What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, December 12, 2010

Second Sunday of Advent
Isaiah 11:1-10 • Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19 • Romans 15:4-13 • Matthew 3:1-12

In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, "The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.'" Now John wore clothing of camel's hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. Then the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and all the region along the Jordan, and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, "You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? 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. "I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will
gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire."

As an old man, he had nothing left. There was nowhere else to go. And then it came back to him. Ah, yes, there is someone I could turn to. And he went back to the tree. And the tree said it did not have any more apples in its limbs for the man to eat or sell, as it did when he was a young man. That’s okay, he said, I don’t have any teeth left. I don’t need apples. And the tree said it did not have any more branches for the man to swing on to his heart’s content, as it did when the man was a boy. Oh, I don’t need to swing anymore, my body can barely move. So what could the tree offer this man who had nowhere else to turn? This tree after all these years, had been cut down, and was now just a stump. The man and the tree looked at each other for a moment…both of them…stumped. Well, the man said, I am tired, and I could use a place to sit down. The tree stood up as straight as it could and told the man that, of course, he was welcome to come over have a seat on the tree. And even though it was just a place to sit, even though there was still no sense of what the future held for these companions, hope was born that day as the man sat on what was no longer a stump, but a throne.

This final scene from Shel Silverstein’s children’s story The Giving Tree echoes an image that abounds in our first lesson from Isaiah and in Matthew’s Gospel text. As unlikely as it sounds, Isaiah prophesies that “a shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.” (11:1) John the Baptist testifies to the power of Jesus’ coming by proclaiming that Jesus’ justice will come like trees that do not bear good fruit being cut down. (Mt. 3:10) We look at these texts and we are stumped! Can God do as Isaiah says, and renew the covenant of a promised Savior who will come from the line of Jesse and David? Can the Jesus that John proclaims really be the one who can make good on God’s promise to raise new life out of death?

And it’s not just trusting a God who can work in these kinds of unimaginable ways that stumps us. When we look around at the world, it seems fair to say that like the old man, we search far and wide for signs that God is sustaining us but all we can see are stumps, dead ends, trees cut down around us. Hopelessness appears to be our only response as we look at headlines of a continued national economic recovery that remains stagnant; hopelessness may be our response as we may face hurts in our families that can emerge at this holiday time of year; and yes even Cubs fans, notorious for relentless hopefulness, may be losing hope after the recent death of legendary player and broadcaster Ron Santo. As our congregation responds to the recent news about the necessary dismantling of our bell tower, hopelessness may have set in for some of us…or perhaps it hasn’t for others. Either way, the gravity of this emergency before our church cannot be minimized: we face desperate challenges to our future sustainability as a congregation. The foremost challenge is the lack of sustainable financial resources to address the ongoing stewardship of our building as a means of God’s mission for us, rather than an end in itself. We face becoming a stump. As all these things surround us, we have many reasons to believe these cut down “stumps” can lead only to hopeless dead ends.

But when God sees stumps, when God looks at us, and when God looks at United Lutheran, God promises that out of what’s been cut down can come a renewal of God’s promises. After all, it’s out of a stump of Jesse, a lineage with the most righteous and faithful of Israel’s kings, Jesse’s son David, that God promises to raise up a leader of such powerful family stock to lead home Isaiah’s exiled Israelites. It wasn’t some brand new, some pie-in-the-sky Savior, someone coming out of nowhere to liberate them…it was someone who grew out of the righteousness of God’s past who would lead them to a new disclosure of that righteousness in a way that had never been seen before. And the cut down tree stumps of which John the Baptist prophesied were the roots out of which God grew the tree branches that brought God’s saving, life-giving love to the world—the tree of Jesus’ cross.

Stumps, it turns out, are the shape that God’s hope, God’s peace and God’s new life in Jesus takes. Just as the tree discovered a way to give hope to the old man in the Giving Tree, Jesus discovers a way to give hope to us by turning our stumps into the thrones upon which he sits to rule and transform death to new life, to raise up our hearts, our lives and our world. Jesus comes this Advent to be our Giving Tree, to renew our hope in God’s promises wherever it is that we have been stumped.

Hope can be a wish, a dream, a fantasy. But in the biblical sense, hope reassures us of God’s presence here and now, even in the depths of when we’re down and out. Hope doesn’t predict the future, but hope can renew a vision of God’s peaceable future, a future that’s not necessarily seen in the clearness of daylight but that can be sensed even in the thickest of winter darkness.

When we were confirmed, perhaps this kind of hope was not at all what we were thinking about when the pastor laid hands on us. But, hope is what God is asked to renew in us whenever we affirm our baptism. In that rite, the prayer that we use during the laying on of hands comes directly out of Isaiah 11’s prophesy of a Messiah who will grow out of the stump of Jesse. We ask God to send the Holy Spirit, the wind, the breath of God upon us. I wonder if anyone can remember the words that began that prayer used in renewing us in baptism? It’s also the words that began our Prayer of the Day today, and they’re words we use at the start of each Prayer of the Day in Advent. Stir up the gift of your Spirit… “Stir up” is what we pray for God to grant us in this Advent season… “Stir up your power, O God” we prayed last week…today we prayed “stir up our hearts”, and next week, “stir up our wills…” and finally on the fourth Sunday of Advent, “Stir up your power, O God, and come.” God promises that God can stir up the gift of the Holy Spirit into which Jesus baptized us. God stirs up the waters of our eternal covenant with new life, waters that soften our hardened hearts, and flood our blind eyes with visions of God’s Giving Tree.

So today, let us affirm our baptism, let us again be confirmed by God’s Spirit, a Spirit that renews our hope in God’s Giving Tree—Jesus.

Let us pray. Stir up your Spirit among us, Lord God, that we would be flooded again with the grace revealed to us in your Son, who joins us in the depths of our emptiness, who sits with us at our stumps. Send that Spirit which you rest so fully upon him, and upon which we so desperately yearn for, so we can again envision your branches of righteousness and mercy, and wonder at his love that brings your people together under the shade his protective care. Stir up our imaginations again in these Advent days, O Lord, with your Giving Tree called Jesus who is our hope, for he is foolishness to the world, but he keeps us forever in covenant with the ways that show forth your faithful working among us. Lift us up to be the bearers of your hope, as means and channels of your presence to a world you love so much. Amen.