The Lutheran Hour
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"Paradise Restored"
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Text: Isaiah 11:1-10
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You really get to know a person when you see what he loves. My next-door neighbor, Bob, loves Frangipani trees, otherwise known as plumeria. Frangipani trees grow that distinctive fragrant flower sometimes used in Hawaiian leis. Frangipani trees are native to tropical climates. So, Bob, my neighbor keeps his in pots. In the cold Midwestern winters, they’re dormant in his basement, but in the hot, muggy St. Louis summer, Frangipani trees thrive. In August, Bob’s backyard becomes a veritable island paradise. On a hot summer evening, when I’m taking out the garbage out to the dumpster in the alley, what should be a 30-second trip, sometimes becomes a 30-minute tropical excursion.
I see Bob out back. I call over the four-foot fence between our yards, “Bob, your yard looks like a tropical paradise. What are those trees called again?” “Frangipani,” he tells me. Bob says that his trees are nothing like those domesticated ones you get up here in the states. Those ones up here don’t have any smell, no perfume, but these ones, he says, these were grown from cuttings from a real Caribbean frangipani. They have this aroma that transports you to paradise. In some cultures, frangipani trees are considered sacred, said to represent immortality because a branch can be cut off, dislocated from any root source for months, even years, but then replanted and returned to life.
Bob loves his frangipani trees. And I love listening to him talk about them. You can tell a lot about a person by what he loves. Four summers ago, two years after we had moved into that house and became next door neighbors with Bob and his wife, my three sons really loved soccer. They played soccer out in our backyard for hours that summer. Now our backyard, it isn’t very big. It’s not suited as a proper soccer pitch. So often, a misfired soccer ball would end up in Bob’s backyard. Looking back, if I had been more engaged with them, if I had paid better attention, I could have intervened before paradise was lost.
See, I only learned after the fact that for three weeks my boys had been launching soccer balls like missile strikes into Bob’s backyard, blowing up his beloved frangipani, one blossom after another. And Bob, God bless him, he loved to see the boys out there playing soccer so much that he just bit his tongue. Boys will be boys. And he didn’t want to discourage them, so he just kept repositioning his pots around the backyard, like an improvised game of Battleship, moving them around, trying to keep them out of the path of a torpedoed soccer ball. But it didn’t matter where Bob moved his treasured trees. My boys, God bless them, they weren’t doing it on purpose, but it was like they were launching laser-guided munitions. Bob did his best, but in the end, paradise lost. Three weeks into this backyard drama, I finally started to wake up. I’m standing in our kitchen, looking out the window and I see my youngest son, Jude, out there practicing penalty shots against the fence, sending every fifth shot into Bob’s backyard.
I make a mental note to tell Jude to stop. At this point in the story, I’m thinking Bob might be a little annoyed with us climbing into his yard to retrieve the ball, but I don’t know the half of it. I didn’t know what I’ve since learned. When I asked Bob for permission to share this story with you today, I didn’t know that he has a 20- or 30-year relationship with each of those trees. I didn’t know that they tie him to deep memories of treasured people and places and experiences. I didn’t know how much he loves them. And at the time, I did not know that it was our soccer ball that was turning them into stumps. So, I see my wife out there talking with Bob and Bob has had enough. His cheeks are flushed with anger.
And when I come outside, he is telling the whole story of what has transpired, the unvarnished truth of our negligence and disrespect of his property. Bob’s speech wasn’t a belligerent tirade. That would’ve been easier to take. What made Bob’s word so damning was that he was more heartbroken than anything. He had adopted us, treated us like family, and we had destroyed his treasure, and confronting us like this was so alien to his nature, so foreign to his friendly personality that saying it hurt him even more than it hurt us. After a moment of silence, Jude walks over to the fence to say he’s sorry. I can see the wrath and pain on Bob’s face.
And for a moment, I think, “He’s going to strangle my son.” But instead he reaches his arms over the fence and hugs him. Whatever impulse Bob had to vent his rage, he just absorbed it. He let it burn up and die in himself. He hugged Jude. And with tears in his eyes, he says, “I love you, Jude. Just don’t do it again.” You really don’t know a person until you know what he loves.
This month, during the season of Advent, leading up to Christmas, many Christians around the world are listening once again to familiar readings from the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah is one of the great prophets of ancient Israel of the Jewish people. And Isaiah tells us what the Lord, the God of Israel, loves.
In the fifth chapter of Isaiah, we hear the Lord sing a love song for His beautiful plants, for His beloved vineyard. The plants represent the people, Israel, whom the Lord had planted. The Lord planted Israel so that they would bear fruit, the fruit of justice, because He says, “I, the Lord love justice. I hate robbery and wrong.” The Lord planted Israel and spent hundreds of years cultivating them to restore what was lost long ago in the garden of Eden. Like Adam and Eve, Israel was supposed to fill the world with fruit, fragrant fruit of justice and peace. But instead, they gave him sour grapes. Israel proved to be just like the rest of us, disrespectful of God and negligent with His beloved creation.
Much of Isaiah’s 66-chapter long book is about God’s response to this, God’s response to sin. Sin is that distortion in you, in me, that turns us in on ourselves, stuck on ourselves, indifferent to the plight of others. Not caring enough to know our neighbors. Isaiah’s book is about God’s response to sin, Israel’s sin, and by extension, your sin and mine. Isaiah describes God’s response to sin from two perspectives. From one perspective, God steps back and lets sin bring its own natural consequences. It’s simple cause and effect. If you kick a ball in a garden, you’re going to destroy some flowers. If you keep breaking trust with your neighbor, you’re going to lose the relationship.
God created a real world with real consequences, and God responds the sin by stepping back and letting us face the consequences. But from another perspective, God’s response is not passive, but active. God responds to sin actively with anger, with wrath over sin, because it destroys what He loves, harming the good things He’s created and cultivated. God is slow to anger, the Bible tells us, but when He’s had enough, watch out, because He will come quickly and put a stop to it. It’s not belligerent rage. It’s not a tirade. Bible teachers sometimes refer to God’s wrath as His alien work, His strange work. It’s a phrase that comes from the book of Isaiah 28:21.
Wrath is a strange work of God because on the surface His wrath appears to be counter to His character and His purpose. It appears counter to His purpose like when a surgeon cuts tendons and breaks bones in order to heal. It appears counter to His character like a friendly neighbor torn apart because the people he loves are destroying the creation that he loves. How have you suffered under this strange work, this alien work of God?
Sometimes we suffer the consequences of other people’s sins. And whether it’s done in malice or negligence, either way, our beautiful things keep getting knocked over and destroyed. Other times, we suffer directly from the consequences of our own sin. You may have kicked the ball or had the power to stop it and didn’t. Either way, the damage is done. Trust is lost. The relationship is broken. Whether it’s sins of omission or commission, sins we inflict on others or sins we suffer, God is heartbroken over our sin. At the same time, God is actively using the consequences of our sin to cut away our pride. He’s doing His alien work to level us and to level with us, to show us that He’s the only One who can save us. The only One who truly wants to save us, who in fact loves to save us. All He asks is that you and I turn back to Him, to know Him, trust Him. And He gives you Someone to trust in. He gave His Son Jesus, the Messiah.
Isaiah spoke of Him. Again, Isaiah speaks from two perspectives. On the one hand, God promised to raise up a new human descendant of Jesse. Jesse, the father of Israel’s greatest leader, King David, God promised a new tree, a new vine, a new garden growing from the roots of Jesse. God said that He would send the Messiah as a new human leader. God would send a Leader who would succeed where every other leader had failed. On the other hand, God promised that He Himself would come to save us. He wouldn’t just send another human being to do the job. God would come. He wouldn’t just reach over the fence. He would permanently cross the eternal division between Creator and creation. God would come personally to save us from the consequences of our sin.
And in Jesus, He did it. Jesus is both God and human. The Creator born as a creature to become our neighbor, the best neighbor you could ask for. On the cross of Jesus, God did His most alien and His most proper work. Instead of venting His full righteous wrath directly on us, Jesus absorbed it. On the cross, with Jesus, God’s wrath and our sin burned up and died in Him. And by Baptism through faith, we die with Him so that we may live with Him, risen from the dead, a green shoot springing from the root, the root of Jesse. God did it because this is what He loves. God loves us and His good creation, frangipani trees and all. And He wants to lead us out of our destructive ways, back to His holy mountain, back to the garden, the new creation.
In some of Isaiah’s most poetic prophecies, we get a glimpse of the entire work of Jesus, concentrated in a single vision: His birth, out of the family line of King David’s father, Jesse; His ministry to Israel; His crucifixion and resurrection; His giving of God’s Spirit; His great commission with His people, to all the nations, and finally His return to judge the living and the dead to give unprecedented peace to all creation. Listen to this poetic imagery of paradise restored in Isaiah 11. He says, “A shoot will go forth from the stump of Jesse. A branch from his roots will bear fruit and the Spirit of the Lord will rest on Him. The spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and strength, the spirit of knowing and fearing the Lord. And His delight will be in the fear of the Lord. He will judge. He will do justice, not by appearances, not by what His eyes see. He will decide disputes, not by what His ears hear, but with righteousness, He will do justice for the poor. With equity, He will decide for the afflicted of the earth, and He will strike the earth with the rod of His mouth. And with the breath of His lips, He will slay the wicked, righteousness will be a belt around Him. Faithfulness will be the belt around His waist. And a wolf will dwell with a lamb and a leopard will stretch out and lie down with a young goat, and a calf and a young lion and a fattened calf together. And a little child will lead them. A cow and a bear will graze together, and their young will lie down together and a lion will eat straw like an ox. A nursing child will play over the hole of a cobra. And a weaned child will put his hand into a viper’s den, and they will do no harm nor destroy on all My holy mountain, because the earth will be full of knowing the Lord as the waters cover the sea. In that day, the root of Jesse who will be standing as a signal, as a banner for the peoples and the nations, will seek after Him and His resting place will be glory.”
It never fails to amaze me the many little miracles God grants me to see. We had a heat wave in St. Louis this last September, record highs and humidity. And while most of St Louis was languishing, Bob’s frangipani trees were flourishing. The soccer pitch, in case you were wondering, has been permanently relocated. Now, I remember seeing those dormant plants in Bob’s basement this last winter. He and his wife had gone to the Caribbean for a few months, and they hired Jude, our youngest son, to house sit, paid him handsomely for it too, in advance. Another miracle of undeserved grace. I had gone over with Jude one cold winter evening to check on the place. And downstairs, we saw those frangipani trees. They looked like dead stumps planted in pots, but in September they were in bloom again, and the former devastation was a distant memory. A shoot had gone forth from the stump.
You and I have seen a lot in this life. When you dwell in all the garbage that we have to deal with, it’s hard to see God. I’ve never seen a wolf dwelling with a lamb. I’ve never seen a baby playing with a cobra. I’ve never seen that unprecedented peace, but why couldn’t God do it? Why couldn’t God transport us all back to paradise? He created everything out of nothing. Something that we can all see. He raised Jesus from the dead and today we see people gathering in His name because of it. You can go and see it with your own eyes. The earth isn’t full yet, but it is filling with knowing the Lord. So, what’s keeping you from trusting that you will see paradise restored? I haven’t seen a wolf dwelling with a lamb, not yet, but I’ve seen sins forgiven. I’ve seen grace win over wrath, and I’ve seen a frangipani come back to life. And Jesus, Lord, how I want to see more. Amen.
Reflections for December 4, 2022
Title: Paradise Restored
Mark Eischer: You’re listening to The Lutheran Hour. For FREE online resources, archived audio, our mobile app, and more, go to lutheranhour.org. And we’re back with our Speaker, Dr. Michael Zeigler.
Mike Zeigler: Thank you, Mark. Today I’m visiting with Dr. David Schmitt. Welcome back, David.
David Schmitt: Oh, thank you. It’s great to be here.
Mike Zeigler: So, David, we’ve noted Isaiah’s use of beautiful imagery and how the Scriptures do this. Beginning and end, it’s framed by beauty. Why is it worthwhile for Christians to reflect on this?
David Schmitt: I would think it’s worthwhile for two reasons. One, because beauty is a human experience. But I think it’s also a spiritual experience. I mean, the apostle Paul in Philippians says, “Whatever is lovely or beautiful or excellent, think about these things.”
Mike Zeigler: And that’s a way to connect with people who don’t share the same spiritual views or convictions that we do, that we can relate on this very human level of experiencing beauty.
David Schmitt: Right, right. That we have a common ground in that sense.
Mike Zeigler: How have you heard this experience of beauty perhaps being downplayed?
David Schmitt: Robin Jensen is the one who talks about beauty as ornamentation. And it approaches beauty as if it’s a frivolous end. It’s kind of the last thing you would look at. And yet when you read Scripture, when you read Scripture, I don’t think beauty always functions as a frivolous end. I think sometimes it’s the fruitful beginning.
When you have that story of Jesus and being anointed by that woman, this fragrance, that would rarely have been smelled, the fragrance of royalty, is there in the room and people are experiencing something of beauty, and nobody knows what it means. It’s a beginning, it’s a fruitful beginning, as some disciples see it as a waste, as other disciples see a different act of piety could be done. And then Jesus says it’s a beautiful thing and that it was done for His burial and that it will always be talked about. And so instead of always approaching beauty as the last thing, how can we make this teaching beautiful, maybe we can just start with beauty and see what teachings arise out of it.
Mike Zeigler: So how can reflecting on beauty shape the way Christians see themselves in their calling and their purpose in the world?
David Schmitt: So we had talked about created beauty, broken beauty, and promised beauty. So, with just created beauty, that’s the beauty that we see in creation. It situates us between the original goodness of all things and the curse of decay. So, we see this beautiful sunset, but it does not last. We see this flock of birds take off in a moment of splendorous beauty, but it doesn’t last. We see a flower that turns in the wind. And this type of beauty, I think, invites us to receive the world as a gift. It’s a gift to be cared for, by a creature who is broken.
Mike Zeigler: As you’re listening, I pray that you would open up the book of Isaiah and see how his images, specifically in the passage we heard today from Isaiah 11, about all things restored and made beautiful again, that that might be a fruitful beginning for you this week.
Music Selections for this program:
“A Mighty Fortress” arranged by Chris Bergmann. Used by permission.
“On Jordan’s Bank” by the Hymnal Project (© Michigan District-LCMS) Used by permission.
“Lo! He Comes with Clouds Descending” From The Concordia Organist (© 2009 Concordia Publishing House) Used by permission.