Sermon – What Do You See?
Isaian 11:1-10; Matthew 3:1-12
Farmville Presbyterian Church
12/7/25
To be honest with you, I feel sorry for the lion. One day the lion was enjoying his typical diet of steak, ham, and chicken, and the next day, in the great and glorious day of Isaiah’s prophecy, he became a vegetarian. With modern sensibilities, he would more likely be designated as a vegan. I say that because the lion was born eating meat. It was genetically and evolutionarily designed to be a carnivore. The lion, the king of beasts, is the epitome of the meat-eating world, and that is the point, of course. Now, in the great day of promise that Isaiah prophesies, the fearsome lion is trading in his steak dinners for straw. His nature is completely changed, and he is never to devour any meat, again. Yes, I feel sorry for the lion. This is nothing against those of you who might avoid meat yourselves. Certainly, you are probably healthier in many ways. What it does NOT say in Isaiah 10 is that vegans will have to make changes to be accepted on God’s peaceful mountain. You are already good to go. You are already counted among the peaceable.
Who I do NOT feel sorry for is me. I am awed and awed and awed again every time I sit down to work on these messages from God’s Word. When I put in the time, I discover and learn and am astonished all the time. I have no idea how many times I have read this passage or the one from Matthew’s Gospel – they are regular passages for this time of the year, and they help point us to the coming of Christ, but there is always so much that I had not considered, and I find this amazing. I hope you do, also.
Yes, that lion. It is jarring to have the natural order turned on its head, even in nice ways. I assume you agree that it is good that animals stop destroying one another and that humans are not put at risk by them either. The infants with deadly snakes is a shocking juxtaposition. That gives me a flashback to the Riki Tiki Tavi cartoon that mesmerized me as a child. People and snakes have always been and will always be enemies and at odds with each other. Very few of you in this room or listening are snake friendly, I am sure. But in Isaiah’s vision of the future in God’s plan, all of that is gone. All animosity, all enmity, all hostility, all natural desire to destroy one another is gone. It is no longer needed or natural. My cat will even stop taking swipes at me for no reason! There is a new natural order here, God’s order. All creatures have a place together in a new world order under God.
Quaker painter Edward Hicks in the early 19th century was so enthralled with this passage and its promise that he painted at least 60 paintings of this passage and probably many more. He often put people in the background, behind the animals and children, especially American Indians and his people, the Quakers. They are making peace with one another in these paintings as the animals stand amazed. Those actual peace efforts were not a great time in our national history, and they did not work out very well, but the point is a good one. On God’s holy mountain, on the mountain of peace, it needs to be more than ideas of peace. It must be workable peace that is something we can try to make possible in our lives today. We have to be able to work for change, God’s righteous change today.
Actual peace efforts can be next to impossible. We see that today in the Ukraine/Russia War. So many other places around the globe have or are struggling mightily with wars that never seem to end or peoples who live with warring spirits toward one another. Peace negotiations are like trying to find your way through an invisible maze in a sandstorm at night while wearing a blindfold, and yet, there must be room for God to work something amazing and unexpected when we step out of the way. We are not the answer to the world’s problems. God provides where we cannot.
In Isaiah’s picture, the God’s answer and the world’s hope is not a mighty warrior or powerful king or rich lord or amazing leader. He is a tiny shoot off of a dead tree. Stop to consider how ridiculous that might be. Isaiah wants us to grasp this. God’s plan is something and someone we would never expect. It is no ordinary stump, but it is an ancient stump, hundreds of years old. Jesse was the father of King David, the second king of Israel. By the time Isaiah is speaking, there have been many kings. Our hope is from David’s family, but even David, the greatest king in Israelite history, was not great because he was powerful or strong or mighty. Think about that story with Goliath. He was great when and only when he found his strength in God. The revolution of God’s Kingdom begins with powerlessness.
John the Baptizer was also not what people expected. He rejected all the normal ways of being and doing and dressing and talking and living. He was a shock to the system, and he left his message in God’s hands. The people saw him and recognized something they had never seen before. When Isaiah was speaking for God, he expressed something the world had never seen before. We need something today that we have never seen before.
The same old, same old is not solving our issues and problems and conflicts. No amount of death and destruction, cruelty or brutality, or inhumanity and apathy will make the world a better place. Power does not fix a broken heart. Power does not fix broken people. Power does not fix a broken world. Powerlessness, recognizing our powerlessness before God, is the beginning of godly change. No, it does not make sense, nor is it comfortable or easy. Our base human desire is to win by destroying anything against us. Peace is not the destruction of those who threaten us. True peace is changing hearts. It is making carnivores into vegans. On God’s holy mountain, the lion no longer wants to eat meat. He does not need to take life to live. The Kingdom of God can follow a little shoot from a long dead stump because that shoot is given God’s strength, not because of its own excellence or power.
I have long said the worst thing to happen to the church was when the Emperor Constantine in Ancient Rome made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. At face value, you might consider that wonderful. The church finally gets to shape the world around it and dictate how things need to go, but I would say that is demonic. Once the church got a taste of power, it never gave it up. Guess what power does to people, what our thirst for power makes us, even the best and most noble of us? Every generation must decide whether it wants to be a lion or a lamb. Do we live up to the expectations of a world that believes we are all hypocrites or do we recognize our honest reliance on God’s goodness to set the world and our own lives in place? Honesty means meekness, humility, peaceableness, compassion, grace, and forgiveness. It means setting aside our need to be right and to see what is right for our neighbor. From the world’s perspective, it doesn’t look normal. This is like people extending forgiveness and love to those who do them harm. When the lamb first saw the lion, it could only remember a meat eater, but peace means seeing what is not obvious. God made us and gave us this world to discover what we could do together, not to see who could come out on top. I do feel sorry for the lion until he understands that he is better with the lamb on God’s holy mountain. To God be the glory. Amen.