Isaiah 11:1-10

One of the things that makes the Scriptures interesting are the different images they use to talk about what God is doing in the world. Last week, our Scriptures were about waking up. We said that the season of Advent is like an alarm clock. It’s the beginning of the church year and the time for us to wake up to what God is doing in our lives. On this second Sunday in Advent, the image changes. The prophet Isaiah, our Old Testament reading this morning, speaks about a ‘shoot coming out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch growing out of his roots.”

The image that came to my mind during this cold beginning of winter in Pennsylvania is an amaryllis bulb. I learned about amaryllis a few years ago when I started my garden in the summer and wanted to grow something over the winter. Amaryllis are bulbs, they are related to other bulbs like onions, garlic, and tulips. They are native to South Africa, so for us in our frigid northern hemisphere weather, there is no way we can grow them anywhere but indoors during the cold.

Amaryllis are often grown so that they bloom around Christmas. WalMart begins selling them a few weeks before Thanksgiving. I’m not sure of the history behind how Amaryllis came to be associated with Christmas. But I’m wondering if it has anything to do with our Scripture today from the prophet Isaiah, “a shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.”?

Here’s the question that has been weighing on the people of God’s hearts that the prophet Isaiah is trying to speak to: how do we know that God cares about what is going on? You see, Isaiah was written to people who were going through a dark time. Their nation was invaded. Towns and villages were destroyed. Some of their people were deported to a foreign land. Things were really hard and seemingly hopeless. But in addition to things being really hard economically and politically, the people also forgot their faith. At other points, the prophet Isaiah calls the people of God ‘godless’. Meaning, not only did the people forget God, they made idols, replacements for God himself. There was a deep fog of gloom that had settled over the spiritual and moral lives of the people. 

The prophet Isaiah told his neighbors and fellow believers the hard truth: the trials and gloom facing them were a result of their sin. God gave them what they wanted. Here are something of things brought up in the Scriptures: They wanted wealth; they wanted to be like the other nations and have a strong army; they wanted to have flashy things. God allowed them to have and do all of those things that and it nearly destroyed them. 

Here’s how I think this relates to our situation. We often think of God’s punishment for our wrongdoing to be almost magical. What’s the classic image? Fire and brimstone. God reigns down a whole bunch of awfulness on whoever we think deserves it. But that’s really not how the Lord handles sinfulness. Sure, you can find that kind of stuff (I’m thinking here of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah). But more often, the Lord’s response to sin is what we might call a divine shrug. It’s as if the Lord says, “if that’s what you want, have it at.” It gets to our having free will. The famous phrase of Scripture is this: “God gave them up”, God let them do what they wanted to do. So we might say, to get philosophical, that the punishment for sin and wrongdoing is sin and wrongdoing. 

We all sort of experience this or least are aware of this. We have phrases like “no good deed goes unpunished” or “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer” or the people who are most likely to get taken advantage of are the people who probably have been taken advantage of before. Do you know who is most likely to be kidnapped and human trafficked? It’s not the kids from well off suburbs. It’s those who are already vulnerable – the homeless, those in poverty, kids in the foster system. 

To be clear, I am not seeing whatever awfulness someone is experiencing is their fault or that it’s the Lord’s punishment for their sin. What I am saying is that the world that we live in, the world the people of Isaiah lived in, is one that was not fair. The world they created for themselves was a dog eat dog kind of world, and one where those in power took advantage of almost everyone else and exploited them for their own ends. It was sinful. It was a dark and gloomy time. 

And yet, the Lord’s message through Isaiah is that the way things are in this kind of dark and gloomy world is not the way God wanted them or wants for them to be. God will make a new way.  And the sign of this is like a shoot of new, green vegetation growing up from an old, almost dead stump. “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.”

Here’s how this looks. We’ll use the amaryllis bulb. It’s a metaphor to describe something deeper and more profound about God. This amaryllis bulb from WalMart is just beginning to shoot up from this ugly looking bulb. “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse.” It has a long way to go to shoot up and bloom into a magnificent flower that will last for weeks. While out of this similar ugly bulb from WalMart, a shoot almost two feet tall is just beginning to bloom in the darkest and coldest part of the year. “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.”

The Church hears this Word from the Lord in Advent because Jesus Christ is like the shoot coming up from the stump of Jesse. He is the Messiah. Christ is the shoot whose roots have taken hold in the world and whose branches are growing out. Even here, in this cold building, Jesus Christ is coming to us and among us and in us. In the hurriedness and busyness of our everyday lives, it can be easy to forget that God is with you. I know I can forget that. But the promise of God is this: you “have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me and the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20)

We can say with confidence that our reading from the prophet Isaiah is hopeful. In spite of the deep darkness and gloom that can and has settled into our lives and burrowed into our spirits, there is a “shoot coming out from the stump of Jesse.” But the prophet Isaiah also knows that this promised “shoot coming out from the stump of Jesse” has to be the real deal if he is to be from God. Which begs the question: how are we to know if something is from God? How do we know when Jesus Christ is present in our lives? How do we know the Holy Spirit is at work? 

That is what verses 2-5 in our reading from the prophet Isaiah are about. Here are the relevant portions of that:

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.

It leads into the question Isaiah poses: how do we know when something is from God? Simply, we can say the Spirit of God is there. With Jesus, we see that very early in his life. Remember the story of Jesus’ baptism? He goes to be baptized in the river Jordan by John and as he’s baptized the Spirit falls on him by a dove coming down for him (the dove being a symbol of the Spirit and of peace). Continuing on with these verses, Jesus has wisdom and understanding. He is full of moral and spiritual power and right judgement and right thought. There is a respect for God and God’s word and God’s laws. But there is also delight. Put simply, how do we know something is from God? We see signs of the character of Jesus – understanding, moral courage, right judgement, a respect for God, God’s word, and God’s people, but also joy and delight.

But Isaiah isn’t finished. There is a social, a community aspect of feeling out God’s presence. Here are the verses from verse 4:

“He shall not judge by what his eyes see or decide by what his ears hear, but with righteousness he shall judge for the poor, and decide with equity for the oppressed of the earth…”

How do we know God is present? How do we know a community is close to God and near to the Lord Jesus – whether a family, a church, or a nation? Isaiah answers that – we don’t look at just appearances, but at what is in the heart. The poor are given their fair share. Those who have been beaten down by life or taken advantage of people the power people and systems of the world are not forgotten, but given their rightful seat at the table to make decisions and be a part of things. Again, think of the ministry of Jesus. God was with Jesus and this is how he lived his life.

This is what we mean when we talk about the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God is here in our midst and it is also something we look forward to coming in all of its fullness. The root shooting from the stump of Jesse, the kingdom Jesus inaugurated, began, what we just talked about is the character of that kingdom and the character of its head. The last part of what we read in Isaiah are like the practical outcomes. It’s a “you know it when you see it” kind of thing. If we want to know if God is present, if we want to know if our church is full of the things of God and alive in the Spirit, here are the kinds of things we’d see. Isaiah uses images, but they are metaphors:

1. Vs. 6 the wolf will live with the lamb. This is a metaphor for community. The movement is away from competition and an attitude of survival of the fittest to one of cooperation and harmony. The wolf and the lamb stay who they are. They don’t mesh together to become a new species. Instead, a peaceful community forms. The old school Christian word for this is solidarity. In the kingdom of God, we live in solidarity with one another, in spite of our differences, because Jesus Christ lives in solidarity with us and for us. When a family, when a church, when a nation does that, they are close to the kingdom of God.
2. Vs.7 the cow and the bear will graze together. This is a symbol of fellowship. The cow and the bear normally keep their distance from one another (or at least the cow does). But in the peaceable kingdom of God, they eat together. Meaning, they have fellowship. Put in a different way, this is the work of Jesus Christ. He turns enemies into brothers and sisters. He gives people the power to forgive and reconcile their differences. He does that through his broken body and his shed blood (think of Jesus sharing the last supper with his disciples, this is my body, broken for you and this is my blood, shed for you.” When a family, when a church, when a nation can resolve its differences, offer forgiveness and restoration without resorting to threats and violence – that is a sign we are close to the kingdom of God.
3. The small child will play over the hole of a snake and there will be no hurt or harm done. This is a symbol of play and fellowship. In the kingdom of God, the fear we experience is transformed, its redeemed. I’m thinking here of the story of the Garden of Eden. What part does the serpent play? It tricks Adam and Eve and brings all sorts of distortions and alternative realities and harm and pain. But in the kingdom of God, truth drives away fear. And play and enjoyment and merriment, those are the signs of joy and peace. When a family, when a church, when a nation can play and have fun together and respect differences, it is a sign that we are close to the kingdom of God.

Isaiah’s vision of a shoot coming up from the stump of Jesse is a promise and a reality. That can seem strange to us. It is both something we hope for and can experience now. We don’t light these candles of hope and peace to go through the motions. They are signs. Trust in God and take part in what God is doing to redeem the world. Amen.