Our God of Ax and Shoot

Isaiah 11:1-10

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. His 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; but 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. Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist, and faithfulness the belt around his loins. The 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. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den. They 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.

On 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.

Who Paul Bunyon-ed the Israel-tree and made it into a Jesse-stump? Well, you don’t need Scooby-Doo to solve that mystery. Just look back a couple of verses and you’ll see the one lopping off branches with terrifying power and bringing down the majestic tree of Israel is  the Lord of Hosts! It was God who went full “Lizzie Borden” on God’s chosen people, leaving them at the end of Chapter 10, a lifeless, hopeless stump!

What is it that led God to take up the ax? Well, God has always insisted that God’s creation run with a radical form of economic justice. God wanted (and still wants) God’s people to make the world work so that everyone has enough… enough to eat, enough shelter, enough dignity, enough respect, enough purpose, enough security. The people of Israel had done the exact opposite. To borrow from another prophet; they weren’t doing justice, they weren’t loving kindness and they certainly weren’t walking humbly with their Lord! They were making the poor, poorer and the rich, richer and THAT’s what led God to cut them down into a lifeless, hopeless, stump.

Cutting down an entire people into a lifeless, hopeless stump is admittedly pretty harsh and because of that I think we often try to tame this ax-wielding God. We say, “that’s the Old Testament God and I’d like the New Testament God instead, if you please.” But here’s the thing… there’s not two gods! The same God who demanded justice for creation then, is the same God who is demanding justice for creation now! We have that same God who still has a radical bias for the poor, the marginalized, the weak and the sick. We still have the same God who doesn’t think feeding the hungry should come with conditions. We still have that same God who doesn’t think being poor should be a death sentence. And BECAUSE we still have that same, justice obsessed, ax-wielding God, WE WOULD DO WELL to look around and not ignore these lessons from the prophets as just relics of a bygone “Old Testament God.”

That ax-wielding God?  That IS the God we have! BUT that is not ALL there is to the God we have. The same God that takes up the ax and makes a stump out of the wicked, ALSO IMMEDIATELY calls out to those same chopped-down, stump-people… waves them over and insists they look and marvel and notice the tiny, little shoot… the sign of hope, growing right in the middle of their very own hopeless, lifeless, stump-like lives. Now, you might think that lifeless stumps aren’t much to work with and that’s true for all but the Spirit of the Lord. You see, the Spirit of the Lord is the same Spirit who blew over the formless void before day was even separated from night. So, for the Spirit of the Lord, both a stump and a formless void are material out of which hope can spring!

Those two characters of God, held TOGETHER, make up the fullness of the God we have to this day. We just can’t take the God of the ax and siphon that part off of the God who grows shoots of hope! Our God IS and WILL BE, both! A justice insisting, ax wielding God AND a hope giving, shoot growing God… bound together… inseparably.  And because OUR God is NOT content with the wicked taking advantage of the poor, nor is OUR God content with the meek waiting for their reward in the sweet by and by, our God INSISTS we care for those who live on the edges of this life right now. Which is why our God will NOT leave you and me unchanged.  No matter how badly we fear change and fight and flail against it, our God WILL take an ax to us if that’s the only thing that will move us out of systems of injustice, chopping us down, if need be, to a lifeless, hopeless STUMP!

AND… YET… that same God… our God… will also grow in us a new beginning.  No matter how much we’ve been cut down… no matter if every bit of our stumpiness is our own dang fault. Our God WILL and DOES stay with us, no matter how little and lifeless a stump we have become! Our God WILL and DOES work in us.  Even if we have given up on God... EVEN if there is NO stump left of us and all that remains of us is a formless void! Our God CAN and WILL send the Spirit of the Lord to work with whatever there is to work with, to grow a new shoot in us, and bring new life out of the most hopeless and lifeless sort of place.

As followers of this God of BOTH ax AND shoot, you and I are called, to neither wield the ax, nor grow the shoot, but to NOTICE how our ONE God… the God of both ax AND shoot… the God of counsel and might, has not left us alone to confront the injustice of this world all by ourselves. Instead, God is even now, sprouting and growing a new creation and when we notice what God is doing in us and around us... it is in that noticing that we will find hope! Then out of that hope we are called to walk, in what will be our inevitable, stumbling, human way, carrying our tiny piece of this world toward God’s vision of a creation so radically changed that the hungry are fed, wolves lie down with the lambs, the poor are cared for, bears eat grass, the meek are lifted up and children play with snakes. Our calling is to notice and trust that the God of BOTH ax and shoot, is at work in this world and in each and every one of us, and in that work, find the hope and encouragement we need for our own journey, walking our way toward the realization, otherwise known as the Advent of the Kingdom of God. Amen.