A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.

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Solomon Hart
6 years ago
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1 Isaiah 11 : 1 10 Matthew 3 : 1 12 Sermon A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. The stump of Jesse - it is a strange sounding phrase, and not one which sounds like a likely source for a bright and encouraging sermon. Yet it is a phrase which comes up regularly in our advent readings, and which features in several seasonal hymns. I remember singing about this Jesse as a child, hearing about things growing out of his stump, and wondering what on earth it was talking about. Well I know now that the Jesse being referred to is Jesse, the father of King David. And I understand that he is a significant figure because Matthew s gospel goes out of its way to state that Jesus is in the family line of King David, and is therefore a descendant of Jesse. So I, and I hope you, get a sense of why these ancient and mysterious words of Isaiah are often taken to be a prophecy of the arrival of Jesus Christ. For apart from any family connection, we know that his life would demonstrate the sort of actions and qualities which the prophet goes on to describe. So this strange sounding prophecy has helped to shape people s understanding of who Jesus was, and therefore our understanding of the significance of the Christmas story. But I want to go a little beyond that simple explanation this morning to tell you that these words actually have more to say to us than that. To tell you that these words not only describe what God did in the person of Jesus, but what God always does in our lives and our communities. And perhaps if I can do that, you may yet find this to be a bright and encouraging sermon. For a start, these words from the prophet Isaiah take on a greater significance when we understand their setting. The image of a tree stump does not appear out of nowhere. The previous chapter of the book of Isaiah, the one we don t tend to read so often, contains a series of angry words spoken on God s behalf. There the prophet expresses divine anger

2 directed in part to the Assyrian people for their pride and military aggression, but also in large part to the people of Israel and Judah. They are condemned for all sorts of things, most notably for having deprived the poor of their rights and withheld justice from the oppressed, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless. The people are told that these failures have consequences and that because of terrible times are coming. They are told that nothing will remain but to cringe among the captives or fall among the slain. You can see why we don t read that chapter very often in the lead up to Christmas. And that chapter, chapter ten, ends with the prophet specifically saying that God is going to cut down all the trees; that the lofty trees will be felled, the tall ones will be brought low. Why does that matter? Well in a sense that is what it is all about. That is why there's "a stump" in the first place. It s the result of God taking action in response to disobedience and violence and greed and corruption. It doesn't matter how tall or glorious looking a tree might have been, when is comes crashing down, the stump is what we are left with. We saw this earlier in the year when we had that sudden storm here in Geneva. Trees which had appeared to be solid and strong were bent over and snapped with the sheer force of the wind and the hail. Once the fallen wood was removed, the only sign that they had ever existed was the stumps, looking bare and lifeless, sad little reminders of what once had been. That is the image the prophet surely had in mind, for he is describing a society gone so badly wrong. Kings of Israel and Judah had been appointed and anointed with great expectation, but they had failed to lead the people in the ways of peace and justice and compassion as God had commanded. The dreams were dead and the hope was gone. All that was left was a stump of what once had been. It is in this setting, just when things appear hopeless and the future looks very bleak, that the prophet promises that God are not in fact dead that he will one day send a leader who will rule with justice and with mercy. It is not often that I am able to tell anything about my past which makes me sound like the rugged outdoor type, and this story doesn t really achieve

3 that either, but it is about as close as I get. Our house in Clydebank had a tree in the garden which was deemed to be too close to the house, as the spreading roots were causing damage to the foundations. So some experts concluded that it had to go. I m sure that by now you are already picturing energetically swinging an axe, and of course I would have done, had it not been for the fear which others expressed of whole thing crashing through the roof. So the experts came back and did the job, first taking off the branches and then finally taking the chainsaw to the trunk, just a few inches above the ground. Fortunately they did know what they were doing and the job was done safely. But we were left, and this is the relevance of the story, with a tree stump. Which is when I discovered how very hard it is to ever really kill a tree. I was told that the roots would be so widespread that it would be a massive job to dig it up, and I would be better to poison them and let them disintegrate naturally. For this I received lots of advice, lots of suggested solutions involving salt, or caustic soda, or drilling holes to inject poison, or smothering it with plastic but none of them worked as well as I had been told they would. So despite all of my attempts, new shoots kept growing out of it, mocking me as they reached up towards the sky, sprouting leaves and springing into life. A tree stump may look dead, but it is very hard to kill it off completely. That is the picture offered to us by the prophet, of the promise of God. The promise of a great nation whose commitment to justice and peace and hospitality and compassion would be a shining light in the world that may have been seriously damaged human greed and corruption. There may only be a stump of the great hopes which had once grown, but the promises of God will never be killed off. God will cause a shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. The new promises which the prophet goes on to describe are astounding and perhaps even unbelievable. It is not that things will be restored to how they once were it is much more than that. This is a vision of the whole order of nature being turned around. All the stuff we have known since school days is no longer true in this vision. All that we have come to regard as normal and inevitable gets shaken up. For here it is no longer the case that the big feed on the small, that the strong gobble up the weak, or

4 that the vulnerable end up getting hurt. Instead: 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. It is a beautiful picture which has inspired many a lovely painting, but the niceness of it may cause us to miss how dramatic it is. Just as the many child friendly versions of stories about Jesus may cause us to miss the deeply challenging nature of what he actually did and said, words and actions which have the power to shake so many of the things which we assume to be true about life, to shake the foundations on which our societies and our economies are built on. For in the gospels also we find that it is not the rich and the religious who come out on top. It is not the strong and the powerful who are said to inherit the kingdom of God. The ones who Jesus holds up are the outsider and the outcast, the widow and the child, the corrupt tax collector and the woman with six husbands and condemned criminal on the cross. And what comes across very clearly is that this one who changes "natural" order of the strong eating the weak, is himself full of humility. He makes himself weak and vulnerable, and it is with mercy and compassion that he achieves his purpose, rather than any military might. This was God s promise being fulfilled God s way. This is the one who grew out of the stump of Jesse. So what might start out as a depressing image is turned into a symbol of hope. This is the story of what God did. And this is the story of what God does. This stump of Jesse tells a story about the resilience of hope, the creativity of the spirit and the coming of Christ in our midst. And that is why it becomes a bright and encouraging story for us. It proclaims that hope lives on no matter how bleak things may appear. It proclaims that new beginnings are possible even when we seem to be out of strength. It proclaims that new life can emerge even out of our failures. So if any of us, or perhaps it should be all of us, are worshiping this morning with a sense of failure, if our dreams appear to have disintegrated,

5 and our once bright hopes have faded. If we have tried to live faithful lives but have been worn down by our repeated mistakes, if we worry that the church in Europe seems to be in steady decline, if we despair of a society which only seems to value material possessions, if we are beaten down by accounts of warfare and hatred and poverty and disease in our world, here is the story for us. The goodness of God and the promise of God are much more resilient than we might imagine. A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. And whenever we are ready to lay aside our pride, ready to change our ways, and to put our faith in the God who does such things, it can still burst into life and show itself in new ways. And so the story once preached by John the baptist, becomes glad tidings for us, and the birth of Christ which we prepare to celebrate, becomes a bright and encouraging message indeed.

We are broken We long for rescue

Obsessed with Super Heroes? We are broken We long for rescue Isaiah 11 Isaiah 11 Is. 11:1 There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit. Our hope