A Little Child -- Second Sunday of Advent

Isaiah 11:1-10

December 7, 2025

 

            There is a scene in the movie Children of Men, where the protagonist, Theo, is trying to help a young woman, Kee, escape from a building that is the center of a fierce battle. But this is not just another war movie. Kee is the first woman in two decades to give birth to a baby. This is the heart of the story of both the movie and the book that it is based on. The premise is that the human species is teetering on the brink of extinction because of worldwide infertility. The story opens with the news of the youngest human being, a young man in his early twenties, being killed outside of a bar. According to the story, the United Kingdom is the last nation on earth to have any sort of rule-of-law. But that rule-of-law is crumbling as the government targets immigrants in the country as being anti-government, anti-law and order, anti-everything. But Kee is a young woman from Africa, and she has given birth.

            Through a series of plot twists and turns, Theo is trying to help Kee reach the safety of an organization that is working to reverse infertility and restore the human race. In this battle scene fierce fighting has broken out between government forces and immigrants. It is this fighting that Theo and Kee are trying to escape. Theo slowly walks Kee, with her newborn baby in her arms, down a bullet riddled hall.

            The baby is crying, which is a miraculous sound that no one has heard for at least twenty years. And as they walk and as the baby continues to cry, people stop and stare in wonder. Women reach out their hands to the mother and child. Immigrant fighters point their guns at them but lower them when they hear the baby’s wail. A government solider is racing up the stairs but when he sees Theo and Kee and hears the baby’s cries, he calls for a ceasefire. The guns are silent and Theo, Kee, and the baby make their way slowly out of the building now battleground. Soldiers lower their weapons. Some kneel and cross themselves. Some almost smile as they stare down into the blanket wrapped child in her mother’s arms. Just as Theo, Kee, and the baby move past the line of troops, another shot is fired in the building and the battle begins again in earnest. But for a moment, for a beautiful, tender, heart-wrenching moment, guns are lowered, the fighting stops, and there is a shared, stunned awe at the notes of a newborn’s cry piercing the sudden quiet.

            This movie, and the book that inspired it, depict a dystopian future, a world falling into despair and chaos. It is a hopeless world filled with hopeless people. Without the possibility of a child being born, there seems to be no reason to hope, to believe, to welcome the future. The world is bleak, and the future, if there is to be one, is bleaker still. It is a hopeless world filled with hopeless people.

            The world that Isaiah prophesied to in our passage this morning was not quite the same as the world described in Children of Men – children were still being born, although it may be questionable as to what kind of world they were being born into – but the despair in Isaiah’s time was real, very real. I suspect that to Isaiah and his people chaos and destruction were not seen just as possibilities but as imminent.

            It was a time of political turmoil. Isaiah prophesied from the southern kingdom of Judah, and threats of conquer from other nations were real and intense. Isaiah read the signs of the times and called on the people to take heed. In the verse immediately preceding ours, Isaiah spoke these words,

            “Look, the Sovereign, the Lord of hosts, will lop the boughs with terrifying power; the tallest trees will be cut down, and the lofty will be brought low. He will hack down the thickets of the forest with an axe, and Lebanon with its majestic trees will fall.

            If I heard only words like this from the prophet, I would have been tempted to give up and give in completely. If God has despaired of us, if God has promised to bring us low, to hack down the tallest of trees, what point is there in hoping for anything? But these words are not the end. They point to something more. Trees might be hacked to stumps, but out of the stump will grow a shoot, a tenuous but stubborn shoot. The promise of God did not end in that dead stump. No, it only made it possible for a new branch, a new promise, a new life to begin.

            Not only does Isaiah speak of a stubborn shoot growing from that cut down and dead stump, but we also hear words of promise, words of what the world will look like when that bud, that branch appears. The world will be a peaceable kingdom. It will be a world where the wolf will lie with the lamb, the leopard shall lie with the kid, the calf, the lion and the fatling shall be together. A little child will lead them all. The cow and the bear will graze in the same pasture. The lion will eat straw as does the ox. One little child shall play by the hole of the rattlesnake, and another little child shall safely put his hand into the hold of the adder. There will be no more prey and no more predator, but all creation will live in peace.

            This image of the peaceable kingdom has been depicted in art hundreds of times. It is an image that captures our collective imagination. How wonderful it will be if the picture becomes reality – a reality where even natural enemies live together in quiet, harmonious peace!

            But this is not a sentimental, sweetness and light description of God’s kingdom. It is both a foretelling and a reminder that creation itself will be reordered and re-aligned with God’s promise and covenant. When this shoot, this branch from the stump of Jesse appears, everything will be changed. Everything will be new. God’s kingdom will not only be in our midst, something we see only in fleeting glimpses, but we will also be in God’s kingdom. No more harm will be done on God’s holy mountain. No one will be unaware or ignorant of the Lord, because a word from this King will fill the earth with knowledge of the Lord.

            How beautiful are Isaiah’s words! How I long for them to become reality. Yet, when I hold up our present world with the world Isaiah’s words convey, I realize how far awy from this peaceable kingdom we truly are.

            Predator and prey are alive and well, aren’t they? And sometimes it’s hard to make a distinction between them. Wolves and lambs do not lie down together. Cows and bears do not graze side by side. And while little children may play by rattlesnakes and put their hands down the hold of adders and lead these ferocious creatures around like pets, in the world we inhabit, the little children are often the ones to suffer the most from the actions of the adults.

            Nature is not so peaceable and we are a part of nature. Strife and hatred and enmity are alive and well here and around the world. You don’t have to look very far to see the effects of violence, of anger, of mistrust and ignorance. You don’t have to look very far to see the pain that lies at the heart of our not so peaceable kingdom.

            A quick scan of national and international news tells me how very far we are from the peaceable kingdom Isaiah prophesied. The gap between that kingdom and our own reality is wide and seemingly unbridgeable. But Isaiah did not speak these words for God’s children to despair at how far away we are from God’s kingdom. These words were given to Isaiah and spoken to the people in his world and to us so that we might hope. Even when all seems lost, God’s promise lives on. God’s promise lives in that stump. God’s covenant lives on in that stubborn shoot. God refuses to give up on up. God refuses to abandon us to our own sinful devices. God’s promise lives in that holy stump. God’s promise flourishes in that stubborn shoot. We know that the chasm between God’s peace and our reality is wide, but our hope in God’s peace is as persistent as that branch that grows from a stump.

            In Children of Men, the cry of a single baby was powerful enough to bring fighting to an end, if only for a few minutes. In God’s peaceable kingdom, a little child will lead all creation in the way of peace. Our hope rests in that promise of peace, in that little child, in that stubborn shoot.

            Let all of God’s tenacious, hopeful, peaceful children say, “Alleluia!”

            Amen.

           

           

Plowshares and Pruning Hooks -- First Sunday of Advent

Isaiah 2:1-5

November 30, 2025

 

            When I was ordained as a minister in our denomination – a very long time ago – I was ordained as a Minister of Word and Sacrament. That was my official title, and that’s what I did and do. I do my best to preach the word, and I get the joy of presiding over our sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. But over the course of my years as a pastor in the PC(USA), that title has changed to Teaching Elder. That does not mean that I am not a Minister of Word and Sacrament. I still am, but my official identification, whether I am at a presbytery meeting or in some other church role is, Amy Stoker, Teaching Elder, First Presbyterian, Pulaski, Tennessee.

            But Teaching Elders are not the only elders in our denomination. There are also Ruling Elders. It hasn’t been that long ago that I understood that ruling does not refer to reigning over but to measuring. The Ruling Elders who serve on our session are responsible for taking the spiritual measurement of our congregation. Are people growing in their faith? Are they growing in spiritual depth and wisdom? Is our congregation witnessing to the love and justice of God in all that we do? It’s a challenging call. But Ruling Elders are vital to our church. They serve on our session and head up ministry units within our congregation and sometimes serve on committees and commissions at the presbytery level and beyond, and in the case of our own Chris Williams, serve as the Vice-Moderator, soon to be Moderator, of our presbytery.

            We are a denomination of elders – both Teaching and Ruling. Our name, presbyterian, comes from the Greek word for elder, so it makes sense that the governing of our church falls to elders. But whether we are Teaching Elders or Ruling Elders, or Deacons in the churches that still have them, we all take the same ordination vows. We all make the same promises and abide by the same covenants. There are eight ordination vows that we share, and the eighth one is my favorite.

It is, “Will you pray for and seek to serve the people with energy, intelligence, imagination, and love?”

All the vows that we take, the promises that we make at ordination and installation are vital and important, but this last one really gets me. When I was a young minister, I heard this vow and immediately thought,

“Yes! I am promising to be creative! I get to try new things and maybe I’ll get to sit with kids and color. Bring on the crayons!”

Okay, that may not have been my first thought, verbatim, but I do like sitting with the kids and I really enjoy coloring. Always have. Always will. But my point is that when I was a young minister, I took this call as license to just always try new things, new ways of preaching or teaching. And that still holds true, but the older I get and the longer I serve God and the church, the more I comprehend the depth of what this eighth vow requires of elders, of us. It’s one thing to serve with energy, intelligence, imagination, and love when life is great and everything is going swimmingly. It’s another thing to hold to this promise when we are tested, when life is hard, when nothing is going to plan, when it seems that God is far away, when the world seems to be spinning wildly, and we are just trying to keep going.

Why am I giving you this mini lesson in our church’s polity? Because in the very governance of our church, our congregation, our denomination, we are called to use our imagination. And the very words of scripture that we hear on this first Sunday of Advent, the first Sunday of the new church year, come from Isaiah – a prophet, a person charged by God to use his imagination.

Isaiah was a prophet called by God who saw God’s word. What does it mean to see God’s Word? I don’t know if I have a good answer to that question, but maybe our understanding will be helped if we clarify what a prophet was and what a prophet did. I think sometimes we confuse prophets with fortune tellers. We think of them as looking into a crystal ball and seeing images of a future that may only look like clouds and mist to a non-prophet’s eye. But that’s not true of biblical prophets. They were not fortune tellers or mind readers. They could read the context and circumstances in which they lived and were called and they could see the potential consequences of the peoples’ actions. They did hear the voice of God. Clearly, they were given unique insight into what God was doing both in their present and in the future. And they were called to both see and proclaim the word they saw and heard from the Lord. But what really made a prophet a prophet was that they had what Walter Bruggeman called the prophetic imagination.

They could imagine the future consequences of actions taken now. They could imagine a different reality, a different present, and a different future. A prophet was gifted with the imagination to see the world as God sees it and as God created it to be. Perhaps when Isaiah saw the word of God concerning Judah and Jerusalem, that’s what was happening. He was not just seeing words scrolling like on a movie screen in his mind. He was able to imagine the different reality that God was creating.

What did Isaiah see?

“In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all nations shall stream to it.”

What did Isaiah see?

He saw God as arbitrator and judge. He saw God as teacher.

“He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many people; they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”

What did Isaiah see when he saw God’s word? What did he imagine? He saw a world where people from every nation were streaming like a constantly flowing river to the mountain of God. People of every nation – which implies that people of every gender, of every race, of every ethnicity, culture, background – will be streaming toward that holy mountain of God. Isaiah saw God as judge and arbitrator between every nation. And in response to God’s judgement, people were not only relinquishing their implements of war, but they were also remaking and refashioning those implements into tools for growth, for food, for nurture, and for nourishment. Swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks.

Isaiah was given the ability to imagine a world where every nation not only ceased their wars, their battles and fighting, but they stopped learning war altogether.

Isaiah was gifted with a powerful prophetic imagination. He saw God’s word. He proclaimed God’s word. He imagined the world that the word of God was creating. And his prophetic imagination produced such beautiful and powerful imagery that centuries later we still turn to his words for hope. His words have inspired and comforted generations of believers.

But Isaiah’s prophetic imagination was not born out of comfortable or easy circumstances. We cannot read his words out of context. He saw and spoke God’s word to his people because times were hard, because his people were being tested and would continue to be tested and tried in ways no on had yet conceived. Isaiah spoke his words of hope and light out of a growing darkness. His prophetic imagination came into its fullness when the world he and his people knew seemed to be spinning out of control.

His prophetic imagination was a glimpse into seeing the world as it could be, as it should be, as God created it to be.

When the pandemic first hit and the world went into lockdown, we had to learn how to be church differently didn’t we? We went from being in person every Sunday to streaming. Public gatherings became dangerous. Public singing became a prolific way to spread a virus that was terrifying to say the least. We had to learn how to be community, to be church in a world that felt like it was spinning wildly out of control. We needed to live into that eighth vow more than ever before, to pray for and seek to serve the people of God with our energy, our intelligence, our imagination, and our love.

The prophetic imagination that Isaiah and the other prophets employed can be ours as well. It is not about being artistic, although that can certainly be a part of it. It is about seeing what the world can be. It is about imagining a future where we all stream to the highest mountain, to God’s mountain, to a place where awe and reverence and mystery outweigh cynicism and certainty. Using our imaginations, we can see a world where difference does not equal distance – distance that is physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual – but instead draws us closer together and closer to God. Using our imaginations, we can envision a world where weapons of war are transformed into tools of peace. Swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. Using our imaginations, we can see the world as God created it to be, as it one day will be, and we can find our hope. That is the challenge and call of this first Sunday in Advent, indeed of this entire season. We can imagine, therefore we can hope. We can hope that one day swords will be replaced with plowshares and spears with pruning hooks. We can hope that one day we will learn war no more. We can hope for the world that God is creating, right now, in our midst. We can hope for the future because the future is in God’s good hands. We can imagine this and so much more. Thanks be to God.

Let all of God's hopeful children say, “Alleluia.”

Amen.