Hoping in Poetry

A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,
     and a branch shall grow out of his roots.  Isaiah 11:1

A stump, a remnant of something good and grand, little more than a memory; from this something new will come. So says the prophet. Not how things typically work. King David had his day. Jerusalem had flourished for a moment, in a brief period when the empires around it were weak. But that was over. Israel had split into two nations when Solomon died. Jerusalem was now capital of Judah only, and it was a vassal state to more powerful empires. How could anything of much significance ever come from there?

We are well schooled in how the world works. We have a pretty good idea of what is possible and what isn't. Stumps don't become great trees. The world is filled with great suffering and evil, and it's hard to imagine that ever really changing.

But still we trot out the words of ancient prophets every year about this time. We hear once more their absurd notions of stumps reborn, of at time when

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.

 It all sounds so nice, and we love to hear it. But we know it couldn't possibly happen.

In my sermon for the second Sunday in Advent, I borrowed quote from Walter Brueggemann, who spoke of a way that sees things most of us, with our certainties about how things are and what is and isn't possible, can't see. To us who know all about cause and effect, but whose imaginations are captive and constrained, Brueggemann said,

 Mostly unnoticed and not taken seriously, mostly under the radar in this adult world of control and order, there have been Jews. For the most part Jews have not committed to reason and logic and memo and syllogism and brief. Because the Jews came with their peculiar stories of odd moments of transformation, all about emancipation and healing and feeding and newness, all under the rubric of “miracle.” And behind the stories there were poems…lyrical, elusive, eruptive, defiant. Jews have known from the outset that a commitment to memo and syllogism will not make things new. Jews have known all along that in poetry we can do things not permitted by logic or reason, because poems never try to sound like memos. Poetry will break the claims of the memo. Poetry will open the world beyond reason. Poetry will give access to contradictions and tensions that logic must deny. Poetry will not only remember; it will propose and conjure and wonder and imagine and foretell.

 "Poetry will break the claims of the memo. Poetry will open the world beyond reason." Lord, I hope so. Lord, I hope so.

For a child has been born for us,

     a son given to us;

authority rests upon his shoulders;

     and he is named

Wonderful Counselor, Might God,

     Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

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