Perishing Words

“And he confessed, and denied not; but confessed, I am not the Christ…He said, I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord.”  St. John 1:20,23

We are living in an age of powerful words.  Over the last few months, women from every corner of public life have found the courage to come forward to say: “I was violated, demeaned, treated with cruelty.  Sexual abuse affected me too, and I will be silent no longer.”  And it seems that every morning there is another apology, another resignation of some powerful man. 

In the last few years, people all across the nation have spoken out about racial discrimination and brutal treatment of African Americans.  There have been bestselling books, protests and counter protests, verdicts rendered.  Old statues have fallen, flags have been hauled down, and a few football players sit on the sidelines.

Words are, of course, the oxygen of politics. 

O Root of Jesse

O Root of Jesse, Who dost stand for an ensign of the people, before Whom kings shall keep silence, and unto Whom the Gentiles shall make their supplication: come to deliver us, and tarry not.

The House of Jesse was a stump.  That’s where this majestic passage from Isaiah 11 begins.  God had revealed this to Isaiah, when to all outward appearances, it seemed likely to have a fairly secure future.  He’s talking about the royal house, Israel’s line of kings.  Jesse was the father of David, the greatest of kings, and it was David’s descendants who ruled in Jerusalem in Isaiah’s time.  It will become a stump, Isaiah begins, cut off violently after so many warnings went unheeded.  The patience of God would be exhausted, and it would fall like a great tree in the forest.

And great trees, generally, do not rise again. The ruin of what once was, the death of a promising future.  It’s the natural lesson of this time of year, of course, when the greenery of summer is dying off.  The trees have shed their leaves, and the wind whips through the branches, and the sap moves very slowly if it moves at all.  It’s dark and cold, and life seems chased from the earth.