A Boring Safari
Pastor Mathew Magera – 12/4/16 – Sermon 195
St. Thomas Lutheran Church, Trufant, MI
To God be the Glory!
Grace and peace to you from
God our Father, from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
If you've never been on a
safari before and you have the opportunity, I would highly suggest you do it.
I'm not talking about riding on a tram through a city zoo either, I'm talking a
genuine safari where you get to encounter animals of various kinds in their
natural environment doing what animals do. When Lane and I had the opportunity
to do so, we found that staying in a safari camp and going on safaris brought
about emotions that spanned from extreme excitement to downright fear. Knowing
that you are not separated from some of the greatest known predators on the
planet by a giant fence like in a zoo, there is a certain rush of adrenaline
that forces you to respect these creatures that we would otherwise play down in
careless ways. There is something about being inches from the sniffing nose of
a hyena separated only by the vinyl that makes up your tent wall. There is
something about finding a lion print outside that tent in the morning and there
is something about walking down a path looking at birds and hearing a lion's
roar from about a mile away.
The thrill of being on a
safari is knowing that you are at the mercy of the rules of nature. Animals
don't play by our rules, they aren’t peaceful playful exhibits. Even the
elephant had me running in fear at one point on this trip. But, when you are at
the mercy of another set of rules knowing that you don't have as much power as
you did, you still find your attention being grabbed by nature in action. If
you were to see lions scoping out some monkeys in the trees, you wonder if one of
the monkeys might make a mistake, fall out of the tree and become an afternoon
snack. If you were to see a high speed chase ensue, you would be glued to it
waiting for the prey to exhaust itself and become a meal. The natural world is
violent. It's not very peaceful at all.
In Isaiah today we get a
picture of what the world will look like when Jesus comes. The prophet gives us
a visual image of our violent world that survives on the rules of nature and
completely flips it upside down. He writes, "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. The cow will feed with
the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like
the ox." Now, I don't mean to sound harsh but this image that Isaiah
paints for us here would make for a terribly boring safari. It's even worse
than the zoo. Even at the zoo you might be looking at the lions in the den and
thinking to yourself, "couldn't they just put one deer in there? Just
one?" hoping something might happen. But this image that Isaiah paints
gives us complete harmony. No fences. No predator. No prey. It's like going to
a petting zoo where the excitement comes from a goat eating out of your hand
and your largest fear is that one of them sneezes in your face or you step in a
bunch of those little brown pellets they leave all over the place. There's
something about conflict that arouses us, gets our attention, and causes us to
want it. But, it goes well beyond, say, the natural order of the animal
kingdom.
Our world is an entire mess
of conflict. So much so that we start to become blind to it and yet continue to
feed off of it. We say we want world peace but what do you think we would do
with it? The thing of it is that not only is our world a not-so-peaceful place
but many people and many aspects of life thrive on being conflicted. Media
capitalizes on death and destruction. If the evening news were prohibited from
showing any conflict, disunity or conflict, we wouldn't see very much.
Plumbers, mechanics, electricians all survive because things break, because of
conflict. Doctors survive because humans break, because cells within the human
body conflict with one another.
So, when we think about how
much we hate conflict and violence and war and then we step back further to see
how much we actually depend on conflict to survive, this analogy of peace that
Isaiah shows us just becomes more and more meaningless, it becomes something
that if we think about it we may not want, and it might lead us to not only
ignore peace but to actually work to preserve the conflict for our own
enjoyment and survival.
This is why we so
desperately need that shoot from the stump of Jesse. We have grown so accustom
to being that stump that we forget that God created us to be trees. We've
worked our way, leaf by leaf, branch by branch and we have cut ourselves down
to a stump with no other purpose than to be used for sitting on or for yard
decoration in a small Danish community in Michigan. Even when the best of us
call for peace, that conflict is fueled by so many that it is not possible to
completely restore what was cut down. This is why we so desperately need that
shoot, that righteous branch. We have become turned off from peace. Our eyes
have been glazed over by conflict and we have forgotten what joy actually comes
from peace. We have forgotten and have become separated from how God intended
us to be when he created us. We can't even once again comprehend the joy that
comes from pure peace and our minds can't even imagine how it can be good for
us.
Conflict is our new normal
and Isaiah's prophecy appears more and more like a fantasy world that is
increasingly unappealing. So, it's not just that God sent Jesus because he
wants to restore relationships from conflict into peace but it is also because
we have lost our capacity for understanding why it is we need it. If we look at
Isaiah's words and find comfort in them but can't see why it matters and why it
is relevant then we need Jesus.
There is a painting by
Edward Hicks that captures this very scene that Isaiah describes and in this
painting, one of the first things you notice is the wide eyed expressions on the
animals as if they are as perplexed and amazed by this situation as we the
viewer are. It is portrayed as a utopian dream in which you have to pinch
yourself to determine whether it is actually reality.
God created you and I to
live in peace with him, with each other and with the rest of creation. God
meant for that peace to fill the world. God even calls his Son, Jesus, the
Prince of Peace. Can you see now why he ended up on a cross? We didn't want
what he preached. He preached peace and we killed him. Isaiah 11 reminds us
that we live in a violent and conflicted world. But, it also reminds us that
God will not rest until peace captures our hearts once again. God won't stop
making peace until all predators and prey, as well as all enemies live together
in peaceful harmony. This seems so foreign and unattainable to us because a
lion hunting down and killing another animal is just nature taking its course
but that is how dramatic the change needs to be, so that what we see as
unnatural, the animals at peace with one another, as the new natural. And where
does the source of this peace come from? From the symbol of death and
devastation, the useless tree stump. So, if you ever had wondered if those
stumps in Trufant had any more meaning, perhaps you can find a Christian symbol
in it now.
For centuries the nation of
Israel had placed its hopes in King David's family line. God had, after all,
promised that his family tree would flourish and that one of his descendants
would always sit on Israel’s throne. But this image of a stump looks shaky at
best. The once towering tree is dead. But from death comes the new life of that
shoot, that righteous branch, one that will bear fruit. And is this not a
perfect image for who Jesus is? Out of death comes life. After Jesus endured
death on the tree, or the cross, new life sprang forth. And yet, while we still
live in a world that is dominated by conflict and violence, war and
devastation, while we still go to churches that have leopards chasing the
goats, there are still brief glimpses of Isaiah's peaceable kingdom, for
instance when we gather for Holy Communion, when the leopards and the goats
together come to the table. For a brief moment, we are able to see, though
still flawed by our own eyes, a glimpse of that scene that Isaiah shows us.
One final thing that we
notice here in the image of Isaiah 11, in the brief glimpse of that image in
Holy Communion, is that those animals that were once identified as predator and
prey are not only gathered into one but they are gathered around the little
child that leads them. In Holy Communion when the wolves and the lambs, the
calves and the lions gather, they gather around that little child, our Lord
Jesus Christ who leads them into that peace, for without the leadership of the
child, the animals would not know that peace which passes all understanding.
And so it is with us that without the leadership of Jesus, we will never know
that peace.
So, perhaps it may be a
boring safari to see all of these animals getting along but it is also an image
of hope for us that while we may not understand it, Jesus comes to ensure that
we reach that point where the conflict in our churches, the conflict in our
community, the conflict in our nation, and the conflict in our world would be
replaced by a heavenly peace. God is sending Jesus to rescue us from our own
captivity to sin so that we might see the beauty and the desire of the peaceful
kingdom. And while I would not really find any interest in a boring safari, I
know that it is not something that I may desire due to my sinful nature, but I
know it is something that I need and I am willing to use it as my guide and my
image. I pray that you would do the same so that together with that little
child leading us we can be a source of that peaceful kingdom right here and
right now. To God be the glory, now and always. Amen.