Stump
Isaiah 11:1-10; Matthew 3:1-12
December 5, 2010
When you look at a stump, especially what’s left of a recently cut-down majestic tree, it looks sadly exposed and pathetic. A year later we may marvel at the resiliency of that pathetic stump to bring forth new leaves and shoots. Don’t let anybody fool you, that is resurrection.
The stump of Jesse has morphed into the Jesse Tree for many a congregation, no stumps allowed, a full tree adorned with ornaments representing the Christian story and its familiar symbols. Those Christmas trees, of course, have no roots and we can keep them on temporary life support for only so long. Stumps still have roots.
The stump of Jesse is not one of pathetic annihilation, but of life that insists upon not going away. Symbolically, the reference is to the descendants of David, from whom one day will arise by the grace of God the Messiah or Anointed One. Israel kept a close track on this family tree and the evangelist Matthew records the branches in the first 17 verses of his Gospel. It reminds us that not only should we be proud of our heritage, but also that we are the beneficiaries of our ancestors. Seldom do we create something truly new - we are always building, amending, fixing up the insights and inventions of our predecessors. This particularly applies to the Church whose most important stump includes those compressed trees found in every Bible. The Bible has been our stump for nearly two millennia, a collection of spiritual ancestors who have not changed a word, just as our own ancestors no longer change. But while the words on the pages of our Bible do not change, while we cannot change the lives of our parents and great-grandparents now gone, we can and do change our perspectives and attitudes and experiences. We continually have the experience of hearing the same old thing saying it differently.
This is not David’s stump, it is Jesse’s, the father of David. Jesse appears only a few times in the Bible, always in the shadow of his son. In a world celebrating celebrities, it is odd that Isaiah begins with Jesse. The grace of God usually comes from people and institutions and events we have no awareness of. Jesse is our anonymous uncle to whom we owe more than we imagine.
Yet, as human beings there are many times that we are stumped by Jesse, our own growth is halted and cut off. If we believe that knowledge is something only thought in the past, that everything worthwhile happened long ago, that there is nothing new under the sun, and that saints are perfectly dead people - we are stumped about how to live today.
Some people do act as if our only purpose in life is to conserve and relive the past, but for some reason the past never behaves the way we expect it to do. Instead, you and I have been called to be agents of resurrection, shoots issuing forth from the stump of the past, and while building upon the past, we think again about what has been thought and done before and then repeat it in our own words and in our own actions. We are continually making something new out of something old. It is here we learn the art of practising resurrection.
“The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.” That’s how Isaiah describes this shoot from the stump of Jesse, a human being blessed by the Spirit of God. We could have just stuck with Isaiah’s prophecy and been stuck with it, but the earliest Christians took that eight centuries’ old scripture and saw someone new in it, a human being saturated with God, who instead of lording it over others began by being baptized by his cousin John who humbly knew it should be the other way around. What Christians did was widen the base of that stump and its shoots and branches to include not just biological descendants of David, but spiritual heirs as well.
The Spirit of the Lord is upon us right now to transform what we have been given through our wisdom and understanding, our knowledge and love of God, to recreate with the Spirit a new heaven and a new earth where even the wolf will dwell with the lamb ... and - wait for this old word given new meaning - and a little child shall lead them.
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan