I read a difficult passage in church today, the Old Testament lesson from Isaiah 11:1-10. The first struggle I had are the words “Jesse” and “shoot” and “shall”, of where there are a lot in this passage. I was in speech therapy as a child for these confounding “s” and “sh” sounds, and of course I was afraid of saying “shit” instead of “shoot” because that’s how my brain works.
I also joked ahead of time that I was going to channel Pink Pinkerton, who was I believe a British ex-pat living in Sparks and a member of my church. He sang bass in the choir. He had a voice that I can only describe as stentorian, and he always–always–read from the book of “Eyes-eye-ah” instead of the book of “Eye zay ah” as we tend to pronounce it. I don’t have his accent or stentorian voice, but guess which one I used?
But I thought I would spell out some of the techniques I used to perform the reading. Yes, it’s church, this is purely liturgical but good liturgy is good theatrics.
A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.
Here it is, the opening statement and a dangerous one full of sounds my palate and tongue don’t like to make reliably. The best trick is to slow down and find the rhythm of the sentence. Not that every syllable takes the same amount of time, but that the important words can take a little more time and even a slight pause. A very small pause to hit the “T” at the end of “shoot” fixed the problem for me.
The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.
Another thing I like to do when reading passages is look for the parallels in the text. Here is a list of spirits with a wonderful rhythm of “spirit of THIS and THAT” repeated three times. The first “spirit” gets some emphasis, but the rest become almost a single word (hitting the “t” enough to make sure it’s not ‘thaspiridov’) and each THIS gets emphasis here. I am also careful not to drop the tone at the end of each phrase. I can’t remember the technical term but usually sentences end with a dropping tone (for declarations) and a rising tone (for questions) so I try to keep a small lifting tone, not a full question, but clearly not the end of the thought.
The way the text is printed in the lectionary we read from, there are no paragraph breaks, so I have to think of where they’ll be. (If I have a chance to print the thing out, I add my own paragraphs.)
He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.
I know all punctuation in the English texts are editorial. Here we have three sentences separated by a semicolon, which means they are a group of thoughts. Each sentence has a conjunction and the words “he shall” as the subject and verb.
Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist, and faithfulness the belt around his loins.
Again, parallel structures involving belts. The obvious words for emphasis are “righteousness” and “faithfulness”.
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.
This whole section is the utopian vision, peppered with “shall”s that could have gone wahooni-shaped on me very quickly if I hadn’t kept a steady rhythm.
On that day the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples; the nations shall inquire of him, and his dwelling shall be glorious.
One final challenge of “Jesse shall stand” to get through, and that’s it.
Reading this text in church is type of teaching. I think of it as a ministry of teaching, of presenting it in a way that leads to an idea. I hope my reading is an interactive thing, as much as that is possible in the liturgy.
Some phrases, however, bother me. “He shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked” is always difficult to hear. I mean, we all kind of want our enemies to suffer the wrath of God but really didn’t Jesus teach us not to want that? As much as we teach that Jesus is the branch of Jesse mentioned here, Jesus didn’t quite live up to that standard, did He?
The whole utopian section also throws me because it completely upends nature. Animals will stop being carnivores and turn into herbivores? That’s practically a flying snowman moment. We get a utopia where the basic truths of our lives are upended. Okay. I’ll buy that but then why have those dangerous creatures (lion, bear, asp, and adder) in the utopia at all? Can we assume that God will restore the animals as well as humans, will our beloved dogs go to heaven after all?
Me, personally? I buy the idea that God set things up to develop an ecology that depends on some animals eating other animals, and plants kind of get the short end of the stick, despite the fact that they can communicate with one another. So why would the ecology of God’s utopia use the same animals as our current non-utopian ecology?
Then I think to myself that I think too much about these things and just submit the damn post anyway.