Mushrooms (again)
As I said in a sermon back in November, I’m standing by my wishful (and wholly unsupported) translation of Isaiah 11:1 as “a shroom shall come out from the stump of Jesse” rather than the traditional (and accurate, scholarly, etc) translation: “a shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse.” Not only is it biologically likely, since mushrooms are often found growing out of cut-off stumps, it is figuratively instructional.
Chapter 11 of the book of Isaiah, after all, comes as a word of hope in the face of the prophecy of devastation that we read in chapter 10 — wherein God’s disobedient people (the line of Jesse/David) have been trampled by their enemies and hacked down like a field a barren stumps. The hope God offers is that, even out of those circumstances, life will come again — small, persistent, sprouting. Like a mushroom.
[Here I’m shamelessly quoting my own sermon.]
“Mushrooms are signs of life — bright and wild and wonderful — in places where it looks like everything is dying or already dead. Mushrooms feed on decaying wood, so they’re life that comes out of death. And did you know that the visible part of a mushroom that we see is just the fruiting body of a larger fungal network that is already active inside the tree? So, when a mushroom comes up from a stump, it’s the evidence of something we can’t see, of what’s going on inside, or behind the scenes.
And that’s what God is saying through the prophet Isaiah in this passage — that something unseen is going on — that even in the trampled vineyard, the decimated forest, God’s not done. In a wasteland sea of stumps, God’s not stumped, his plans aren’t stymied. Even when we can’t see it, he’s working. In the place where it looks like everything is dying or already dead, God is bringing life. Relentlessly. Redemptively. This is the very core of God’s promise, of the unique hope God offers. Life after death. Out of death, even.
We, of course, as Christians, know the source of that hope, that life, to be Jesus. And we cannot help but hear in the prophet’s words, the One foretold, the promised Savior.”
