December 5, 2010
The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly - Isaiah 11:1-10
Pastor: Luke Maybry
DownloadI subscribe to Newsweek. You may already know that about me since I make a number of references to it, but I subscribe to and read the weekly newsmagazine, Newsweek. It helps keep me up on what’s happening in the world. I like Newsweek, but I’ll have to tell you that for about the last year or so, Newsweek has been schizophrenic. In the most recent edition, we read that Americans are spending money again, that the past “Black Friday” was a really good one, thus indicating that maybe the economy is coming back from disaster. So, maybe we’ll be alright. Yet the very next article talked about North Korea, and about how the Chinese can’t do as much with them as we thought, and therefore, we must not be alright. There was an article not that long ago that suggested that America was still on top of the world and would stay that way for a very long time. And yet just a few weeks before that, the headliner said that America’s best days are behind it, that as it racks up more and more debt, that more and more of our budget will go to servicing that debt and less and less will go to defense, and somebody will come along and clean our clocks. Newsweek is certainly not unique in the prediction business. In fact, we Americans now more than ever are uncertain about our future.
Well, if we were Judah, this is what Isaiah would say. We are toast. Period. You know all those big buildings in New York City and Washington, DC? If you think it made a big pile of rubble, if you think that was a disaster, you haven’t seen anything yet. It’s all coming down. That flag that you see over there in that corner, well, it’ll look really nice in our enemy’s garage one day. That’s exactly where it’s going. Not only are our best days behind us, Isaiah would say to us if we were Judah, but we are going to get crushed. To my knowledge, the Pisgah National Forest is one of the only virgin forests left in the entire country, with thousands and thousands of acres of enormous trees. Imagine what Pisgah would look like if all those stately thousand-year-old oaks were cut down and there was nothing but briars and weeds left. That’s the imagery that Isaiah uses to describe his country, Judah. America may be a great forest now, like Pisgah, but the day is coming when it will all, every last ounce of it, be gone. The only thing left will be the stumps, Isaiah would say to us if we were Judah.
That’s the bad in Isaiah, and it’s really bad. If you’re Judah, then it’s really bad. Then there’s the ugly. When the bad happens, Isaiah told Judah, don’t go blaming God for it. Don’t go wringing your hands and saying “woe is me.” The ugly part is that the bad stuff happened because you made it happen. You sinned, over and over and over again. You managed somehow to make the God whose mercy extends from the East all the way to the West, who has for eternity made the gateways of the evening and morning shout for joy…, you made that merciful God angry. As an old Lenten song that we sing once a year (because we can’t bear to sing it more) on Good Friday says “Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon you? It is my treason, Lord, that has undone you. ‘Twas I, Lord Jesus, I denied you. I crucified you.” I did it. You did it. The wreck of a future that our precious children will have, according to Isaiah (if we were Judah), is our fault. Merry Christmas!
That’s what Isaiah told Judah. Go read the end of Isaiah 9 and the beginning of Isaiah 10. Actually, for very few exceptions, go read the first 39 chapters of Isaiah, not to mention Jeremiah, Hosea, and Amos. Now to make this clear, I am not Isaiah. I am not in the business of predicting America’s future. I may be prophetic at times, if God so blesses me, but I am not a prophet. This is not at all doom and gloom, at least from America’s perspective. I just know what Isaiah told Judah, and how they must not have liked it very much.
The good news of today’s passage, and today’s sermon for that matter, is “the good.” “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” is the title. There is good. The hard part, though, is that to get to the good, you’ve got cover the bad and the ugly. I should have entitled this sermon, “The Bad, the Ugly, and the Good,” because that’s what Isaiah does. This passage starts out with ruin, with a bunch of old tree stumps in what once was an impressive forest. That’s the great irony of Christmas, isn’t it? We hear all the time about peace on earth at this time of year, and yet, as Isaiah would say, there is no peace on earth. We need a savior to bring peace on earth. We ourselves cannot bring peace on the earth. In fact, if you take Christmas seriously, if you just pay attention, the implication is that we, as fallen and sinful human beings, bring anything but peace on the earth.
The good news, according to Isaiah, is that we have some hope that there is a new king coming who will bring in a different kind of reign, where justice will flow forth and even where the great enemies of the earth become fast friends. We do have some hope. We have lots of hope, actually. That’s the incredibly good news. But the bad news is that we have lots of despair right now, and the despair seems to be winning, and that’s all, Isaiah would say, our fault. We are part of the problem. We took this tremendous forest that God gave us and we cut it all down. We paved paradise, as popular song says, and put up a parking lot. We made a cesspool out of Eden.
Now in order to talk about peace on earth, in order to get a lump in our throats on Christmas Eve, then we first have to accept the ugly fact that we’ve really messed things up down here. We have to accept the fact that we’ve made a cesspool out of Eden. We have to be honest about that. We have to look honestly at ourselves. We can’t accept the dream world that passes as “the holidays” today.
Today is the second Sunday in Advent. This is officially my eighth Advent preaching. In everyone one of those Advents, I have had to preach on John the Baptist, right about now as a matter of fact. John the Baptist a strange man, at best. He’s a very crude and ugly man. He’s from the wilderness. He hasn’t had a bath in months. His beard is long and scraggly, and he has all these locusts in it (or bugs). And he eats wild honey all the time. Can you imagine how he smelled? Instead of bag full of toys, he holds and axe, and he calls us a tree, and says that God’s going to cut us down. He’s very much like Isaiah, actually.
It’s hard as a pastor to preach about John, especially this time of year. Everybody’s all jolly and bright, and if they aren’t, they’re supposed to pretend to be jolly and bright. And in most cases, they genuinely are. And so they come to Church in such a great mood, in the Christmas spirit, only to get crushed by John the Baptist. And so this year, I decided to skip John the Baptist. I decided to stick with Isaiah, only. Isaiah talked a lot about a coming Savior, and we have interpreted that to be Christ. So forget John, I said. Even though there is literally no way to read any of the four Gospels, and not read about John before we read the first word about Jesus, I decided, for the first time ever, to skip crusty, nasty, negative John.
But the very first words in this passage, that a sprig will grow from a stump, are just as bad. But it’s just true, isn’t it? If we can’t acknowledge, or if we refuse to acknowledge, the reality of the fallen, sinful human race, then we’re just deceiving ourselves. Christmas is just another way to get drunk, basically. Some people go out to a bar to escape reality, and some people go to Church, where, if we’re not careful, we’ll celebrate peace on earth and silent night without confronting the reality of what we have done and whom we have allowed ourselves to become. If you’re going to celebrate this new king who will judge the world with righteousness instead of self-advancement and corruption, if you’re going to celebrate a new reality where a wolf will lie down with a lamb, and a leopard with a kid, and a calf with a lion, where a little child will lead them, then you have to take seriously this old, raggedy stump that we’ve made out of Eden. Otherwise, it’s all pretty much a joint effort in self deception that will all be over in three weeks.
I’m not telling you not to be merry, or to intentionally be gloomy and depressed this holiday season. But I am saying that if it’s the Christmas season that we celebrate (instead of the generic holiday season that we’re supposed to use), then we can be merry and bright and get a lump in our throats singing Silent Night only because we have acknowledged that we’ve made a mess of things down here. Evil exists and persists, and we’ve bought into it. If that’s not true, then who needs the Savior anyway? So there’s the bad, and even the ugly collectively and individually. Isaiah and John the Baptist keep us honest about that. They serve as a needed correction on us this time of year. Yes, there’s the good, and it really is infinitely good. But I charge all of us to have the courage to face the bad and even the ugly, and only then, celebrate the good.
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
