"Upside Down 02: Wild Beasts" - Tim Suttle

December 4, 2016 Redemption Church

"Upside Down 02: Wild Beasts"

by Tim Suttle

12/4/2016

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Upside Down 02: Wild Beasts Tim Suttle

2016.12.04 – Advent 02 – Upside Down
Isaiah 11:1-10 – The Root of Jesse

So I have this love hate thing with Christmas… I’ve admitted this before.
I really do love Christmas.
It’s one of my favorite times of the year.
But some of what happens this time of yr. really bugs me.
And it has for a long time.
LOVE: … festive, xmas light, giving gifts, time off, parties, food…
HATE: over top consumerism, decorating, busyness, anxiety, stress…
PT: Anybody else have this experience?

Quick show of hands:
… straight up love Christmas no hating to it?
… hate Christmas, wish it was June right now?
… love/hate combination?

It’s funny, but I bet if we asked our kids, there would be only a LOVE/LOVE relationship w/xmas going on there right?
Kids don’t hate anything about xmas time.
I think maybe part of the reason is that:
Kids don’t have to make Christmas happen.
Christmas just happens to them.
They don’t have the generate the celebration, right?
We generate it for them.
Nothing kids can do to make xmas happen, come faster.
For kids this is a season of great anticipation

PT: And I think that’s part of the secret… it’s this movement away from generating Christmas & learning to just receive it… luckily for us the church for the past 2,000 years has had a built in solution for this. It’s called ADVENT.

There’s a big distinction in the Christian calendar between the season of Advent and the season of Christmas.
Advent: 4wk season of WAITING & expectation leading up to xmas...
Christmas: 12 day feast or CELEBRATION, starting Dec. 25th
Did you catch the difference between those 2 things?
Advent: is about WAITING… anticipation…
Christmas: is about FEASTING/CELEBRATING.
4 weeks leading up to xmas are season of prep/waiting
12 days after Dec 25th = season of celebration
PT: This has become a real tradition at Redemption Church. We celebrate ADVENT as a season, and we take really serious – or at least we try to take seriously – the call to WAIT on God during this season.

Advent is about taking this posture of WAITING to receive the Messiah when he comes & you kind of have to trick yourself into it.
Because we know the Messiah HAS already come.
He lives in our hearts… in the space between us …
He is on the loose working in the world.
But there’s also this reality that he will come again for us.
And all of us are awaiting that day as well.
So for 4 wks, during the season of ADVENT…
We assume a posture of WAITING.
… a posture of anticipation.
… we say, “I’m not going to start celebrating just yet.”
In fact we do this decrescendo… front-load busyness 1st few weeks.
Then try and slow everything down… make space… quiet our lives.

PT: And we remain in this posture until Christmas Eve, when we celebrate the fact that the light of the world came down into darkness. And if you do this well, there will be – truly… not kidding – a sense in which he comes to you again on Christmas Eve; a sense in which the weight of it all will fall on you again.
Not just a sentimental Christmas moment w/you in a cable-knit sweater and your kids in itchy clothes.
You experience the reality that God has come for you… it’s significant.

Traditionally we go to the OT during this season of Advent, and often find ourselves in the writings of the prophets.
Today our text comes from Isaiah Chapter 11.
If you have your bibles… if not words on screen

1A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. 2The 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. 3His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord. He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; 4but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked. 5Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist, and faithfulness the belt around his loins.

Isaiah was a Prophet, & many people think that means he sat around predicting things that would happen in the future… which is not quite right.
The prophet is the one who thinks the thought nobody else can think.
Says the things everyone else is too blind or afraid to say.
The prophet names what’s really going on & how things will turn out if the people don’t change what they’re doing.

Isaac Newton said that if you sit under an apple tree & an apple breaks loose from the branch, it won’t just float there.
It will fall to the ground.
Some force must be acting on it… called this gravity.
Newton also said: if you drop a rock & feather from the same height in a vacuum… they’ll hit the ground at the exact same time.
Gravity is a constant… this became a law of Newtonian physics.
Before Newton nobody had named that…

Then along came Einstein: he said, sure an apple breaks loose will fall to the ground… but what if you are riding the apple?
What if a person were to fall, say from the top of a very tall building?
Once they get going they’ll no longer feel the effects of gravity…
I mean they’ll feel the effects when they hit the pavement.
But on the way down, they will actually feel weightless.

He said: imagine you’re on an elevator, descending into the vacuum of space… if you travel in this elevator at a constant speed… .
You won’t feel the effects of gravity.
Not only that, there would be no scientific way for you to prove that you are moving without reference to something outside the system.
Inside the elevator you would think you are standing completely still.
And you would have no way of knowing you’re in motion unless you have a reference point outside the system.
PT: That’s the prophet. The prophet is a voice from outside the system.
Right now we are all moving at 67k mph through space in our orbit @ the sun.
Why is everybody not screaming, Ah! We’re going 67,000mph!!!
Because everything in our frame of reference is going 67,000 mph.
It’s only when you compare it to something outside the system, like the sun, that you realize you’re in motion.
That’s the prophet: they have a reference point outside the system.
The problem is nobody ever wants to hear it.

Einstein had this thought experiment: Pretend that I have a light clock, a cylinder with mirrors at the top & bottom.
And the pendulum for this clock is a single dot of light.
The speed of light is always a constant, so it bounces back & forth at a constant velocity… tick-tock, tick-tock.
The distance it travels from one mirror to the other always the same.
Now let’s say we’ve got this clock on a train going fast… speed of light.
If we’re both on the train we’d see it behaving same as on the ground.
What if you are on the train …. and I’m on the ground.
I wouldn’t see the light beam bouncing straight up and down.
I’d see it zig-zagging… travel a much longer distance.
So if the distance changes & light is a constant, that means another variable has to change in order to balance the equation.
The only other variable is time…
So relative to me, your clock = run more slowly than mine.

This is how Einstein proved that time is actually not a constant. Time is relative… it’s a variable in the system… does your brain hurt yet? 1 more:
If we had a yardstick here, & measured it, we’d see it’s 1 yd long.
If we were both on a train going speed of light & measured = 1 yd long.
If you were on the train & I was on the ground.
And I measured the yardstick as it went by at the speed of light.
It would no longer measure 1 yd… it would be shorter.
Even matter isn’t constant, it can bend & change relative to other things

PT: This one made people really mad. “This doesn’t obey the laws of physics.” And Einstein said, ”Yeah, no duh. Time to update the laws of physics.”

You cannot imagine how threatening this was to some people.
Einstein was like a voice from outside the system.
He was called a pathological liar.
Came at him w/anti-Semitic smears… “Jewish Science.”
The Nobel committee refused to give him the Nobel prize for years.
And when they finally gave him one, he didn’t get it for relativity.
They gave it for his work on the photo-electric effect.
This is the biggest advance in laws of physics since Isaac Newton & he has never received the Nobel prize for it… it was too threatening.

PT: The thing about his discovery is that it was elegant. It wasn’t that complex. It was high school math. But it was a thought no one else could let themselves think. That’s what the prophet does… they think the unthinkable thought.

Einstein proved: w/out relating to something outside your coordinate system, you can’t really accurately name what’s going on inside your coordinate system.
That’s the role of the prophet.
They’re a voice from outside the coordinate system… status quo.

When the prophet Isaiah told the people: “a shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.”
Everybody thought he was crazy.
This did not conform to the laws of physics of the day.
The house of Jesse was a stump… dead wood… worthless…

You remember the story of Jesse right? Jesse = grandson of Ruth & Boaz. He was a farmer & a sheep breeder who lived in Bethlehem.
He had a wife & a bunch of sons.
Lived peacefully there in the hill country farming & raising sheep
Until one day the prophet Samuel shows up @ Jesse’s door asking to meet all of his sons.

God had told Samuel that he had rejected Saul as king. He wanted Samuel to go anoint a new king & to go to the house of Jesse to find him.
Samuel met the oldest son Eliab, he thought, “This is great… this kid looks like a strong, virile, man.”
God said, “no I have rejected him. The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.”

So the next son comes, and the next one… and God says that none of these are the one. Finally Samuel says, “Is this all you got?”
Jesse gets a little embarrassed…
“Well, not really, there’s one more but he’s the runt of the litter. We got him out tending sheep.”
Samuel says, “I can wait. Go get him.”
And it was David, the youngest son, the least among the family..
… who became the greatest king in the history of Israel.
David led Israel faithfully, conquered much of the territory promised to Israel by God. Conquered Jerusalem & moved the capital there.
Made a new Davidic covenant with God.
Had a bunch of children…
David was the most faithful & successful king of Israel in their history.
Then his children get involved & it all goes sideways.
After Solomon the kingdom was divided.
There was this long slow decline.
One bad king after another / one bad decision after another.
During the reign of four of those kings, came Isaiah the prophet.
And he began to warn Israel that God was getting tired of this.

But the glory of Israel was lost. God’s vision for a people who would be set apart, a people on whom God would hammer out his image…
He would bless them & make them a nation of priests.
That dream was over… the people just could not be faithful.
The axe had been put to the base of the tree of Jesse…
And all that was left was a stump.
… so long after Isaiah was gone… Jerusalem lay in ruins.
Most of the people had been killed or exiled.

The people of God, lost as they were, turned again to the words of the prophet Isaiah & this is what the prophet told them:

PT: And this vision caught hold in their imaginations. It was a voice coming to them from outside their system… thinking the unthinkable thought, imagining a world that nobody else could imagine.

It’s interesting you can take these ten verses and split them in ½, and it’s sort of like looking at to separate but related paintings.
v.1-5 speaks of this HOPE of a future ruler.
v.6-10 speaks of this HOPE for a coming age of peace.

PT: And for Isaiah: the first hope… makes the second hope possible. The hope of a future peace will never happen without the hope of the righteous king…
In this short passage Isaiah paints two distinct but related pictures. One of the righteous ruler, the other of what his rule will look like.
The two are like a pair of paintings that could stand alone, but are more powerful if they are seen together.
Writer Paul Simpson Duke says that if they were paintings…
You’d name 1st one Justice… and the 2nd one Peace.

I’m going to read the passage again in the two parts & just want you to imagine you are part of the people of God.
Israel has died… there is no Israel… Jerusalem is in ruins.
The people are dispersed among the nations.
Or living in exile in Babylon.
And you are dreaming of a future ruler – a king like David:

This is a picture of Justice.
This is a ruler that has this spirit of
Wisdom – understanding
Counsel (ability to work w/others & involve others)
Might – not insecure… but w/a deep down strength
Knowledge, but w/this reverence for the LORD.
And he doesn’t go by what his eyes see or ears hear
But with righteousness… and then look at this part
“… but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth;”

PT: The poor, and the meek of the earth will be protected. They will have enough to live on & be happy.

Then they thought about what it would be like when this king finally came for them. What would his reign and rule be like?

6The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. 7The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. 8The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den. 9They 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. 10On that day the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples; the nations shall inquire of him, and his dwelling shall be glorious.
This is a vision of peace & it kind of makes no sense!
…these unlikely friendships between enemies.
Predators & prey sharing a meal together.
The wolf and the lamb taking a nap.
The child who can play in the viper’s den & not get hurt.
And showing the way to this new life is not a manly king… it says:
And a little child shall lead them.

PT: This is a picture of peaceful co-existence. Not where everyone becomes this homogenous bunch of like-minded zombies. The lion doesn’t stop being a lion, the lamb doesn’t stop being a lamb. They just learn, somehow, a way to live together in peace.

Now, when the early church looked at these two pictures that the prophet Isaiah was working with.
They looked at the first one & saw Jesus.
The looked at the second one & saw the church.

Jesus was the righteous ruler – the new kind of king.
Doesn’t rule with the sword & the chariot.
He rules with meekness & self-sacrifice.
His throne was a cross
And the people who follow after him, they live together peacefully…
They bury the hatchet.
They might be different but they live together like family.
Enemies become friends.
They will not hurt or destroy each other or the earth.
But they nurture life.
Wherever they follow Jesus, there “will be the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”

PT: when the earliest Christians read Isaiah, and saw the picture of the righteous ruler… they saw Jesus. When they saw the picture of peace & the kingdom of God… they saw themselves.

And all of it… the two visions of Justice & Peace. The righteous ruling Messiah, and the people of God who follow after Jesus.
They all have as their Genesis:
The shoot that came out of the stump of Jesse.
He was a little child that would lead them.

There was a famous American Painter named Edward Hicks – he was a Quaker, lived in the late 1700s, early 1800s.
His favorite subject drew from this passage in Isaiah 11
He called these pictures “The Peaceable Kingdom”
And he seems to have become almost obsessed w/this vision.
62 of them still exist… thought to have been 100s at one time.

Early ones are serene, idyllic… kind of pastoral scenes.

Began to experiment w/other themes
living in frontier of Pennsylvania
One w/William Penn signing a treaty w/the Native Americans
He was doing this on purpose you see.
These were warring factions in his day.

As he went along painting this same picture over & over…the wild beasts looked much more scary.
In the early years the lions looked like house cats…
Later on = more menacing, sharp teeth, looking hungry… like toward the end of his life he knew how dangerous the wild beasts really were.

The last bunch of them, you can see the animals are like “what is happening to me? Why am I not eating this juicy lamb right here…”

PT: We read this text with one eye on this vision of God’s peaceful kingdom… but the other eye is on the wild beasts… and we know what a stretch it is…

You can’t get cute when you read Isaiah 11. We live in a world with a dreadful abundance of human predators of all kinds.
Predator nations, individuals, institutions, and societies…
… bent on destroying the vulnerable.
When we make ourselves vulnerable, going to get hurt.
This is a picture that comes to us from outside our system… makes no sense!
Reality is: a warped humanity tends to warp creation as well.
Instead of stewarding the earth we exploit it.
Instead of living together peacefully we find ways to abuse & kill.
The prophet believed a child would come…
The advent of a whole new kind of kind was at the gates.
The world may be full of wild beasts…
(The Babylonians, Persians, Romans… even priests & rulers)
They fought and killed and took advantage of the weak.
But Jesus taught them a completely different way…
“Not so among you… among my people there will be peace!”
To those stuck inside a closed system it seems completely unrealistic.
But Jesus came from outside the system… a new frame of reference.

And as Christians we cling to God’s vision of the kingdom… but we know what we are living w/some wild beasts… teeth & everything.
And so we have to stare into the face of the poor.
We have to be in friendship w/the homeless.
We have to lock arms with the immigrant.
And we say “Maybe out there things are awful, but in our midst… in this place, the lion will lie down w/the lamb.”
The hungry will get food.
The friendless will find friendship.
The vulnerable will be protected and inasmuch as it depends on us this kingdom will extend out into: work, neighbor, family.

So for the next few weeks our lives are being lived out through these Advent days of darkness & unexpected light, these days of endings and of unexpected beginnings, these days of death and unexpected life.
And the signs of all of these are not much... you know?
… a shoot out of a stump, a branch out of the roots.
Just a small step forward, a smile... a touch…not much.
A little forgiveness… patience… foregoing vengeance…
These are the signs of the peaceable kingdom.
They are small, and frail, and weak like the little child who leads us… but they are enough for me.

Because every now and then, peace breaks out in a place where I never would have believed it possible.
Every once in a while our deepest, oldest wounds actually heal.
Every now & then a hatchet = buried so deep, it’s never dug up again.

PT: And I have no way of accounting for any of it except to say that it must come from above… from outside the system. Isaiah's vision--the light, the peace, the healing, the calm and the peaceable kingdom of God.

Advent is when we turn our eyes to this picture… and we wait patiently… we say come Lord Jesus, come. Be our good, and wise, and gentle king. Come and rule and reign in our hearts. Come and show us how to organize our common life together in such a way that we experience your peace now and always.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

1. There is tension between the world as it returns to the way God created it and what we see in our everyday lives: we don’t see the wolf living with the lamb, and we regularly see humans doing harm to other people. How does your own behavior contribute to this tension? (For example, the way you use your time or money, how you treat others with whom you disagree, driving habits, etc.) How can you use the example of Jesus to reduce this tension?

2. Where in your life can you be the lion who lies down with the lamb? Where can you show grace when others would expect power or vengeance?

3. Who has been a prophet in your life? Living or past?

4. Where in your life do you long for hope like the shoot sprouting from the stump of Jesse?

5. Where in your life are you currently seeing a shoot of hope sprouting?