A sermon on Isaiah 11:1-10 & Matthew 3:1-12 by Nathan Nettleton

In last Sunday afternoon’s congregational meeting, Samara asked us a very confronting question. She did it quite gently and appropriately, but it was a question many of us didn’t feel ready to touch, and so it would have felt confronting however well it was put. Samara mentioned two other small congregations she has connections with who had both recently closed down, and she commented that they had been able to do this in an intentional and planned way and so had closed well, with a clear sense of something that had been good for a time was being laid to rest to enable the clear space for new things to be born. And so, she wondered, is there a conversation we need to be having at some point about whether or not that is a direction we should be considering here? She didn’t say that she thought we should close, or that the conversation should go that way. But she did suggest that perhaps we should acknowledge that possibility and intentionally include it in the conversations about where we are headed. They say that people who refuse to ever think about death seldom die well, and I reckon that Samara is right in suggesting that the same is probably true of churches. But it is also true that it is often when people have faced the prospect of death that they discover how precious life is and really begin to live, and it has been my experience here that facing the prospect of closure has, in the past, been good for the life of this congregation.

This season of Advent calls us to give attention to the future and to questions of what we are hoping for and what we can expect and anticipate, and this Sunday’s readings are full of images that relate to these life and death questions. Our first reading, from the prophet Isaiah, opened with the words, “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him.” This image of a shoot of new life sprouting from a dead tree stump is one of the classic images of Advent. In fact it is depicted in our banner up here. The Apostle Paul quoted it in the reading we heard from his letter to the Romans, so we heard it twice tonight. Now in its original context, you could quite reasonably say that it has nothing much to do with our situation. It is a specific prophesy about the expected coming of the Messiah, and its basic meaning is that the line of Jesse, which produced first King David and then a string of kings after him, is now a dead stump because there is no king in David’s line any more, but that God will do something new and the long anticipated messiah will come from among the descendants of Jesse and David. God’s chosen and anointed one will spring from this line like a new shoot on a dead stump. And so at its simplest level we would say yes, and so it was, because Jesus the Messiah was a distant descendant of King David.

But if that’s all there was to this passage, the prophesy itself would now be a dead stump, having fulfilled its purpose and then been cut down. But God’s prophesies are rarely disposable single-use artefacts. This one, like most, does not only speak of how God did something in one time and one place, but of how God does things again and again. It tells us something important of who God is, what God values, and how God goes about things. So the promise is not just that God once brought a shoot from the stump of Jesse, but that God brings new life from chopped down stumps repeatedly. Bringing new life from chopped down stumps is a typical of God. It is God’s modus operandi.

Now we could readily and simplistically latch on to that promise for ourselves and say that therefore we must wait expectantly, because though we might be a stump or a remnant now, God can and will bring new life from the stump, because that’s what God does. Given that our current smallness was brought about by a traumatic event rather than by a gradual dwindling decline, the image of the chopped down stump seems particularly appropriate. But God has not made a universal promise to bring forth new life from every stump. It might be a typical God thing to do, but we can’t generalise it into a law and presume upon God that because we have a stump, God is obligated to bring forth a new shoot from it. That would be pretty close to the sort of presumption John the Baptiser was denouncing when he said to the Pharisees and Sadducees in our gospel reading, “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.” We cannot presume upon God. God is not obligated to do for us what God has done elsewhere.

And interestingly, John immediately goes on to say, “Even now the axe 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.” Now this is particularly interesting when we juxtapose it against the image of the stump from Isaiah, because here we have an axe ready and waiting to chop down a tree and so produce another stump. And clearly John is intending this image of judgement to refer to God. God is the one with axe in hand, ready to hack into those who have failed to produce fruits of righteousness, justice and repentance. And there is something in most of us that thrills with anticipation at such an image. The earth is full of evil doers, and at least some part of us longs to see God come in furious anger and dish out just desserts to those who rape the earth and trample its people into the dirt. And John draws on a long tradition of apocalyptic hopes to depict such a scene. But is he right? Is God the one wielding the axe?

There is no answer in this passage, but the whole Jesus tradition gives good grounds for questioning it. John himself acknowledged that Jesus would be greater and that his own understanding and role were limited. Jesus says and does very little that reinforces the view of God as the axe wielder. Instead, he offers himself as the tree that is chopped down. The people write him off as the tree that yields no good fruit, the tree that will not give us what we were wanting, and so must be chopped down. And so they wield the axe and chop him down. And sure enough, just as Isaiah had prophesied, it is from the chopped down stump of this execution that the shoot of new life, resurrection life, appears.

John also uses another image that Jesus later questions. John says, “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.” The image is one our farmers are desperate to carry out if there is enough break in the rain: gathering in the harvest and separating the grain from the waste. John uses it to suggest again that God will gather in the good and destroy the wicked. But Jesus knows how that appeals to our desire for vengeance, and he challenges it with a harvest image of his own in which he warns us against trying to pull out the weeds in case we uproot the wheat in the process. Don’t be hasty, he is saying. It is too hard to tell which are ultimately weeds and which are wheat, and if you are premature in your attempts to weed out the undesirables, you will do more damage than it is worth.

So Jesus turns these judgement images back on us. The hunger for judgement is our hunger, not God’s. The haste to weed out the problem people and take an axe to the roots of those who aren’t producing fruit is our haste, not God’s. Despite what John, like us, was anticipating, Jesus offers himself not as an axeman but as the hacked up stump. He offers himself as the target of our “righteous” anger and our violent judgement. He steps in front of those we would condemn, and takes the blame for not producing the fruits we lusted after, and allows us to cut him down and hack him to death. And then God’s modus operandi is seen again, as the dead stump becomes the site of new life. The crucified corpse becomes the birth place of resurrection. The cut down victim becomes the birth place of mercy and forgiveness for all us axe wielders.

So what does all this mean for the future of our little church? Should we be planning the closure or holding firm in hope? We could go either way with these images, couldn’t we? We could wait in prayerful expectation that God will bring forth a shoot of new life from the stump. Or we could step forth with Jesus and lay down our life, victim of another tragic error of hostility towards a tree that might yet have proved its value, and trust that from our death, God will open a pathway for something new to be born. Either pathway could be true and a faithful response to the God we know in Jesus. But which is right? I honestly don’t know. But what I do know is that our hope is in God, not in our own capacity to get it right. If we will wait and trust and pray, God will bring the truth to birth among us. And the other thing I know is that Samara is right: we won’t be able to see the truth God is bringing to birth if we have already made up our minds what we are going to see and are refusing to acknowledge any other possibility. Perhaps for us, in this Advent season, the challenge is to honestly and openly lay all the possibilities on the table before God, and put our trust in the coming one to make all things new and fill all things with wondrous new life.