"Tooth and Claw"

Photo by USGS on Unsplash

The First United Presbyterian Church of Loveland

“Tooth and Claw”

Rev. Amy Morgan

September 5, 2021

Isaiah 11:1-9

A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.

 2 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.

 3 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;

 4 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.

 5 Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist, and faithfulness the belt around his loins.

 6 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.

 7 The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

 8 The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder's den.

 9 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.

There was one lonely chicken left. It poked around the chicken coop, looked up at the house, and waited. 

All the other chickens who had previously occupied the coop had been snatched by dogs who had broken into the coop one way or another. Just the one chicken was left, and my mom finally determined that if anyone was going to eat that final chicken, it was going to be her. I’ll spare you the gory details, but let’s just say that we came to understand the origin of the phrase, “running around like a headless chicken.”

I grew up well aware that nature is “red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson put it. One of our dogs was killed by a bite from a water moccasin, and we learned at an early age the adage, “red and yeller, kill a feller; red and black, friend of Jack” to determine which snakes were dangerous and which ones were fun to play with. When our Husky had puppies, she went out hunting, bringing back squirrels, armadillos, the leg of a deer for her little brood. We shook our shoes out before we put them on to make sure a scorpion or tarantula hadn’t taken up residence there. I wrote my first research paper about mountain lions because one had taken up residence in our neighborhood. My childhood taught me that nature was filled with danger, violence and death lurking in every tree. 

But I also learned as a child that nature was full of wonder and beauty. While I had to avoid poison ivy, I also took sips of honeysuckle on my way to the bus stop. Fire ants could take down a small animal, or our air conditioner, but dragon flies could dance on the water. Our Husky may have been a hunter, but she would sit there and listen compassionately as I poured out my troubles to her. We had goats who could walk the deck railing easier than a gymnast on a balance beam, and the sweetest, gentlest gray quarter horse who would let me ride bareback. I had bunnies and kittens to snuggle, and there was a creek filled with skittering minnows and a pond with turtles.

Nature was dangerous, I learned, but also wonderful and beautiful. It was never one or the other. It was, and is, both. 

Our text from Isaiah employs this paradoxical reality to cast a vision of a peaceable kingdom. The segment we read today begins with the image of a living, green shoot growing up out of a dead, rotting stump. 

That stump of Jesse, the father of King David, is all that is left in Isaiah’s time of the lineage that God promised would rule Israel forever. As king, David had united the tribes of Israel into a single, glorious nation. But in the centuries after David’s death, the lineage had withered under the blaze of anger and division, violence and warfare, lust for power and bloodshed. It had been cut down when the Northern Kingdom of Israel seceded from the Southern Kingdom of Judah, rejecting the line of Davidic kings, and inaugurating their own royal lineage that was marked with executions and fratricide. At the time of Isaiah’s prophesy, the Northern Kingdom had aligned with the Assyrians to attack their southern sibling state. The unifying power of David’s kingship was ancient history, a grand tree felled by human lust for power and violence, reduced to a dried up, old stump. 

Into this time of fear and instability, Isaiah prophesied that a king like David would be born to rule with hope and peace and unity. He advised the current king of Judah to trust in God to provide help and guidance and hope in the form of this wise and righteous ruler. This “new David” would bring peace, not just to warring people, but to the whole cosmos. He would bring about a time when the knowledge of Israel’s God would be so pervasive that nothing in the whole created order would do harm to another living thing. 

These treasured words of Isaiah did not arise out of times of peace, comfort, and prosperity. They were penned in a time of unimaginable violence, fear, and division. 

This hymn to a peaceful kingdom was written, scholars believe, in the same year that the Northern Kingdom of Israel fell to the Assyrian Empire they attempted to conspire with. In Isaiah’s prophesy, Assyria is cast as the rod of God’s anger, but Assyria, too, will be judged and punished for the violence it has inflicted upon God’s people. And Isaiah is all too aware that Assyria’s weapons are aimed at Judah next. 

But Isaiah hears God’s voice in the chaos, calling Judah not to take up arms to attack their enemies or build higher walls to defend their territory. Instead, God is calling them to a vision of the world that is not characterized by brutality and danger, but by peace and safety. 

This has been a difficult image for me to sit with this week. As we watch flag-draped coffins carried off military planes; as we see our healthcare system and the people who work in that system stretched beyond capacity; as we despair with those who have lost loved ones, or homes, or businesses to wildfires, floods, and hurricanes; how on earth can we tolerate this vision of a time when wolves and lambs live together in harmony and even animals will ignore their primal instincts so that nothing will hurt or destroy? In times like these, this image is almost mocking our pain. 

But this prophesy doesn’t ignore the danger and pain the people of God experience. It casts a vision so beautiful it hurts, and it’s supposed to hurt. Isaiah, and the people he is writing to, know without a shadow of a doubt that nature, especially human nature, is “red in tooth and claw.” But Isaiah is calling them to trust that wonder and beauty, peace and harmony, are God’s end goal for the creation. And he asserts that signs of that beautiful promise are visible even in the horrors of the present day. Remnants of the people overtaken by the Assyrians have been trickling into Judah and Jerusalem. The Assyrian army was stopped at the border of Judah, and Jerusalem was spared the defeat experienced by Samaria. Things are not peaceful, but God is still at work. 

Pastor Doug Bratt asserts that “God’s work often seems to begin among the stumps of human failure and rebellion.” If we are looking for hope in this challenging time, if we are wondering where God is at work, there is no better place for us to be worshipping today that outside, among the trees, and among the stumps. 

A couple of years ago, an enormous cottonwood tree in my backyard came crashing down during one of those heavy spring snowstorms. It destroyed our fence and left a huge mess to clean up. At first, this was horrible. What were we going to do with this giant tree and this messed-up fence? But then, I realized how much worse it could have been. If the tree had fallen in any other direction, it would have destroyed the neighbor’s house, our shed, or our cluster of fruit trees. As it happened, the only thing it destroyed was a fence that was in terrible shape and needed to be replaced anyway. We cut up the tree, rebuilt the fence, and left the tree stump as it was. 

Today, if you look in that back corner of my yard, there are green, leafy shoots coming out from that stump that are taller than I am. 

The things that are happening today are devastating. Everything we thought was secure and trustworthy, everything we thought would shade us from harm or difficulty, has come crashing to the ground. All our authority structures have failed or been cut down. Our government failed to protect us from a deadly pandemic, and partisan division has stymied efforts to improve our situation in any meaningful way. Our military has withdrawn from the longest war in American history with 13 casualties of American service members in the final days. More frequent and severe natural disasters attest to the unchecked crisis of climate change. In each of our lives, there are losses and broken relationships, stressful situations, fears, and anxieties that layer on top of these corporate concerns. We are exhausted as we look at the devastation and the mess. 

But this is precisely where God shows up. In the stumps of our failures. In the stumps of our resistance to the peace God is calling us to. In the stumps of our frustrated expectations and even our very justified fears. 

Maybe the bud of hope is nothing more than the fact that we’ve stayed healthy and well so far. Maybe hope is sprouting in the return of our church choir. Maybe hope can grow just by worshipping today with our animal family, praising God peacefully with dogs bred from ravenous wolves and chickens descended from dangerous dinosaurs. 

Maybe the peaceful kingdom has not arrived, but the king in the line of David has. And that king, and all of us who follow him, are working to make Isaiah’s vision complete.

We are facing fearsome things, friends. But we are surrounded by beauty and wonder, too. Some days, all we can see is the approaching lion, or bear, or snake. But if we run away too fast, we might miss that the lamb, and the cow, and the child are there, too. We might not see that they are safe, that no harm has come to them. 

Life is dangerous, but also wonderful and beautiful. It is never one or the other. It is always both. I invite us to hold the beauty in front of us, even if it hurts, trusting that a green shoot of life is emerging even from the dead stumps of our loss and failure. Things are not peaceful, but God is at work. And we are called to work with God, living into the vision of a peaceful kingdom, blessed by the creation to be a blessing to it. 

To God be all glory forever and ever. Amen.