A sermon on Isaiah 11:1-10 and Matthew 3:1-12
by Rev. Chris Bohnhoff

Will you pray with me? Holy Spirit, have mercy on us. Wolves pursue our neighbors, goaded on by vipers. The few feed on the chaos inflicted on the many, and in that chaos we feel anger, and helplessness, and guilt. Visit us with dreams of holy peace, we pray. And show us a path to embody that peace, even if in a lifetime we only take one step on the thousand-mile pilgrimage to your commonwealth. Amen.

Sometimes dreaming is all a person can do. Sometimes life conspires to strip us of all agency, all control over our circumstances. Maybe an injury or illness lands us in bed. Or whether we get to do the thing we want is dependent on another’s approval and we find ourselves stuck in a purgatory. Sometimes agency is stripped through political violence.

The prophet Isaiah dreamt of peace. He dreamt in the aftermath of war. In his time, his nation of Judah was separate from the northern kingdom of Israel. Israel asked Judah to join them in standing up against Assyria, the superpower neighborhood bully of the time. Instead, against Isaiah’s advice, Judah’s king asked Assyria to intervene and they did, conquering Israel in 733 BCE.

Throughout the book of Isaiah’s prophecy, God calls out both Judah and Israel for their roles in the situation, how the elites had weakened the social fabric and their covenant with God by neglecting – and exploiting – the poor. And in the war-torn devastation of the age, Isaiah dreamed. In our passage today, he dreamed of the regeneration of the lineage of David, leaders who had governed with righteousness and faithfulness. And under that hoped-for ruler, he dreamed of an upside-down world where the prey aren’t consumed by the predators, where the powerless don’t need to fear the powerful.

Regardless of what you believe about the origin of Isaiah’s dreams, whether God or his own imagination (or maybe those two are related), Isaiah pulled his deepest truth from a context of war and destruction and dreamt holy dreams.

Almost 800 years later, in our other passage, John the Baptist invoked Isaiah’s holy dreams, his deepest truths. In another fraught time in Israel’s history, but this time on the kingdom’s margins instead of at the center as Isaiah had been, John beckoned, cajoled, and implored all comers to find their place within Isaiah’s dream – to embody the dream, not just to picture it. Where Isaiah named Israel’s ills and established a dream worthy of working toward, John added urgency and agency, telling Jews and non-Jews alike to “repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” Repent, which means to turn around, to change one’s life, to rid oneself of the gunk of selfish self-interest and anything else obscuring what keeps one from living out Isaiah’s – and God’s – dream for us.

But John didn’t only call his followers to live into Isaiah’s dream; he also dreamt his own dream of the one who would follow him. The one who would bring the unquenchable fire of God’s Spirit that would consume the chaff that surrounds and protects, but also obscures our true selves, the grain of God’s peace that resides within us. Isaiah’s dream of peace, and John’s dream of the bringer of peace became a durable North Star to guide our journeying.

Dreaming is central to peace. Sometimes it is the only peaceable action one can take – picturing an alternative to the current reality – and when this is the case, it sparks hope to light the world when the darkness closes in. But for the one whose agency has not been erased, hearing another’s dreams of peace, those dreams become a lure to action, giving the dream a second, expanded life. Isaiah’s dream from underneath the Assyrians, John’s dream from under Roman occupation, Martin’s dream from Jim Crow Birmingham, these are some of our dream ancestors, the ones pointing us to the North Star of God’s commonwealth and inviting us into the journey towards peace.

To dream is to prepare for peace, to look around and see through eyes of righteousness what is missing, who is being denied a seat at God’s table and who is profiting from their dehumanization. And to adopt a dream as a guiding star is to honor the power born of adversity, the power to envision something that doesn’t yet exist when all that surrounds you is pain.

This Advent season, as we prepare our hearts for the coming of the light of God’s love, Isaiah and John’s dreams of peace can still help us navigate through the pain running through our community today. When our government uses fear and chaos as tactics against its own citizens, when our leaders call our neighbors garbage, we have the language that describes what a leader’s true values, true identity should be: “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.”

 And we have words for what one who professes to follow Jesus must do to hold up our covenant with God: “bear fruit worthy of repentance. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; therefore every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.” Fruits of love, protection of the vulnerable, and knitting of community. We are called to use our voices as Isaiah and John did to call out injustice, unfaithfulness, and unrighteousness, to be the unquenchable fire demanding that the dehumanizing ways of empire are set aside. It is what we were made for.

And so let us dream holy dreams of peace, and let us prepare our hearts to be drawn into the embodiment of our ancestors’ dreams. Our neighbors are waiting. Amen.