The following sermon was preached at saint benedict’s table on Sunday, December 8, 2019. You can also listen to the live recording or subscribe to our podcast. Just click here.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable and pleasing in your sight O God for you are our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
Gord Johnson’s “Jesse Tree” is one of my favourite songs. In tonight’s reading from Isaiah, we get the verse that Gord based that song on: “ A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.” (1)
The image of the shoot that will grow out of a dead stump is a beautiful one. It is such an amazing, defiant image of hope. A shoot, a living thing, will grow out of a dead thing.
We love images like this. Just do a google search for flowers growing out of concrete sidewalks.
The image actually begins in the previous chapter of Isaiah:
“See, the Lord, the Lord Almighty,
will lop off the boughs with great power.
The lofty trees will be felled,
the tall ones will be brought low.
He will cut down the forest thickets with an ax;
Lebanon will fall before the Mighty One.” (10:33-34)
A forest full of lofty trees has been cut down. All that remains, are stumps.
Things really should not grow out of stumps, a stump is what is left when you kill a tree by cutting it down. Jesse’s family tree, that was once large and majestic, that contained kings, has been cut down. It no longer resembles its former glory. It’s a dead, useless stump.
Some people take great pleasure in trying to connect imagery like this to specific events, past or present, Jamie mentioned an example of prophetic predictions gone wrong a few weeks ago. But even if you wanted to, it’s hard to pin this image to a specific event because Israel had multiple experiences that could be described in this way. They were cut down and began again multiple times.
New life can come from death. This was something they would have known from experience.
Our text from Isaiah is not describing a present reality, it is pointing to a hopeful future. At the time these words were written the new life was not yet visible. They were written when all that could be seen were the dead stumps. They are words pointing to a hope-filled future that has not yet become a reality.
The new life that the people are hoping for will come in the form of a person. Michael J Chan explains that this person will embody “the best of Israel’s traditions: He is wise and understanding (2), powerful and effective in war (2,4), able to judge for the benefit of the poor (verse 3-4), and obedient to God ( verse 2,5). [He] will rule the world in such a way that the poor are treated righteously, the meek are given a fair hearing, and the wicked are killed. So glorious is this reign that he is literally clothed in righteousness and faithfulness (verse 5).”
His reign will upend the natural order of things. Isaiah tells us that:
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 (6-7).
Isaiah is saying, “Look! The mighty forest was decimated and became a field of stumps but out of one of those stumps grew a beautiful and mighty tree! And look at all of the good and wonderful things that it will be able to accomplish. It may seem like all around you is death and destruction but pay attention and don’t lose hope. New life is coming!”
And sometimes, when we are experiencing challenging times, this is exactly the kind of defiant hopeful promise we need to help us keep going.
And this is exactly the kind of message that John the Baptist was preaching.
John is one of the more colourful characters we encounter in scripture. I’m grateful that even though it would be an incredibly theologically sound choice, the church didn’t choose to model vestments on John’s wardrobe and we don’t have a single feast day in the liturgical calendar where his regular diet is on the menu.
No camel hair for the priests, and no locusts dipped in honey for the feast.
Thanks be to God.
John was a fiery character who passionately proclaimed his message to the people, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”
Have you ever stopped to wonder for a moment just how one goes about making a path straight?
Well, one way would be to cut down any trees or growth that is in the way. Later in the passage John says, “Bear fruit worthy of repentance. Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” (8-10)
If it’s in the way, don’t save it, don’t tell a false story about it, cut it down and throw it into the fire.
There’s not a lot of wiggle room, or grey, in John’s message. None really.
Have you ever wondered how John felt when he finally met Jesus? When he finally met the Messiah and began to understand just how Jesus’ ministry was going to unfold?
I wonder if he was disappointed. I suspect that he was disappointed.
I suspect that Jesus did not look or act like John hoped he would act.
And so, in order for John to embrace the actual Messiah, he had to let his dream of what the Messiah would be die.
He had to lose hope in his idea of what the Messiah would be like in order to embrace the actual Messiah.
Which is a hard thing to do with any person, but with the Saviour of the world? The Saviour you have dedicated your entire life to?
But John does. He cuts it down, throws it into the fire, and embraces the real Jesus.
I was out for breakfast a little while ago and I have to confess that I spent more time eavesdropping on the conversation that was happening at the table next to mine than I did actually participating in the conversation that was happening at my own table.
At this other table, a group of people were generating ideas for their church’s adult Sunday School program and one person at that table said something like this, “The church needs to teach us how to end things. We never learn how to do this or do it well. Friendships, jobs, romantic relationships, they all end, but I’ve never been taught about a faithful way to end things. I’ve only ever been taught about the importance of having hope and not giving up.”
The past few months have been really tough for me. And a lot of people have reached out to try and help. They’ve reached out in a lot of different ways, but one common way has been to try and manufacture a Jesse Tree for me. Not a legitimate one, but a quick and easy one. They’ve seen the difficult things and tried to jump to a promise of new life – the bright side, the good thing that will come from the bad.
And honestly, it hasn’t been even a little bit helpful.
Two things have been.
The people who let me just sit in the difficulty. The people who acknowledged the situation with no attempts to promise a better time yet to come, and who resisted the temptation to gloss things over by trying to graft a potted plant from the grocery store on my dead stump.
The second helpful thing was a book a friend gave me. They actually gave it to me over 2 years ago and I just couldn’t bring myself to read it until recently. In that book, Necessary Endings, author Henry Cloud talks about the importance of hopelessness.
And that concept gave me hope.
You see, while the shoot that grows out of the stump is a beautiful, powerful, and true image, sometimes a stump remains a stump.
And more importantly, sometimes a stump is supposed to remain a stump.
Sometimes things need to end.
And in order for that to happen, and happen well, we need to resist the temptation to live in false hope and instead live in the reality of hopelessness.
Some stumps will never bring forth new life no matter how much hope you have or water you give them.
Imagine your life is a forest. There are healthy trees that are doing just fine. There are trees that could use a bit of pruning, and there are dead trees that need to be cut down and, as John says, burned. Some of those stumps will remain stumps, some may develop new shoots.
It can be difficult to tell which is which. It can be tempting to pretend that everything is just fine as it is and avoid the difficult tasks that require you to take an ax to some of those trees and that’s where it’s important to have good friends, or a counsellor, or spiritual director to help you sift and sort.
Advent is a season that teaches us two opposing truths. The first is that we should never lose our ability to embrace a defiant hope that says, sure that’s a dead tree stump and no life will ever come from it and yet, look! A shoot. A tree. New life, new hope. Don’t give up.
But Advent is also a season that can teach us to let the dead things stay dead.
I know in this room there are people who embrace the season of Advent in a wide variety of ways. I take it fairly seriously and so it’s not uncommon for me to have conversations with folks whose practice is different from mine in which they assume I’m going to judge them.
I have had my tree up and I’ve been listening to Mariah Carey’s Christmas album since October, they’ll say sheepishly. Don’t judge me.
And I don’t, I really don’t, but I am curious about how those choices are helping them. If they are, great!
But they don’t help me.
For me, one of the key things I like about Advent is that it puts my practices at odds with the culture around me. While other people are anxiously rushing through the mall, I choose not to. While other people are listening to Christmas music, I choose not to.
And by the time they are all sick to death of the decorations and the music, I’m getting ready to fully enjoy those things for 12 days. And it is good. And it is enough.
There is a story being told by our culture at this time of year that the key to happiness is found in consumption. In more and more and more. If Christmas music is great for one month, then how much better is it for three? If Christmas decorations are great in December, then how much better are they if you put them up in October? If giving gifts helps us love and be loved, then why not just buy more and more and more. The credit card bills can be sorted out in January.
Why wait?
I see no hope in that story. I see no new life. I see only a dead stump. Advent is a practice that helps me to see that story as hopeless and resist the temptation to live into false hope. Advent helps me to let that story die.
By embracing Advent I learn to have less. I learn what the waiting and watching have to teach me.
And in the death of one thing, in the acknowledgment that it is truly hopeless, I find the space to embrace a new thing, and a new hope. By clearing out all the dead and dying trees, I am able to notice when a small green shoot, despite all of the odds, begins to grow on one of those stumps.
May you, in your own way, do the same.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.