In a Perfect World
Isaiah 2:1-5 1This is what Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem: 2In the last days the mountain of the LORD's temple will be established as chief among the mountains; it will be raised above the hills, and all nations will stream to it. 3Many peoples will come and say, "Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths." The law will go out from Zion, the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. 4He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore. 5Come, O house of Jacob, let us walk in the light of the LORD.
Jesus was born to give us hope. Jesus is evidence that at any moment God is liable to burst again into our world and into our life. Jesus gives us a sense of hope that waits on God, wondering what God will do next.
Isaiah’s vision of Jerusalem is vivid. Jerusalem is in ruins, a pile of smoke and rubble, and the people are devastated. They feel that God has betrayed them, and they lose all hope. And into this devastation comes the word: “A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit” (Isaiah 11:1). In the midst of rubble, amidst everything dead, a small green branch grows out of the seemingly dead base.
The hope that came from that stump was fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Hope arose form the root of Jesse and his son David. Hope was heard with a baby’s low cry. Nothing big, a sign that could easily be ignored. But in the dead of darkness, in the spiritual devastation of Israel, a root sprang forth and the life of that root had the power of God to bring peace to the world and to each person in it.
When it seemed to everyone that Jesus was taking Israel by storm, suddenly He was cut down, arrested, hung on a Cross to die, and the cry for the Cross was not the baby’s low cry but the anguished cry of a dying man. When the disciples saw Jesus slowly dying on the Cross they lost all reason to hope. The Cross destroyed their hope that this was the one who would deliver Israel from the hands of Rome.
The Cross seemed to destroy everything the disciples had hoped for in Jesus, and yet that cry from the Cross was also a “shoot coming from the stump of Jesse.”
Hope that depends on the ups and downs of our life is not hope at all. It is wishful thinking that comes from assuming that we are the center of the universe, and life according to the way it happens to us is all that really counts.
The hope that Jesus gives is different from that. When we are living in comfortable circumstances, surrounded by security, we sometimes shut out real hope. The hope that comes to us from Jesus usually comes to us only after all false hopes have been destroyed. Hope that comes to us as a gift from God most often comes when our life is mired in soil of hopelessness where all we can feel and all we can see says to us, “It is hopeless.” That is when God says to us, “Take off your shoes for you are on holy ground” (Exodus 3:5).
And God gives us evidence, small signs like a branch growing out of a seemingly dead tree trunk, like a baby’s low cry.
From a sermon preached by Henry Dobbs Pope
© Rhonda Hinkle Mitchell
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