses her.

Advent seeks to express the faith that when all is said and done the sun comes up every morning, not because it must come up, but because someone means it to come up. And lunch will not always happen when a goat lies down with a leopard, and the calf and the lion and the yearling will someday lie down in peace together, because God means it to be that way. And a little child will lead even the kings of Gog and Magog because that is what God wants for his world.

The world is more like a fairy tale than we ordinarily believe, Chesterton argues. It is more weird than rational. "One elephant having a trunk is odd, but all elephants having trunks looks like a plot [to me]," he says.

The fact that things tend to be repeated in nature, even a great number of times, does not necessarily mean that nature must always be that way. It is logically necessary that two plus two is always four, but it is not logically necessary that just because we have always seen the sun come up in the morning, the sun must always come up in the morning.

Perhaps "the repetition in nature is not mere recurrence [but] is more a theatrical encore." Perhaps the repetition in nature, like the repetition of the sun's rising and setting, is more like the excited repetition of a schoolmaster saying the same thing over and over again in hopes that we'll get the point. Perhaps the leaves and the grass are some sort of signal, some sort of green banner or standard, yearning to be understand, the way the stars twinkle, yearning to be understood. Perhaps the rising of the sun each day is someone's way of making some kind of point, God's way of trying to get our attention.

Perhaps the mere repetition of nature is not a sign of nature's deadness and pointlessness, but rather a sign of life's vitality and meaning, Daddy's way of doing it again for our delight.

Preachers and theologians, like Faulkner, are failed poets. Ours is the language of the mind and logic, not the language of the eye. But the language of Advent is the language of the eye, the language of poetry. And Isaiah is the poet of Advent, because he is the seer of hope, and poetry is the only language up to the task of his message. Only poetry can assure us that the magic of life implies a magician who is full of surprises, and that the story of life implies a storyteller who, when he tells his story again, can finish it in new and surprising ways anytime he wants to.

The poetry of Isaiah is the prophet's way of saying that when one day is as predictable as the next, and no surprise is possible, then that is prison, the prison of the world of things as they have always been. And Isaiah refuses to be captive in the prison of that wilderness. He chooses, instead, the freedom and life of creation and re-creation, the freedom of God, which only poetry can adequately express.

Isaiah's poetry and John's preaching and Handel's music are language that liberate, language that offer us hope, a way out of the wilderness of politicians and TV anchors and entertainers and the other masters of prosaic wilderness language.

Every night we listen to the language of Washington and television, language that flattens everything to prose, language descriptive only of what is now, rather than to the poetry of Advent that evokes the possibility of what is to come, because we believe that poetry is, after all, no match for "the facts of life." But from 2,600 years ago, Isaiah speaks the language of hope: "A shoot shall come out of the stump of Jesse.... The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together, and a little child will lead them." It's a vision of a world in which things can be reversed, because the Creator of the world wants them reversed.

It's a vision of a world where there is peace in a world usually at war, a world in which people who usually devour each other learn to love each other. It is, says Isaiah, "a signal, a standard or banner of hope, to rally the peoples," so that all the world shall know that God is active and great, that the Storyteller will finish his story the way he wants, that God intends to have his gracious way with his world.

So we gather in church on this Second Sunday of Advent, and Advent points us to the creche and to the Cross. Advent points us to the Cross because it points us to the creche. Because it is a little child who will lead us. And it points to the creche because it points to the Cross. Because it is the weak and helpless who will show us the way into the future.

We gather in church during Advent, and we hear and sing the poetry. And we pray that God will give us eyes to see the advent of God among us, so that we might be part of his incoming kingdom. It is not a vision of what we are to do; it is a vision of what God is doing. And we are not asked so much to do as to see, because the vision of Advent is our hope, and in this hope is our salvation.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.