“From a Stump of a Tree…”

An Advent sermon based upon Isaiah 11: 1-10

By Rev. Charles J. Tomlin, BA, MDiv, DMin.

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership, 

The Second Sunday of Advent (Cycle A),  December 8th, 2019

The Beatles started playing music together when I was five years old.  They took the world by storm, but by the time I turned eleven, they had already broke up, even though they were one of the most popular, earth-shaking, money making, culture-shaping rock groups, the world has ever known.  I guess you could say, that even being on top of the world can’t be sustained for very long.

After the Beatle’s break up, each of the Beatles, with varying talents had the popularity and money to continue on their own.  John Lennon was probably the most gifted and philosophical of the group, party due to the poetic writing of his new Japanese wife, Yoko Ono.  She was largely responsible for the lyrics of Lennon’s most famous single and Album of all, “Imagine.”  That title song is still one of 100 most popular songs ever recorded.  Most of you know how it goes:

Imagine there's no heaven.  It's easy if you try
No hell below us.  Above us only sky.

Imagine all the people. Living for today (ah ah ah)

Imagine there's no countries.  It isn't hard to do.
Nothing to kill or die for. And no religion, too.

Imagine all the people.  Living life in peace.

You may say that I'm a dreamer.  But I'm not the only one.
I hope someday you'll join us.  And the world will be as one.

Those lyrics were considered revolutionary, sacrilegious, and even communist then, but today they are considered a classic; a song of idyllic hope.  Interestingly, the words which say, “Imagine there is no heaven, no hell below us…” along with the words, “imagine there is no religion too” were inspired by a Christian prayer book given to him as a gift.  In an interview Lennon explained, “If you can imagine positive prayer…a world at peace with no denominations of religions,…not without religion, but without any religion that says my God is bigger than your God, then this can be true….” (Sheff, David (1981). Golson, G. Barry (ed.). All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono (2000 ed.). St Martin's Griffin).

We may, or may not fully agree with Lennon’s perspective, but his hope of a world ‘at peace’ is right up there with the most enduring visions ever imagined, including the second vision we are going to consider today from the greatest prophetic imagination  of the ancient Jewish world; the prophecy of Isaiah.

Last week, we considered Isaiah’s vision calling for God’s people to wait in hope, like we wait on Christmas.  In today’s vision from Isaiah, the prophet explains more specifically what kind of new world we wait for.  

But there are so many things ‘imagined’ in this text, it’s hard to know where to begin. 

In Isaiah’s vision of what can only be only ‘imagined’, we see a shoot growing from the stump of Jesse, we see the gifts of the spirit, and we get a closer look at what has been named ‘the peaceable kingdom’; a kingdom where predators and their prey live side by side.  Then finally, we see a world where babies play unharmed near poisonous snakes. 

Like the practically unimaginable world where all peoples turn to the one true God and allow their weapons of hate and war to be transformed into tools for agriculture and food, here we see a world where both nature and human nature will be challenged and changed because a new kind of King rules human hearts and lives.   The Jewish Comedian and Filmmaker Woody Allen, once gave his own interpretation of this vision: “The wolf shall lie down with the lamb. But the lamb won’t get much sleep!” 

(THE DIVINE FACTOR)  A NEW BRANCH WILL GROW… 

However, what Woody Allen failed to understand is that the old world has to die before a new world can grow out of it.  For when Isaiah says, ‘a shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse. . .” The stump, for all practical purposes, is dead.  The life it had is cut off.  The world that was, had gone.

We know this, because just before this chapter, in chapter 10, God declared punishment on the people, sending in the Assyrians to bring God’s judgment upon Israel and his people: “Woe to Assyria, the rod of my anger…I will send him against a godless nation (v. 5)…against Mt. Zion and Jerusalem (v. 12).   As the chapter ends, we read these most sobering words: “Today the Assyrians will stand at Nob, shaking their fists at the mountain of Daughter Zion, the hill of Jerusalem.  Look, the Lord GOD… will chop off the branches with terrifying power, and the tall trees will be cut down, the high trees felled” (Isa. 10:32-33 CSB17).  The trees, the people -- both will be clean cut off.  Before the new could come, the old had to go.

That’s certainly a disturbing, devastating and depressing picture for any people, including our own.  It’s not only disturbing that people had to die, but that people would not change, would not bend, would not or allow anything different, and that people would not even try to imagine what God imagined, or even demanded of them through his prophets.   How tragic for them, and how tragic it would be for us too, that we would resist God’s new work among us, so that not just something, but everything had to be taken away for the new to grow?

But there is not only ‘death’ and ‘judgement’ going on here.  There is also ‘life’ and promise that returns.  Something is starting to grow in the same world where nothing new could grow before.  Can you imagine anything like this?  Can you imagine growth and life where there has only been resistance, fruitless decay and death? 

A story, perhaps legendary, is told about how a determined European atheist was so bent on denying any hope of resurrection and eternal life that when he died, he instructed the cemetery to put his body under six feet of concrete so his body could not rise.  However, after a few years went by, passersby noticed an unexpected spectacle. The reinforced concrete tomb had cracked, and a new shoot of growth had appeared in that very crack. There are of course, scientific explanations why such a thing happens?  But it was as If a miracle defied the atheists final wish, so that God’s truth goes marching on.

Who knows whether that story was true, but we all know just how resilient life is, even in our own world.  While we must decide whether we believe in resurrection, there is little doubt whether after we’re dead and gone, life will or won’t continue.  As the Battle Hymn goes, we might and will fall, but “His truth is Marching On!”  That’s the Divine Factor!

That’s the kind of image Isaiah imagines in this passage.  Something new will grow out of a tree that has been, or will be cut down.  We’ve all seen that before, haven’t we?  We’ve all cut down, or cut back bushes or trees, only to watch life growing back from the ‘stump’, the root, or from the stem.  The life that returns will, of course, be different, but life will return.  And because life has its source in the creator, sustainer, and redeemer God, life is also God’s truth that goes marching on.

So, how do we imagine new life and growth in our own world?  I’m sure it was difficult for people to envision it when they looked out across the battle fields and saw all the death and destruction.  Back in June of this year, I heard watch the news about several 95 year-old Veterans who had returned to visit Normandy, the site of the most decisive and deadly battle of the second world war. 

Strangely, even though they each had struggled with wanting to remember that day, they now said this day must never be forgotten so such carnage and chaos never happens again.  What struck me most about the whole interview, was how that terrible day had transformed each of their lives, and they hoped that memorializing it would keep challenging and transforming us too.  Today D-Day is no longer just a symbol of death, but it has become a symbol of hope, of new life, a challenge for liberty and for new hope of peace in the world.  Out of the sacrifice of all those cut down in the heat of war, came new life and new determination to learn to live rightly with their lives (The Episode was aired on CBS Morning News, June 5^th, 2019).

(THE HUMAN FACTOR) A NEW KING WILL COME…

But how do people, who are most naturally flawed and corruptible, and ‘bent’ on living self-centered, independent, and greedy lives, grow into someone new?   How can a people, as Isaiah described, who ‘enact crooked statues and write oppressive laws…., which keep the poor from getting a fair trial and deprive the needy people of justice, (Isaiah 10: 1-2)…;  how can people like this, who are ‘hell-bent’ in this vicious cycle of death and destruction, find hope for a world where sin, death, and destruction will never return?  Should we, could we, might we even dare imagine a people or a world like this?   Well, this is exactly what Isaiah does, for where the ‘tall trees’ have been cut down and the ‘forest thickets’ had been cleared, there is a persistent hope that this is where ‘a shoot will grow from the stump of Jesse, and… (where)…a branch from his roots will bear fruit” (11:1).

Isaiah’s promise about the ‘stump of Jesse’ brings us to the human side of this promise.  The new world, the new life, and the new hope for growth does will not come without a ruler, a leader, or a people who will obey and live out of ‘a spirit of wisdom and understanding.’  God’s new growth, depends on the human choice, the human factor, that is, even as much as it depends upon new life and opportunity from God.  

Of course, we see this line of hope running straight through Jesus Christ, and we should.  Jesus was fully and finally the hope of Israel’s salvation and he is still the divinely gifted human life of the world’s hope for redemption wrapped up in human ‘flesh and blood’.  The new growth had to have a ‘stump’ to grow out of; and the royal hope for an eternal kingdom, had to be realized and portrayed in a particularly, human and earthly form. 

In a recent news report, breakthroughs in Face Recognition Technology were being analyzed.  This technology is now being used, not just to read your face to identify who you are, but it is being developed so that computers and cameras can read your face and tell what you are feeling in that moment.  This new kind of technology is believed to be necessary for reading the tired faces of employees, especially truck drivers, who might accidentally fall asleep at the wheel.  But of course, the cost of this new technology was deemed to be threat to civil liberties, because it might also be used to detect the waywardness or laziness of employees who might be doing less than they are being paid to do.

We now live in a world where the moral restraint and discipline are coming less and less from within a person, but must come more and more from outward restraints, which will can shrink the human soul and moral motivation from within.  We call that kind of world, where all the restraints are external, a prison.   But even with so many new dreams being transferred from humanity to machines, there is still no lasting hope in this world without the good of a person and without the goodness of a people through whom God’s moral ‘spirit’ and constructive and creative ‘understanding’ flows and ‘bears fruit’.  I heard Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook say in an interview, that when he was looking at the screen of his phone more than he was looking into the eyes of another person, he was using his phone too much.  He needed to put it down.  He needed to use the phone to help him have more time to be human, not less. 

I like Isaiah’s vision much better, which could even include robots too. Could you imagine that? But at the core of Isaiah’s thought is new growth as ‘the Spirit of the LORD’ to rests on a person, which is here explained as a ‘spirit of wisdom, understanding, counsel, and strength.  It’s the kind ‘knowledge’ that comes to a person whose ‘delight’ is rather strangely, ‘in the fear of the LORD’.  For us ‘fear’ has negative connotations, but we should see it as simply meaning reverence, respect which comes out of a love for justice, righteousness, and faithfulness.

What I think is most important for us to understand, is when we read this passage today, we tend to think it only means that Jesus is this human person who fulfills Isaiah’s dream.  Of course, Jesus is the one whom the Gospel reports had ‘the Spirit rest upon him’, but then later, we also read how this same Spirit rested on the disciples at Pentecost too.  We also read how ever person who was Baptized into God’s new people, received a Baptism of the Holy Spirit too.  Thus, what Isaiah’s vision should mean to us is that God’s vision for new life and new understanding isn’t just about God doing all his work in Jesus, but God would work in us as well.  Jesus is no longer here ‘in flesh and blood’, but he only lives through his Church, through the Spirit that indwells in the believer’s heart. 

The person who ‘fears’ and ‘respects’ the Word and the Work of God for justice and righteousness, is also the person who ‘bears’ God’s fruit in the world.  But what can’t happen, is a salvation that does not include an openness to receive ‘the Spirit’ who has wisdom, understanding, and strength dwelling within us, the human person.   So, even the Divine Factor requires a Human Factor of openness and willingness to imagine and be responsive God’s purposes of life and hope.  And before God brings hope to the world, we have discover his love and hope for and in us.

Barbara Lundblad, a teacher of preachers, tells of a man who lives on her street in New York, who she’s known for years. They often met in the morning at the newsstand. Then, the man’s wife died – forty-two years together suddenly changed to loneliness. Barbara watched him walking, his head bowed, his shoulders drooping lower each day. His whole body seemed in mourning, cut off from everyone.  She then grew accustomed to saying, “Good morning” without any response.  Until one day.  She saw him coming and before She could get any words out, he tipped his hat, “Good morning, Going for your paper?” He walked beside her, eager to talk.

Barbara could not know what brought the change that seemed so sudden. Perhaps, for him, it wasn't sudden at all, but painfully slow. Like a seedling pushing through rock toward the sunlight. There must have been an explanation, yet he appeared to her, a miracle. Had he finally imagined God’s hope for growing newness within his own broken heart?   Whatever had happened, there had to also be ‘a human factor’ that worked with the ‘divine factor’ to invite the newness of hope to come in him.

But here, as Isaiah imagines it, we need to understand that the human factor for bringing about a whole new world is not just a private matter of accepting God’s redeeming grace, but Isaiah reminds us that the human factor has a social side as well.  The one who allows the Spirit to teach them God’s wisdom will judge honestly with goodness, fairness and will be open and glad to obey God’s will.  Again, this is not only a prophecy about Jesus, but it is about how we too are challenged in God’s gift of newness to live in obedience and openness to God’s Spirit for sharing God’s gift of newness for those who need it, just like we do.

Isaiah’s vision, placed in context of the closed-mindedness and short sightedness happening around him as he proclaimed this vision, reminds us how we too might  refuse to imagine a different kind of world—-a world which must include those who having difficulty or are disadvantaged.  We too might decide too soon where things can’t grow, or what can’t be.  “Surely not there!” we say. The rock is too hard, the stump too dead.  Sometimes we just won’t dare toward what might or must be.  There are times when we assume certain groups of people cannot be saved, cannot be loved or cannot grow or thrive. We don’t allow or advocate for fairness and justice for all.

Across from Manhattan in New York City, Jersey City clings to the river's edge. A woman named Ruth grew up there in the thirties. She said it wasn't so bad being a black person in those years. If you were light enough and straightened your hair, you could get a good job with the telephone company.

That’s exactly what her mother did. Every Saturday afternoon as soon as the weather was warm, Ruth and her mother Mabel got all dressed up, fit for the finest party in town. But they didn't even go out the door. They put two chairs out on the fire escape and left the window open wide with the radio tuned to “Saturday Afternoon at the Metropolitan Opera.” They sat for the rest of the afternoon, listening to the opera not from the first balcony but from the fire escape. Mabel knew most of the arias by heart and sang along with her favorites.

One day she overheard some white folks at the phone company say that black people just couldn't understand opera. She would tell that story and laugh until the tears rolled down her cheeks. And she surely was pleased when a most talented, Christian and black Opera singer from Philadelphia, Marian Anderson, was invited to sing at the Lincoln Memorial. People didn’t expect much to grow in black people in those days. But hope can be stubborn. You can try to keep people down, you can put all kinds of obstacles in their way, and yet, they push through the sidewalk. They break through the rock where jackhammers failed and they end up singing God’s new song in the sunlight for all in the world to hear.  When the Spirit is allowed to ‘rest’ on and in someone, no matter who they are, as the poet Maya Angelou wrote, even a ‘caged bird’ will find a reason to sing ( Also from Lundbld).

THE EARTH WILL BE FULL…

“A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse…”  That’s the divine factor for hope.  God is the source of life.  “The Spirit Will Rest upon him…”.  That’s the human factor.  People must allow God’s life to live and inspire them to receive and live God’s hope into their lives, both inwardly and outwardly.  This brings us finally, to the the ‘reality factor’.  As we receive and receive God’s hope and live God’s dream, the dream becomes ‘blessed reality’ in the real world.  As Isaiah imagined: “The whole earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord…” 

Who could imagine getting here to such a reality of transformation of goodness growing in the world, when you on a lifeless stump of utter despair? I’ve sat there on that stump, perhaps you have, too.  You may even be there now -- at that place where hope is cut off, where loss and despair have deadened your heart.

Today, on this Second Sunday of Advent, God’s good word comes to sit with us. This word will not ask us to get up and dance. You may, or may not be ready to decorate your world with Christmas.  The prophet’s vision is surprising, but it’s still small. The nation would never rise again. The shoot would not become a mighty cedar. The shoot that was growing would be different from what the people expected:

For he grew up before them like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground;

he had no form or majesty that we should loo at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. (Isaiah 53: 2).

A shoot did come out from the stump of Jesse… fragile yet strong and stubborn. It would grow like a plant out of dry, barren, desert, ground. It would push back the stone from the rock-hard tomb.  It would grow in humanity again, but it would also be a promise of a whole new reality, based on what God could do with life, and what humanity could do in God.

This life, not just physical, but also spiritual will grow in the heart of a man cut off by sorrow until one morning he can look up again.  This life will grow in the hearts of people who have been told over and over that they are nothing. The plant of hope will grow. It will break through the places where jackhammers fail. It will sing on the fire escape and soar from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.  It will eventually transform human life, but it will transform nature, as well as, human nature.  Nothing and no one goes untouched when God’s life rests and flows through human life and is released into the world. 

What might you imagine being touched and transformed by God’s living goodness sprouting up through some deadness in your world?  We are putting up decorations to say we believe in difference and newness. We don’t just imagine, but we act. Can you imagine that? And if the sprouting sign of life does springs forth through the hardness of your own disbelief, would you feed it, tend it, and care for it?  Even God’s love and eternal goodness doesn’t keep growing in us unless we nurture and nourish it.  Yes, we can ‘kill’ God in ourselves, if we are set on it.   

But now, life and hope spring forth in this Advent time and God’s Spirit rests on us and invites us, to sit on the stump for a while, and God will sit with us. But God will also keep nudging us: “Look! Look -- there on the stump. Do you see that green shoot growing?”  Do you see where hope will grow!  Do you dare go where hope will grow?

Beyond our text, the very next verse declares: “On that day the root of Jesse will stand as a banner (a signal) for the peoples. The nations will seek Him and his resting place will be glorious.”  It says ‘on that day’.  What day is that?  Could something new be growing right now? Imagine that?  Amen.