A Stump, A Shoot, and a Garden Vision

Scripture: Isaiah 11: 1-10

Sermon: A Stump, A Shoot, and a Garden Vision

Topics: advent, stump, trees, hope

preached: December 9, 2012

Rev. Mike Abma

Isaiah 11: 1-10

The Peaceful Kingdom

11A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,

and a branch shall grow out of his roots.

² 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.

³ His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.

He shall not judge by what his eyes see,

or decide by what his ears hear;

⁴ 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.

⁵ Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist,

and faithfulness the belt around his loins.

⁶ 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.

⁷ The cow and the bear shall graze,

their young shall lie down together;

and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

⁸ The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,

and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.

⁹ 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.

10 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.

This is the Word of the Lord

Thanks be to God

INTRODUCTION

We have a stump in front of our home. It is yet another victim of the Emerald Ash Borer infestation that has killed millions of trees in our state. These ash-tree stumps are all over our city. But we hardly notice them. Perhaps it is because we have so many trees. I remember a Nigerian Seminary student once saying to me, “Mike, you have too many trees here.”

To get the full vividness of the stump-image in this Isaiah passage, perhaps we need a more barren landscape in mind. So I would like to transport your imagination to the Saharan desert – the largest desert in the world, as big as the continental United States. In the southern quadrant – the slightly south western quadrant — of the Sahara, where the borders of Algeria and Libya on the north, and Niger and Chad on the south, all converge, you have what is called the Great Ténéré Desert – nothing but a sea of sand, and rocks, and desolation for as far as the eye can see.

In the middle of that desert stood a tree – an acacia tree. Travelers who passed by wrote in their journals that you had to see it to believe it.

Here was the loneliest tree on the planet. Not another tree or shrub or bush for 250 miles in any direction.

Here was this symbol of life in a wasteland of death.

Here was this living miracle, this living lighthouse, that gave many a passing traveler hope.

The tree even had a name – the Ténéré Tree.

Then one day a drunk Libyan truck driver veered off the road and hit that tree. It was the only thing to hit for hundreds of miles, but somehow he managed to hit it.

The tree trunk cracked.

The tree came tumbling down.

And all that was left of this famous tree was a stump – a stump in the sand.^[1]

STUMP OF ISRAEL

Israel was God’s tree in the middle of the desert.

Israel was God’s culture of life in the middle of the surrounding cultures of death.

Israel was the nation

in whom, with whom, and through whom God lived.

And the sap that gave this tree life were the promises of God —

promises most clearly seen in her line of kings,

the royal line of David.

When Isaiah wrote this passage, this tree of life had been reduced to a stump.

It wasn’t simply one truck of destruction that had mowed Israel down.

There were many.

The main ones were first Assyria,

then later Babylon.

But perhaps worst of all,

it was Israel’s own injustice,

her own unfaithfulness,

that caused her internal rot.

In Isaiah 11, Ahaz is the King in Jerusalem.

He was an anxious man and fearful man.

When Jerusalem was threatened, Ahaz went to Assyria for help.

Assyria smiled with its long and sharp teeth,

and was more than happy to help – for a price, a terribly high price.

They stripped gold from the temple.

They put an altar to their Assyrian gods in the temple.

Even King Ahaz was reduced to sacrificing his own children,

all, supposedly, for the price of peace.

This is altogether a sad story:

the kings of Judah delirious with fear.

the empires of Assyria, and later Babylon, drunk with greed,

driving their trucks of destruction right into the heart of Jerusalem,

breaking this once flourishing tree,

and leaving just a stump, just a stub, of what once was.

STUMP OF OUR LIVES

In this season of Advent, this image of a stump captivates us.

This image speaks to us.

It stirs something in us.

It is an image of life cut down,

hopes dashed,

joys eviscerated.

It is an image we can relate to.

Things have happened in our lives.

Things have been said.

Things have been done or not done

and we have been slammed into by a truck of destruction –

maybe more than one truck.

We have been left wounded, cut down,

unable to realize the beauty and joy of life.

What was the truck of destruction that hit us?

Was it like the one in the Ténéré Desert —

one we weren’t expecting,

one that seemed to come from nowhere?

* did we overhear one of our parents say they never really loved us?

* did a teacher once tell us we would never amount to anything?

* did someone ridicule us, humiliate us, shame us before others?

A word, a sharp, biting word, can plow into us, cut us down, so that we are never quite the same.

Perhaps the truck of destruction wasn’t what someone said, but what someone did or failed to do:

* did a friend or family member or church ignore us in our time of need?

* did a son or daughter turn their back on us and on their faith even after all we had done to raise them?

* did someone we thought we could trust touch us in an inappropriate way?

An inappropriate action, a broken promise, an abandonment, can be sharp, biting – it too can plow into us with such impact that we never fully recover.

Perhaps we were the ones driving the truck of our own destruction.

* an affair causing our marriage never to be the same;

* an enslaving habit hurting everyone around us;

* or something that seems too big to confess, too big to admit, too big to be forgiven.

Perhaps it wasn’t what someone else said or did,

or something we said or did.

Perhaps we feel like God is responsible:

that he is the one who cut us down when life was going well;

that he is the one who robbed us of the one thing, or the one person we truly loved on this earth.

We have all been hit – some harder than others,

but we have all been cut down,

struck down.

We are all stumps.

HOPE FROM THE STUMP

A stump in a desert is a pretty hopeless picture.

But this is NOT a hopeless passage.

This is not a hopeless passage because there is a promise.

There is a promise

that a shoot will come out of this stump,

that a branch will grow.

A shoot from a stump is Old Testament language

for the New Testament coming of Christ.

Christ is the one in whom flows the blood-line of David,

but more importantly

he is the one in whom rests all the promises of God.

The spirit of the Lord was upon him,

and he delighted in doing the will of God.

What does this passage say about this shoot,

this coming king in the line of David,

the one on whom God’s spirit rests?

It says two things:

this king would bring justice;

only when there was true justice could there be true peace.

So what does justice look like in this passage?

Justice in this passage looks a lot like it does in the Song of Mary:

the poor would be filled,

the meek would be raised up.

It echoes what Isaiah says later in chapter 61:

through this king

the captives would be set free,

and the oppressed would be released.

But justice would also mean

cutting the wicked down to size,

taking power away from the oppressors,

and all those assuming they would be first, would, in fact, be last.

Justice and righteousness would be the essence of this king’s reign.

Where there is true justice, there can be true peace.

And our passage ends with a spectacular picture of peace,

a kingdom of peace.

It is striking because it is so … unlikely.

It is so counter to the ways of our world.

Woody Allen once quipped,

“when a wolf and a lamb lie down together

only the wolf is going to get back up again.”

And so it is in our world:

the strong dominate the weak;

the wealthy oppress the poor;

the well-connected bully the loners.

But here is a vision of the weakest,

most innocent

most fragile,

most vulnerable,

playing with and enjoying the company

of the most powerful,

the most venomous,

the most terrifying.

I am not a great fan of snakes,

so it is the child playing near the vipers and rattlesnakes

that most rattles me.

Here is a vision of the impossible becoming possible.

But this vision is more than simply animals getting along.

The animals are code language for nations –

nations that do not get along are suddenly enjoying one another

peaceably:

the wolf of Assyria living with the lamb of Judah;

and the leopard of Egypt lying down with the kid of Ephraim.

In modern parlance we might say:

the Big American Eagle playing with the tiny flying Cuban Trogon;

the Big Russian Bear playing friendly hockey with the Canadian Beaver;

and the British bulldog and Irish Wolfhound no longer snarling at one another.

Why are all the old hostilities gone?

Because here the true King rules.

He rules his Kingdom with justice,

and in that justice the strong have been humbled

and the weak have been empowered;

the greatest have become the least,

and the least have become the greatest;

and now, finally, there is peace on earth, true peace,

and good will to all.

CONCLUSION

It is Advent.

Christmas is coming.

Last Saturday,

on that unseasonably warm day,

I, with seemingly the rest of my neighborhood,

was stringing up lights on our outdoor shrubbery.

Now why were we all doing that?

I guess we were all trying to get into “the spirit of the season”:

hanging tiny outdoor lights in an effort to hold back the encroaching darkness;

decorating trees hoping that will somehow revive our stunted and battered lives;

writing Christmas cards announcing “peace and goodwill to all,”

hoping this will somehow

help the stalemate in Washington

or restart the peace talks in the Middle East.

We are a perpetually hopeful people.

Hope haunts us.

And yet, in this season of Advent,

a season of brutal honesty,

we need to admit that our world

is more of a wasteland than we care to admit.

Ever since Satan threw an ax into the Garden,

we have been swinging at each other,

cutting one another down.

Justice is frustratingly elusive.

Peace is a distant dream for beauty pageant contestants.

But in the wasteland of our world,

in the desert of all our broken dreams,

in the clear-cut forest of misery

there is a tree – a cruciform, cross-shaped tree,

whose roots go all the way down to the virgin forests of paradise,

whose branches bear the scars of human suffering,

whose leaves are for the healing of the nations

whose limbs reach out to embrace us.

Here is a tree in whom the Spirit flows,

a tree that bears fruit —

fruit that will produce a harvest of righteousness;

a tree of life growing from the stump of death;

a tree of hope growing out of a tomb of despair.

People of God,

people haunted by hope and aching to believe something:

take the stump of your life,

the sliver of your dreams,

the stub of your deepest desires,

and graft them into this tree,

this tree of life

this tree of hope

this tree who is Christ the Lord.

For in him, in him alone, is the promise of true justice and true peace.

Amen

PRAYER

Lord God,

We thank you for the visions of your prophets.

Thank you for coming into the wasteland of our world,

for being willing to be cut down,

and then rising as the first-fruits of the new creation.

Lord, hasten the day when your kingdom will fully come,

when justice and peace will finally kiss one another

and make a path to your renewed paradise.

In Jesus’ name we pray

Amen

1. I first read of the famous Ténéré Tree in William Langewieshe’s article on the Saharan desert called, “The World in its Extreme” in The Atlantic Monthly (November, 1991). That image of this lonely tree has always stuck with me. A photograph of the famed tree before it was run down in 1973 can be found in the Wikipedia on L’Arbre du Ténéré. ↑