Family Story

Isaiah 11:1-3a

November 27, 2022 • Mount Pleasant UMC

I cannot think of a time of year that is filled with more tradition than this one. Starting this past week, we have officially entered what is blandly referred to as “the holiday season.” Of course Walmart started it back in mid-October and Hallmark started in July! But here we are, and for many if not most of us, we are anticipating certain things that will happen in the next few weeks, things without which, “the holiday season” would be incomplete or even “ruined.” One of the things I look forward to in our family every year is what we have come to call “Hallowthanksmas.” Back when my parents would go to Florida for the winter, we would find a day when everyone could be together and gather in my hometown usually in early October. When the kids were little, we started with candy in the morning for Halloween, then we ate a big Thanksgiving dinner, and would finish the day with Christmas presents. Though we do it differently now, for us “the holiday season” still isn’t complete without Hallowthanksmas.

Because this is such a season of tradition, we all do things differently for this month and we don’t even realize it. There are particular foods we only eat this time of year, and there is a whole genre of music dedicated to this time of year. I mean, think about it: we don’t have “Thanksgiving music” or “Arbor Day music” but every year we pull out our Christmas music and play it endlessly until New Year’s. We go to Christmas parties, we wrap presents, we watch the Disney parade on Christmas Day and I have to hear Linus recite Luke 2 or it’s just not Christmas. This is a season of anticipation, a time of year packed full of all sorts of traditions.

Even in the church, we do things differently for these four weeks. We decorate, we sing different songs than we sing the rest of the year, and we light a whole lot of candles. These next four weeks are, traditionally, called Advent. Some of us have grown up with Advent and others have not so Advent is a new idea. No one is quite sure when or where the practice of Advent began, but the earliest evidence of its existence is in the year 480, so the church has been setting this time aside for a long, long time. Basically, Advent is the period of four weeks leading up to Christmas, four weeks focused on anticipating the arrival or the “advent” of the Christ child. Every Sunday has a different focus—hope, peace, love, and joy, words you’ll have in front of you all season, and each week you’ll hear one of those come to the forefront as we light the Advent candle for that week. The final candle, the Christ candle, is lit on Christmas Eve. I love Advent, and it’s always my prayer that these times of worship help you slow down long enough to truly celebrate Christmas rather than it becoming just another busy time of year.

It’s easy to do, isn’t it, to get busy and start focusing  on the wrong things? Or if not wrong things, then at least things that simply don’t matter all that much. We might get frustrated if the meal doesn’t turn out perfectly, or if the store is out of the brand of ham that you prefer. If this or that tradition doesn’t happen exactly the way it always has, or if you can’t make it to all the parties because your schedule is overbooked. And don’t even get me started about how loose Amazon is with that 2-day shipping promise since Covid! What happens when the traditions become more important than the thing, or the person, that the traditions point toward?

That’s a question occupying the attention of the prophet Isaiah in the passage we read this morning. You may remember that all of Israel’s history really revolved around two people. First was Moses, the great deliverer and lawgiver, who was sent by God to rescue them from slavery in Egypt. Every time they celebrated and celebrate Passover, they remembered and rehearsed the story of Moses. And the second person was David, the greatest king and the one who unified these twelve ragtag tribes into one nation. When you read the history of the kings after David, every one of them is judged by whether or not they lived up to David’s example. Did they follow God as David did? And if you remember when we studied David a while back, David did not always get it right, but he was still a “man after God’s own heart” (cf. 1 Samuel 13:14) because his deepest desire was to serve God first and foremost. When he got it wrong, he confessed, repented and got back on track. But the kings who came after David were not like that. In fact, most of them were more concerned with maintaining their own power than they were with obeying, pleasing or glorifying God (cf. Oswald, NIV Application Commentary: Isaiah, pg. 187). They went through the motions, affirmed the traditions, but it wasn’t about or for God. It was about themselves, about their power, about their throne. And so, Isaiah says, God is going to bring an end to what appears to be their strong kingdom. In the last verses of chapter 10, Isaiah describes God destroying a forest. “The tree of Davidic pride,” as one author describes it (Oswald 187), will be cut down and burned. Listen to how he graphically describes it: “The Lord, the Lord Almighty, will lop off the boughs with great power. The lofty trees will be felled, the tall ones will be brought low. He will cut down the forest thickets with an ax…” (10:33-34). Isaiah says everything will soon be over for these kings.

But God. That’s one of my favorite phrases in the Bible. But God…because God is not done with his people. The worst thing is never the last thing, and destruction is not God’s final word, ever. My Old Testament professor, Dr. John Oswalt, put it this way: “Judgment is never God’s intended last word. It may be his last word, but that is up to us. His intended last word is restoration and deliverance, even for those who have rebelled against him and refused to trust him in the past” (OneBook: The Book of Isaiah, Chapters 1-39, pg. 28). In what appears to be dead, there is still life because our God specializes in bringing life out of death. And so Isaiah does not stop with the destruction of the forest. There is still one stump with life in it, what Isaiah calls the “stump of Jesse” (11:1). Picture a destroyed forest, maybe like what we’ve seen in the wildfires in the western part of the United States, then imagine a camera zooming in one smoldering stump. Now hear these words again: “A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit” (11:1). Smoldering, smoky destruction, and right there, when all seems hopeless, one tiny, green shoot appears. And from that shoot, rooted firmly in the ancient story of God’s people, new life will emerge. This is a shoot of hope, rooted in the soil of all that has come before, and it is a shoot that, Isaiah says, will “bear fruit” (11:1).

In the first century, anticipation was high for the coming of a savior, a Messiah, someone who would save them particularly from the Roman Empire and its cruelty. They were waiting for a conquering king to come riding in on a white horse to do battle with the emperor and to free Israel. They were anticipating a return to the glory days of David, but what they missed was Isaiah (and other prophets) pointing out that an earthly kingdom model hadn’t worked. God had torn it down. Yet, their expectations were what they were. What no one anticipated was the cry of a baby in the night that signaled God was doing something new. The “fruit” of Jesse’s shoot was a baby who was deeply rooted in the story, the land, and the people of ancient Israel. Two of the Gospel writers remind us of that by providing genealogies. Matthew starts with that at the very beginning of his Gospel story, tracing the lineage of Jesus back to Abraham through his earthly step-father, Joseph (cf. Matthew 1:1-17). Luke waits to trace Jesus’ roots until after the story of Jesus’ baptism (cf. 3:23-38), and then he shows how Jesus’ lineage goes all the way back to Adam, to creation. Deep roots indeed! And though Mark and John don’t give us genealogies, they both remind us often how Jesus fulfills the promises of the Old Testament, how his story is rooted in what God had already been doing. Over and over again, we’re reminded that Jesus is the fulfillment of a promise, and how God always keeps his promises—even if he doesn’t do it in the way we think he will (cf. Oswalt 190).

Isaiah’s prophecy combined with the Gospel genealogies remind us that Jesus didn’t come out of a pristine, sinless family. You could say his family’s past was checkered at best. The family line Jesus was born into may have started out strong but did not continue that way. Liars and cheats and adulterers and everything else you can imagine—those are Jesus’ people. The forest had been torn down. And yet, Isaiah says, this new shoot, the hope that is coming out of the destruction, will be different. The future will not be like the past. Isaiah describes it this way: “The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him—the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of might, the Spirit of knowledge and fear of the Lord” (11:2). In other words, his life will be characterized by all the things that the earlier kings, his earlier family, did not have (Oswald 187). What they messed up, this coming one will redeem.

And then Isaiah says, “He will delight in the fear of the Lord” (11:3). I think that’s such an interesting turn of phrase, isn’t it? Delighting in the fear of the Lord. We don’t normally think about “delighting” in something that we fear. But what Isaiah describes is exactly the way God’s people have always been expected to live. This gets back to what I said earlier about the kings being so self-focused, more concerned about keeping their throne and their power than maintaining their relationship with God or living under his authority. Isaiah is describing the exact opposite of that, the response that will in fact allow people to come back to God. They, like this coming one, will “delight in the fear of the Lord.” And when the prophet uses the word “fear” he’s not talking about terror, or the reactions people have to horror movies. In Biblical language, “fear of the Lord” is knowing who God is, that God is God and we are not. It’s knowing our proper place in the world. It’s love, respect, reverence, understanding. One author puts it this way: “To fear God…is to be completely devoted to his will and its rewards while knowing the awesome consequences of not fearing him” (cf. Accordance Bible Software). It’s the same idea that causes Paul to encourage believers to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12). In fact, the only hope people have is just that: delighting in the fear of the Lord. So what does that look like?

It looks like understanding and acknowledging that God is in charge. It looks like knowing and recognizing God as the true king and ruler of the universe. And that’s not just a future hope; it’s a present reality. It’s far past time that God’s people begin living like God is king and ruler of the world. Isaiah wouldn’t understand, I don’t think, the ways we fret and worry and get ourselves all worked up over circumstances. He wouldn’t understand our utter determination to put our hope in politics and political leaders rather than in the one who made it all. Isaiah would point to the shoot from the stump of Jesse and say, “Delight in the fear of the Lord.” Know that God is king, and fear him, not the circumstances around you. And so we begin to live as if that’s true because it is! God is the king.

As many of you know, I went with the Grace Unlimited team down to Mayfield, Kentucky a little over a week ago to serve with Samaritan’s Purse in helping rebuild that tornado-destroyed town. Twenty-six churches, along with a lot of other homes and businesses, were destroyed when an EF4 tornado (the next-to-worst type of tornado) hit this small city last December. So we went there to serve in whatever way we could. A couple of days before we left, it was seventy degrees outside; when we headed down there, it was in the twenties and thirties. Yet the team that is stationed there with Samaritan’s Purse worked through the cold, and so did we. They also worked this last week, right through Thanksgiving. I can tell you that in all my years of mission trips, I have never encountered a group so clear on their purpose. Yes, they are building houses. Yes, they are supplying furniture to those houses. Yes, they are doing a lot of good things, but none of those things is their purpose. Their purpose isn’t even cleaning up after a disaster. Their purpose is to serve in Jesus’ name, to live like God is king over it all because he is. They have reoriented their lives, not just for a week, but for months and years, because they delight in the fear of the Lord. And it’s evident to others in the community. I can tell you that since we wore the Samaritan’s Purse shirts all week, everywhere we went people stopped us to thank us and even gave us discounts on our coffee out of gratitude. I’ve never had that happen on a mission trip, and I firmly believe it’s because those folks are living like God is king. They love Jesus so much they can’t help but live under his authority and it’s making a real difference in that community. The shoot out of the stump of Jesse will delight in the fear of the Lord and he will call those who follow him to do the same thing (cf. Oswald 192). And that will change the world.

This “shoot” will be different than what came before. He is rooted in the family story but will live out a different story, or better said, he will live the story God intended to tell from the start. “The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him—the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of might, the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord” (11:2). Over the next few weeks, leading up to Christmas, we’re going to look at Jesus’ story and how it grows out of “Jesse’s stump.” We’re going to talk about and learn about, though Sunday mornings, small groups and our devotional readings, how Jesus comes from a people, a place, and a story, and how he is the fulfillment of all of Isaiah’s hopes here in this passage (and others). You’re going to meet (or re-meet) Adam and Noah, Abram and Sarai, Rahab and Ruth and many others. We’re going to immerse ourselves in the family story of Jesus, and we’re going to see how the places, people and stories he came out of, even though it was all imperfect, gave shape to his ministry and continues to change the world. Sometimes we think we have to have it all together, that our family story has to be perfect, for us to make a difference for the kingdom of God, but nothing could be further from the truth. Jesus’ own roots tell us that. The shoot from the stump of Jesse didn’t always grow perfectly straight, but out of that shoot came the savior of the world.

Your life and your story doesn’t have to be perfect for God to use you. You don’t have to “have it all together” to make a difference for the kingdom. So often we get wrapped up in what isn’t right, what’s broken, and some people even allow themselves to become defined by their brokenness, by what’s gone wrong. What if we turned that around? What if, instead, this week we focused on celebrating the gifts that show up in your family line, or even your own story, that you can give God thanks for? What if, instead of majoring on the mistakes, we focus instead on the things God can use? Those two major figures in Israel’s history? Moses killed a man and spent a large part of his life in exile in the desert. And yet, there in the desert, while he was tending sheep, he was learning to survive in the harsh environments of Sinai, and he was learning the geography of a land that God would eventually tell him to lead the Hebrew people through. Those forty years in the desert turned out to be a gift. David was the runt of his family, destined (he thought) to be a shepherd all of his life. But God used that time to tune his heart toward heaven, and to shape David into that “man after God’s own heart.” He learned to pray and to praise while in the desert. And then there’s Simon, who came into contact with the savior of the world, and he knew his life had been anything but spotless. “Go away from me, Lord, I am a sinful man” was his first response to Jesus (cf. Luke 5:8). Instead of leaving, Jesus asked Simon to follow him because he saw something in Simon he could use, a determination and strong will that would turn the world upside down. Here’s the point: where we see failure and weakness, God sees possibilities, gifts, pieces of a family story he can use.

When I look back on my own story, I am thankful for a heritage of faith. My grandmother taught Sunday School for so many years that I’m not sure anyone knows exactly how long it was. My parents made sure we grew up in church; in fact, it didn’t matter what you had done on Saturday, you were going to be in worship on Sunday. It wasn’t an option. I am thankful for all the people that my family story put into my path, the people who shaped me into who I am today. And I celebrate the way God has used even my broken pieces for his purposes because when we give it all to God, when we celebrate even the broken pieces, he can make it all fit together. So what are the gifts, the experiences, the pieces in your life that you can celebrate and God can use?