Isaiah 11:1-3

Isaiah 11:6-10

Matthew 3:1-12

We don’t trip over trees.  Trees grow as God intended and we have a way of walking around them.  But the last time I was up in Tahoe hiking, I tripped over a small stump just raised from the ground.  Stumps can trip us up.  Maybe that is why we say you stump someone when they cannot answer a hard question.  When we, like a tree, are cut down, separated from our source we get tripped up.  That hurt or loss can become a stumbling block for our personal peace.  That certainly is not to say hurts and loss are unimportant, quite the contrary.  But sometimes our loss can stick up in our lives and make it hard to move forward. Or trip us up when we feel lost and cut off from God.

A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots” (11:1).  The prophet Isaiah wrote these words when the people of Israel felt cut off from God during the Assyrian exile.   In their reduced capacity they had become a stump of their former selves, the strong tall tree of Israel.  Only part of what they once were remained protruding out of the ground, yet still attached to its roots.  Referring to the stump of Jesse points to the roots of heritage in that Jesse is David’s father, the one hoped to be the savior of the people.  “Jesse” in Hebrew also means “God exists” bearing witness to God’s steadfast love even in the darkness of exile.

Where are the stumps in your life?  What are the things that trip you up when you feel cut off from your source, from God?  Those stumps can rob us of our peace.  We can trip over fear, economic insecurity, an ongoing health issue, worry over our child.  Sometimes the hurt is so old we do not even realize we are still tripping over it.

As many of you know I was adopted into a loving family when I was 3 weeks old.  I am the youngest of four children.  When my mother died in 1991 I started looking for my birth mother.  Last month my 25 year search ended when I found her.  I spent two days exploring on Ancestry.com, chasing leaves, peeking into historic documents, mapping out my family tree.  Then I put the handful of the few data points that I had into a search – Last name Wiley, born in Maryland, lived in Los Angeles where I was born, and her birth year plus or minus.  If you have ever done a search like this you know you often get thousands of leads, from all over the world.   This time there was only one: Mary Virginia Wiley, my mother. Sitting at my computer I soon found yearbook pictures of the woman who gave me life.

Mary in the awkwardness of Junior High,

her senior picture

and the one I most resemble is her in her choir robe standing behind a piano.

Unfortunately, my mother has already passed away.  But finding her helped to end the years of tripping over the hurt from so long ago.  I have a greater sense of peace.  Parker saw a new picture of my father I also found.  His grandfather was smiling with a group of saxophone players- Parker played sax when he was young. Parker said to me, “Now I know who I look like in our family.”  Maybe he won’t have to stumble as long as I did.

John the Baptist would say the way to end your stumbling is to repent.   Be baptized with the water of repentance and the stump severed through sin will be re-rooted in God.  Repent in Christ and you will have new life.  I know I often clung to my faith, clung to God, when I was tripping over my stump of abandonment.  A stump I have carried with me most of my life.  I am sure you have your own stump.  We get rooted in our old hurtful ways, failing to repent.  That creates a stump that blocks our peace.  The peace Christ came to bring.  But we want to be like the Pharisees who want to claim our heritage and years of service rather than surrender to Christ.  We might be afraid to repent because we think God will respond like the world.  Henry Ward Beecher writes this about how God and the world respond differently to our repentance:

“When a man undertakes to repent toward his fellowmen, it is repenting straight up a precipice; when he repents toward law, it is repenting into the crocodile’s jaws; when he repents toward public sentiment, it is throwing himself into a thicket of brambles and thorns; but when he repents toward God, he repents toward all love and delicacy. God receives the soul as the sea the bather, to return it again, purer and whiter than he took it” (Sermon Central).

Our own acts of repentance joined with Christ’s gracious gift of mercy transforms the stumps of our lives, the fear, hurt, anger into places of hope and peace.  We have the courage to repent because God responds so graciously.  Repentance reconnects us to our roots in Christ and gives us new life from the stumps of old hurts.

Preparing for our first Blue Christmas service, I cut some shoots, some branches, from around the campus. Don’t worry garden committee, Linda showed me which ones.  I created an arrangement of barren branches in the back of the sanctuary, which you saw when you came in.  After liturgy and prayers honoring the losses of our lives, each person was asked to write down their loss, the part of their life they wanted God’s light and love to heal.  At the end of the service, white stars representing the loss, bearing the name of a loved one, were hung on the tree of branches. Stars hung above our heads, as we laid our losses at Christ’s feet, seeking His comfort and healing. You can add your own star after worship.

In God’s time, a shoot came from the stump of Jesse.  New life emerged from the stump, from the pain of being cut off from God.  A shoot came forth from the family of Jesse, the family of David, the family of Joseph.  And though adoption, Jesus was adopted by Joseph into the family of David, Jesus was claimed into the lineage of hope, the lineage of peace, the lineage of Salvation.  One small shoot, one small babe was born in a manger; born to bring peace; born to bring us new life.

Lay your stump at the manger- your hurt, your abandonment, your loss. Set down your stump, that part of you that trips you up in your faith; that part that cuts you off from God; that part that holds you back.  Then come to Christ’s table and pray for a shoot of new life to emerge.  Pray for the peace of Christ to grow in your heart as you meet your Lord in this sacred meal.  Amen.