The First Christmas Carol

The First Christmas Carol

Isaiah 11:1-10

(Gary W. Charles, Cove Presbyterian Church, Covesville, 12-4-2016)

What was Isaiah thinking? A peaceable kingdom? On this earth? It might make for a lovely children’s book, but it is not a reality you and I are likely to see. Ask endangered species about living in a peaceable kingdom as they are soon to be extinct through a global assault on creation. Ask leaders of the Palestinians and Israelis, of ISIS and North Korea about living in a peaceable kingdom. Ask Republican, Green Party, Democrat, and Libertarians about living in a peaceable kingdom. What was Isaiah thinking?

  Isaiah’s vision of God’s peaceable kingdom is over 2700 years old and it refuses to go away no matter how impossible we judge it. The vision begins not with the image of a healthy tree, but a rotting stump, a metaphor for anyone whose dreams have ever been pronounced dead.

In Isaiah’s vision, all that remains of the tree is a stump that is decaying into mulch. We cannot be sure of the precise time of this vision, but surely, it was a time in Israel’s life when hope for the future had been severed, hope in God’s promise of shalom was rotting like a decaying old stump. 

          So who invited Isaiah into Advent worship anyway? Who needs to hear one more thing about all the decaying stumps around us and inside us? Who needs to hear someone make another promise that you and I know is just not possible? I already hear “it is just not possible” about as much as I can stand. “It is just not possible to believe all this Jesus talk.” “It is just not possible to believe that the church can be something more than a real, old drag.” “It is just not possible to believe that God can do anything with that stump of faith that is rotting inside me.”

To most people today, you and I and churches everywhere are endangered species, if not already extinct. We are the rotting stumps. No wonder the church invites back Isaiah who has been dead for more than 2700 years to walk with us into Advent. At least, Isaiah tells the hard truth about living as a people whose hope for life and peace is like a dead, decaying stump. 

Lutheran pastor, Heidi Neumark began her ministry at the base of a decaying stump called the South Bronx. “The Bronx had international infamy as an urban desert, a landscape of withered hopes, barren of economic vitality, battered by violence, fear, and death,” writes Heidi. “The church’s membership was steadily aging. Most were resigned to the fact that their child-bearing years as a congregation were over.” (Neumark, Breathing Space, p. 11). 

You do not need to travel to New York to see “a landscape of withered hopes.” Some find it in their own mirrors each morning. It may be because they are too young for the job that they know they can do or too old for the job that they will never be given the chance to do again. It may be because they woke up this morning to an empty bed and to fresh memories of when it wasn’t. It may be because they are not the right color or of the preferred sexual orientation to live in the neighborhood where they want to live.

“It is just not possible” is the rotten refrain of the decaying stump. It is a refrain we know all too well. But before you and I buy into that wretched requiem; take notice that we lit a second candle this morning and with it Isaiah returned and not to the pulpit but to the choir.   

Looking out over a sea of “withered hope,” Isaiah sings, “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.”  Isaiah bounds into Advent like some singing fool, stepping around the scattered stumps within us and around us, singing, “Yes, children of God, it is possible.” He sings of a God who has a way of bringing life out of the deadliest locations, the most moribund situations, a God in whom all things are possible.

In the first few months at her church in the Bronx, Heidi spent a lot of time and money painting over graffiti on the church doors. “In walks around the neighborhood,” she writes, “I began asking teenagers and children I met if any of them would like to be part of an art class a friend had offered to help lead. It wasn’t long before a group of enthusiastic young artists came through our doors. Together we read stories from the Bible, which they then illustrated right on the doors.

“At one time, the members would have insisted that the proper place for such artwork was on a bulletin board somewhere inside, but no one could deny that this beat the graffiti. Week after week, the youth painted their hearts out on those doors. It was a joyous, messy process. In spite of all the newspapers taped down, some paint always splattered on the sidewalk, but no matter. It soon faded under the parade of feet that daily passed by, feet of people who stopped to look, to check out what was going on, to offer compliments and suggestions, and to inquire about the church. There has never been another stroke of graffiti on those doors” (Neumark, p. 11).

Isaiah continues his song, singing, “The Spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. . . . He shall not judge by what his eyes see or decide by what his ears hear.” In the Bronx, others saw only a dying church in a dying borough; Heidi saw the Spirit of God at work. Others told Heidi as Isaiah was told, “It is just not possible. This church cannot survive.” Heidi heard a different song; she heard the crazy carol of Isaiah, that with God “all things are possible.”

In my brief time at Cove, I have learned that this congregation is anything but a dying church. I have watched fresh shoots sprouting, giving witness to what God makes possible out of what once seemed only a stump of dead possibilities. I have watched you leap over personal and political differences to care for each other and for everyone who walks through these doors. I have listened to your passion for the peacemaking power of God at work in Mexico, in Guatemala and in Haiti, in Charlottesville and Covesville. I have been moved by some who have been wounded by churches who have found a pew here and found new hope burning in their souls.

When the Advent candle of peace was lit this morning, I swear I could hear Isaiah singing, “They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”  Long before Mary would ask, “How is all this possible?” Isaiah would sing a carol of stumps and shoots, of snakes and infants playing safely in the same crib, of peace that lasts long pass an uneasy ceasefire. Long before the star would guide the magi, Isaiah would sing the first Christmas carol about what God makes possible in the world, what God makes possible in us. 

In a world way too familiar with the refrain, “It is just not possible,” and in a church that far too often sings, “It is just not possible,” it is time to pass the microphone back to Isaiah. He has a new refrain for us to sing, a song of God’s peaceable kingdom alive in us and awaiting us all, a song of what God makes possible. Isaiah is back and he invites us to sing this carol smack in the middle of Advent. 

AMEN