 |
 |
|
|
Sermon delivered December 9, 2007, by
Rev. Dr. Eugene C. Buie, Jr.
Matthew 3:1-12
Isaiah 11:1-10
It has been said that intellectual inquiry and understanding take place within a tradition that carries a community’s thoughts, practices, and institutions through time. (Alastar MacIntyre)
When covenant traditions, that make healthy social relationships possible, are abandoned for the sake of personal gratification and pride, as is happening in modern North American society, people soon lose their way, communities disintegrate, and society regresses, often with chaotic consequences. Do you remember the outcry of Tavia in "Fiddler on the Roof"? "Tradition! Tradition!," he sang as change enveloped his family and his community came apart.
It is no secret that our American culture is changing in similar ways. The traditions that shaped this nation are not being passed on to our children. More and more, parents have given their children into the hands of public educators who have abandoned the traditions of our grandparents. Also, two world wars and rapid scientific and technological changes have impacted traditions in shattering ways.
Nowhere have these changes been felt more than in our families and our religious institutions. For all practical purposes, Christendom is dead. People are adrift on a sea of relativism, with no compass other than their own limited reckoning and a "feel-good religiosophy." I said, "religiosophy," a religious philosophy that comes more from a human desire for self-satisfaction and justification than from divine judgment and redemption.
It is in times such as these that we need prophets, and we have one in the person of Anthony Esolen, Professor of English at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island. In the forefront of our disappearing traditions are Western literature and a declining ability to read the classic works that express the heart of traditions passed on from generation to generation. Esolen writes,
Books….Yes, I see books. I see a land littered with libraries. In them I see relics: wooden chairs and balustrades no one any longer has the skill to carve, and a few old books to go with them, dusty, forbidding, small-printed, filled with observation, eloquence, and sometimes genius. No body reads them. Few can. I see those books packed in boxes to make room for the ephemeral. I see the boxes carted to the landfill. I see crows pecking at the centuries. I see schools as big as mills. The purpose of the school is to smooth the unpredictable corrugations of a forehead in thought, and at that purpose it works with great efficiency. I see history sowed with salt; geography scraped flat as if by another Ice Age, with a moraine left behind in Social Studies; the works of literary giants scorned, sent into storage, or perversely misunderstood; doses of their art administered to the young as vaccines, lest anyone catch a passion for them again. I see a lot of schooling. I see penny sheet-music no one can read, for songs no one can sing, expressing sentiments no one can understand. I see the traditions of man’s struggle to scratch a living from the land abandoned. Were the wheel to need inventing again, we would drag our prey behind us by ropes, could we remember how to twist a rope. I see the skill of the mason and the carpenter receding, the possession of but a few. Amidst all our wealth I see buildings at best pleasant in a sad nostalgic way, at worst dreary, crass, and ugly. I see Man and Woman, if I squint. They no longer know who they are. They do not recognize their bodies and psyches, tangled over by complementary virtues and vices, strengths and frailties. The wisdom of their grandparents regarding marriage they have tossed aside, so that each is as solitary as a pelican in the wilderness, an owl among ruins.
Our text this morning is from another prophet, Isaiah, who writes,
A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. (Isaiah 11:1)
In our modern, overbearing desire to feel good about ourselves, we choose to ignore it mostly, this "stump" of Jesse. We Protestants like to focus on the shoot and ignore the stump. In your years of church-going, have you ever heard a sermon on the "stump of Jesse"? Well, this morning, you will.
e do not remember Jesse, grandson of Boaz and father of David and grandfather of Solomon, both great kings of Israel. The image here should impact us, but it doesn’t…Jesse’s heritage: nothing but a stump. We have forgotten or, worse, were never taught. After years and years of unfaithfulness to God, the "stump of Jesse" represents all that is left of the great tree of Israel raised up by David and Solomon, both lovers of God.
By the time of Isaiah, the "tree of Israel," that no longer bore fruit for God, had been chopped down. Nothing remained but a stump, dead and rotting. Solomon’s great kingdom was divided by his children and their descendents. Israel in the north, and Judah in the south. By 721BC, Israel was over-run by Assyria and the people carried away, never to return to their homeland. And what about Judah? Esolen writes:
Judah lay near the great ports of Tyre and Sidon, at the crossroads for caravans traveling from the Euphrates to Egypt, and from Asia Minor to Aqaba. But a trade route is a war route, so Judah found itself hemmed between threats, allying with one nation, submitting tribute to another. It was more cosmopolitan than we might imagine, a New Jersey of the Near East. Caravans bring not only goods but gods. The people of Judah sinned not by falling away from religion, but by falling enthusiastically into it. Josiah’s grandfather Manasseh was a child at the circus when it came to religion: Come one, come all. Bad enough, but Manasseh worked on the principle that you can never have too much religion, nor too many ways to placate the gods or at least try to divine what they are up to. So he dabbled in Chaldean worship of the stars, and built them altars in the Temple courtyard. And he "made his son pass through the fire" to Molech, no doubt with a heavy religious heart. He "observed times, and used enchantments, and dealt with familiar spirits and wizards."
So you will know, the pagan god, Molech, was the image of a beast cast in iron. Fire burned inside of the image and infants were sacrificed to Molech by laying them in the red-hot arms of the beast to be burned alive. This Manasseh did with his own son. Esolen continues…
Manasseh was, we may say, a "spiritual" person, ever on the watch to find a way to compel spiritual powers to do his will. Like the spiritual person of our own age, he had an open mind: as open and dark as the sky on a moonless night, as blank of meaning as the billboards at Las Vagas, where everything may be bought but peace and truth. Nor is there any hint that the people Manasseh ruled were of a different mind. The people of Judah, Temple-goers and all, did their own picking and choosing in the mall of the gods. I wonder what it was like to be that high priest Hilkiah, as far as we can tell neither particularly bad nor particularly good. I wonder what it was like to be able to read, and not to read; to live in the illusion of peace, enjoying plenty of goods and plenty of gods, the goods trivial and the gods a cheat; to live in a Dark Age filed with light.[1]
This modern-day prophet raises a question for us, asking if these days of Judah, a dark age filled with light, where people enjoyed plenty of goods and plenty of gods, in any way describes this age in which we live? Do we, like him, kneel and pray, but do not work out our salvation with fear and trembling? Do we know that nothing but the Lord God will satisfy the hunger in our heart, but our heart is not that hungry? Do we shop at the bazaar of our religious institutions to pass the time, not expecting to be satisfied?
Esolen expresses an alarming commentary on Christianity today. Like the people of Judah, we no longer fear for our salvation or hunger to know the Lord or desire to be like Christ. Who are we? What are the traditions we live by? What do we teach our children and grandchildren that they no longer learn from a culture that has ceased to be guided by Christian ideals and morals?
Like the people of Judah, have we become a stump….nothing more than a memory of a tree that once stood tall and strong in Christian traditions? One should wonder, and tremble.
But listen now again to what Isaiah says.
A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. 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.
Out of this dead stump, Isaiah proclaims, will grow a new shoot, a fresh branch from its roots. Where the God of Israel is concerned, that which is dead will live again. When Josiah became king at the age of eight years, the chief priest, Hilkiah, found a scroll while repairing the Temple, perhaps the Book of Deuteronomy. When he read it to Josiah, the young king tore his robes. Pagan altars were destroyed. The Temple was cleansed, and Josiah turned his people to repentance and a renewed devotion to the LORD.
Today, on this second Sunday of Advent, John the Baptist proclaims once again God’s call to repentance. "The kingdom of heaven is at hand," he cried, as the long awaited prophecy of Isaiah was fulfilled with the coming of Christ Jesus into the world. Listen, however, to what John also says.
Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.
Should we be surprised that God is ready to reduce Judah to a stump once again? Is this a warning? Certainly, it is. Like the kings of Judah, it would seem, we in this twenty-first century are again playing among the idols that have been erected in the temple. Oh, they are not so blatant as sultry, sexy Ashtorath or as hungry for our children as Molech’s fire, but these gods are there in our culture none-the-less. Their power over us grows in the absence of Christian traditions that once carried our thoughts, practices, and institutions forward through time.
We must regain these traditions. Yes, the things of this world change, but God never changes. The Lord of heaven and earth calls us to repentance, to turn around and face the future God intends for us. We must work out our salvation with fear and trembling, hunger for the Lord, and strive to be like Christ. Where necessary, we must renew our knowledge of God’s word by rediscovering our Bibles and teaching the Word of God to our children. In short, we must regain the covenant traditions of our faith…and we must begin now. Amen.
[1] Anthony Esolen, "Finders Weepers," Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, December 2007, all quotations taken from pages 9-11.