Dr. William A. Ritter
First United Methodist Church
Birmingham, Michigan
Scripture: Isaiah 11:1-9
December 12, 2004
I don’t know whether you’ve noticed or not, but not everything that looks tame is tame. Like some of the animals that run around my neck of the woods. One Sunday afternoon, a little red fox scampered across our deck. Then, just a few nights ago, we froze him in our headlights on the side of the road. Maybe it wasn’t the same fox. And maybe it wasn’t a fox at all. Not that I would know.
But Eric Sharp would. Eric knows all about the wilderness and writes about everything he knows. I’ve been reading him for years in the Detroit Free Press. I figure that a city boy ought to have some “smarts” about things in the wild. Just the other day, Eric was writing about wolves. The title of his column caught my eye. “When More Wolves Draw Near, How Will We React?” Truth be told, I don’t have the faintest idea how I’ll react. One little red fox running across my deck….no big deal. But wolves in the ravine behind my house….very big deal.
Not that I’m likely to see them anytime soon, given that they’re miles removed from me. A few have apparently crossed the ice of the Straits of Mackinac and taken up residence somewhere between Roger’s City and Gaylord. But most live north of the bridge, where the DNR estimates the wolf population to be about 360. There’s plenty of food for them up there. Eric writes: “Even if there were double that number….and even if every wolf ate a deer a week…..wolves in the U.P. would still kill only a fraction of the deer that starve each winter.” In fact, Eric bets that cars kill more deer in the U.P. than wolves do.
But he thinks about what might happen if they begin knocking off household pets, like dogs….which they will do if they get the chance. Or, as he adds: “I wonder what will happen when the wolves figure out that they can make a much easier living by hanging out near a town and eating those four-legged offerings the nice people put out for them?”
Yet even the domesticated species can be vicious and cruel. The phrase “It’s a dog-eat-dog world” had to originate some place, didn’t it? And just the other night I was in the lovely living room of some lovely people who have some lovely cats….which they have to keep separated, one from the other. Because when their two lovely cats are in the same space at the same time, they are not necessarily lovely to each other.
From time to time, on my way from HGTV (my wife’s channel) to ESPN (my channel), I interrupt my surfing and scrolling at the Discovery Channel, just long enough to watch some lion stalk, pounce, kill and eat some wildebeest or another, totally without braising, broiling, broasting or barbecue sauce. So I ask you, what chance does a lamb have?
I vaguely remember hearing, several years ago, of a world peace exhibit at some world’s fair or another, featuring (you guessed it) a lion and a lamb in the same exhibit. People loved it…. thronged to see it….said (collectively), “Can you believe it?”….but seldom asked, “How did they do it?” The answer was simple. At least once a day….more often twice….it required the introduction of a new lamb. Which called to mind the satirist who was overheard to say: “Sure, the lion and the lamb may lie down together. But the lamb better not count on getting much sleep.”
Yet we love these verses from Isaiah 11 suggesting idyllic harmony in the animal kingdom, even though we know it will be easier to turn swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks (two other images from Isaiah describing things that will come to pass when that old stump of Jesse….David’s father, for those of you who flunked, or never took, Old Testament 101…yields forth a shoot, then roots, then a branch, on whom the Spirit of the Lord shall fully rest, and in whom the Spirit of the Lord shall fully dwell, and through whom the Kingdom of the Lord shall fully come….meaning Jesus, for those of you who flunked, or never took, New Testament 101).
Right here beside me, even as I preach, hangs a banner depicting our text of the morning. Called “The Peaceable Kingdom,” it is one of our oldest and loveliest banners. It comes complete with a little child in the lower left-hand corner. Presumably, this is the child who is not afraid to place his pink, pliant little hand over the very hole where the poisonous snake dwells. Perhaps Isaiah is suggesting that when creation is finally and fittingly healed, that messy business between snake and human which is alleged to have begun in the Garden….where the Creator said “Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me,” and the serpent said “What does he know?”….maybe that messy business is now about to be healed and restored.
Yet I remain cautious. When I once asked the chief resident at Red Bird Missionary Hospital in rural Kentucky about the most frequent cause of admission to his hospital’s emergency room, he said, “Poisonous snake bites.” Leading me, who earlier that day had been hiking those trails, to ask whether the victims were bit on the trails. To which he said: “No, not on the trails. They were bit in the churches.” Then he went on to describe snake-handling rituals during public worship, where people regularly test the depth of their faith and the power of biblical prophecy by allowing poisonous vipers to crawl all over them. Were I to suddenly reach to the floor of the pulpit and reappear with a snake draped over my arm…..harmless or viperous….all but those in the balcony would scatter quickly. And I’d be retired early. Yet we love this text, even though one of the commentators I read in preparation for my sermon suggested that “it passes all bounds of probability”….suggesting that most Christians’ idea of utopia does not include such sentimentality.
I find it interesting that in this version of the prophecy, it is not the lion that shall dwell with the lamb. Rather, it is the wolf. The lion is with the calf….“and the fatling together” (whatever the fatling is). Except recent Hebrew scholarship suggests a mistranslation here. The word “fatling” is better translated “friends”….as in “the lion and the calf shall be friends together.”
For whatever reason, we prefer linking lions with lambs in everything from children’s books to weather reports. Browsing the internet, I learned I can buy any number of “lion and lamb” products from figurines to drink coasters, and from walking shorts to underwear. Better yet, the next time I am on Cape Cod, I intend to stay at the Lion and Lamb Inn, which is a B and B in Barnstable, built in 1740.
But for those of us who seriously question the ultimate compatibility of wild beasts, farm animals and house pets….and just what is that little girl going to do if she does get a hippopotamus for Christmas?….what could this text possibly have to say to us?
Could it be that the message to be appropriated is not so much about the animals around us….the animals beyond us….or even the animals beside us (“nice kitty”)….so much as the animals within us? I mean, if the world be divided (for purposes of classification) into animal, vegetable and mineral, where are we most commonly classified if not “animal?” We may have the spark and soul of the divine (at least some of us think so). And we may be capable of actions that are quite angelic. But we are neither deities nor angels. We are animals….in some ways, wonderfully unlike the rest….but in other ways, very much like the rest.
For years, I have been telling preachers….even preachers who love poetry….not to quote poetry in their sermons. Because the average congregation cannot follow poetry….indeed, will not follow poetry. But there was a day when, as an Albion College sophomore….a dateless Albion College sophomore….I offered to usher at a public reading by the late Carl Sandburg. And because the sold-out chapel reserved no seats for ushers, when I finished my duties, I came down front and sat on the floor, resting my back against the pew. Which means I was almost on top of Sandburg, actually looking up at him where he sat perched on a stool. He was white of hair….lined of face….hollow of voice….and eighty of age. What he did was read through the body of his work, beginning with his poem about Chicago and that memorable line about the Windy City being “hog butcher to the world.”
Then he launched into a poem about the wilderness, saying (by way of introduction): “I was forty when I wrote it, and the animals were alive in me.”
There is a wolf in me . . . fangs pointed for
tearing gashes. . . a red tongue for raw meat
. . . and the hot lapping of blood—I keep this
wolf because the wilderness gave it to me
and the wilderness will not let it go.
There is a fox in me . . . a silver-gray fox . . . I
sniff and guess . . . I pick things out of the
wind and air . . . I nose in the dark night
and take sleepers and eat them and hide the
feathers . . . I circle and loop and double-cross.
Oh, to be sure, there are other ways of looking at our nature. We are indeed “fearfully and wonderfully made” as the psalmist says (Psalm 139) and as Bill Loechel loves to remind me on Wednesday mornings. And just this past week, another man well into his eighties….renowned atheist philosopher Anthony Flew of Oxford….is alleged to have opened the door to belief in an intelligent creator, suggesting that he knows of no other way to account for the incredibly purposeful genetic material we know as DNA. Yet Sandburg returns to humble us:
There is a hog in me . . . a snout and a belly . . . a
machinery for eating and grunting . . . a
machinery for sleeping satisfied in the sun—I
got this too from the wilderness and the
wilderness will not let go.
Followed by:
There is a fish in me . . . I know I came from salt-
blue water-gates . . . I scurried with shoals of
herring . . . I blew waterspouts with porpoises
. . . before land was . . . before the water went
down . . . before Noah . . . before the first chapter
of Genesis.
And this:
There is a baboon in me . . . clambering-clawed
. . .dog-faced . . . yawping a galoot’s hunger
. . . hairy under the armpits . . . here are the
hawk-eyed hankering men . . . here are the blond
and blue-eyed women . . . here they hide curled
asleep waiting . . . ready to snarl and kill . . .
ready to sing and give milk . . . waiting—I keep
the baboon because the wilderness says so.
Along with this:
There is an eagle in me and a mockingbird . . . and
the eagle flies among the Rocky Mountains of my
dreams and fights among the Sierra crags of what
I want . . . and the mockingbird warbles in the
early forenoon before the dew is gone, warbles in
the underbrush of my Chattanoogas of hope, gushes
over the blue Ozark foothills of my wishes—And
I got the eagle and the mockingbird from the
wilderness.
The last time (in the last church) when I dared voice Sandburg’s words to a real-life, flesh-and-blood congregation, a lady verbally accosted me over coffee. She said that none of this spoke to her….made sense to her….accurately described her. So I agreed with her. Then I apologized to her. Even though I knew her to be one of the more cutting and pain-inflicting parishioners I had encountered in my ministry.
And in a week that has given us news of massive starvings….child beatings….rock concert killings….and our own local version (in Farmington Hills) of desperate housewives….you tell me that where human beings are concerned, the animals are all domesticated and the wilderness is totally a thing of the past.
Oh, but there is more to this story. And more to the poem. Sandburg concludes:
O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie, inside my ribs, under
my bony head, under my red-valve heart—and I
got something else: it is a man-child heart, a
woman-child heart: it is a father and mother and
lover: it came from God-Knows-Where: it is going
to God-Knows Where—For I am the keeper of the
zoo: I say yes and no: I sing and kill and work:
I am a pal of the world: I came from the wilderness.
I do not know whether Carl Sandburg was even interested in things religious. But I know that we gather at this season of the year to say that we’ve got something else inside our ribs….that we who came from God-knows-where can know the God of God-knows-where….and that everywhere you find the human animal, it is religious. In part, because the image of God is within us. But in greater part, because the Son of God is born like us. The word “flesh” can never again be diminished or downgraded, given that it was once deemed fit to house the eternal.
Which gives me confidence that we can reconcile the animals….harmonize the animals…. domesticate, pacify, even tame the animals. Leading to closure with this.
A grandfather is talking to his grandson a few days after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Looking at his grandson, the grandfather says: “I feel like I have two wolves barking inside of me. The first wolf is filled with anger, hatred, bitterness….and mostly revenge. The second wolf is filled with love, kindness, happiness….and mostly forgiveness.”
At which point the grandson looks up at his grandfather and says: “Which wolf do you think will win, Grandpa?” And the grandfather responds: “Whichever one I feed.”
Note: The “peaceablekingdom” language from Isaiah 11 was written in the 8th century BC. The author, sometimes known as first Isaiah, is not to be confused with the author of the beloved “suffering servant” passages of Isaiah 53. This latter material is generally ascribed to an author known as second Isaiah and dates from the 6th century BC. As to the debate about who this “shoot from the stump of Jesse” shall be (and whether this is a literal prediction of Jesus Christ), I make no comment here. While the author may be referring to a forthcoming king in the tradition of David, the language clearly shaped the messianic expectation that Jesus later fulfilled. All of which is a debate that fascinates biblical scholars and theologians, but is of lesser interest to congregants.
Concerning Isaiah 11:6-8 of R. B. Y. Scott writes: “The state of peace and well-being to follow is symbolized by the idyllic picture of wild beasts and dangerous reptiles in harmonious companionship with domesticated animals and children.” It is Scott who also alludes to the Garden of Eden narrative and the “perpetual enmity between man and serpents.”
Eric Sharp’s article “When More Wolves Draw Near, How Will We React?” can be found in the Detroit Free Press of Thursday, December 9, 2004. I am also indebted to the late Carlyle Marney and his book, The Recovery of the Person, for his treatment of Carl Sandburg, especially the section entitled “Menagerie and Myth.”
The poignant story about “two barking wolves” has appeared in any number of articles and sermons of late. I cannot account for its origin, but I thank Eric Ritz of New Holland, Pennsylvania for passing it along.
