Advent 2 – Year A

Advent 2 – Year A

Isaiah 11:1-10

Church of the Atonement

The Rev’d Charles Everson

December 7, 2025

In this season of Advent, the Church invites us into a space of longing – longing for God to act, longing for God to heal, longing for God to set right all that is broken in us and in the world. Advent is not about sentimental waiting, nor counting down shopping days until Christmas with whatever novelty Advent calendar the world is peddling this year. Advent is honest: it names the darkness. It acknowledges the grief, the injustice, the uncertainty, and the ache that are part of the human condition. But it is also stubbornly hopeful. Advent dares to proclaim that God’s light is already breaking in.

Our first reading gives us one of Scripture’s most beautiful images of that hope: “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse.” Not a towering cedar. Not a mighty oak. A shoot – fragile, new, tender – growing out of a dead stump.

Isaiah is writing to a people whose world has been cut down. We’re somewhere around the late 8th century BC, in the southern kingdom of Judah, during the reigns of kings like Ahaz and Hezekiah. The northern kingdom of Israel has either already fallen to Assyria or is about to, and Judah feels the empire’s hot breath on its neck. Assyria is the unquestioned superpower of the region – brutal, efficient, merciless – and every small nation in its path trembles. Within Judah, the political and spiritual situation is equally bleak. The monarchy has failed in its vocation; kings are making cowardly alliances instead of trusting in the Lord. Corruption infects the courts and the priesthood. The poor are forgotten; widows and orphans are left unprotected; justice is twisted to favor the wealthy and powerful. Isaiah has already compared Judah to a vineyard that yields only wild grapes, a city once faithful now full of bloodshed. In other words, the once-great tree of David’s line has been reduced to a stump – a stump cut down not only by foreign aggression but by the nation’s own sin and unfaithfulness. And yet Isaiah, standing amid the ruins of political failure, moral decay, and military threat, looks at that stump – looks at the devastation, looks at what seems beyond repair – and he dares to say, “This is exactly where God is going to begin again.” Jesse, of course, was the father of King David – the root of Israel’s royal line. To speak of “the stump of Jesse” is to say that the dynasty God once promised would endure forever now appears lifeless. And yet from that very lineage, Isaiah insists, God will raise up a new King – the One for whom we wait in Advent.

When all seems lost, God is already at work in hidden and surprising ways.

You and I know what that feels like. We know the moments when life is cut down to the ground, when something we loved or depended on is suddenly – or slowly – taken away. Some of those seasons arrive like a storm: the loss of a loved one, a daunting diagnosis, the collapse of a relationship. Others creep in quietly: loneliness, spiritual dryness, a dawning realization that the life we imagined is not the life we’re living.

For me, that sense of barrenness became painfully real in the early months of the pandemic. My grandfather had lived with Alzheimer’s for a long time. His decline was slow, heartbreaking, and filled with little griefs along the way. And then, in May of 2020, right as the world was shutting down, he died. There was, of course, minimal family gathering, a simple funeral in my mom’s back yard while the neighbor mowed his grass and the livestreaming wouldn’t work – an aching quiet of loss in a season already heavy with grief. A season when life seemed stripped to the roots if ever there was one.

This Advent, this sense of barrenness is presenting in my life in a different way.  St. Ignatius calls it desolation, or the feeling of being far from God.  I’m sure you can relate to this feeling as desolation, or spiritual dryness, occurs from time to time in each of us – sometimes for a few days, sometimes a few months, sometimes a few years.    Prayer isn’t easy for me right now, the sacraments feel dry, and choosing virtue over vice feels exhausting. Advent gives us room to acknowledge desolation honestly — not as a spiritual misstep, but as the heart’s deep longing for the God who draws near.

Isaiah speaks right into moments like these. He does not say, “Ignore the stump.” He says, “Look at it.” Because God is not done. Because new life is already pushing up from the places we thought were dead.

“A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse.”

In the hush of Advent, we dare to believe that the shoot Isaiah saw is none other than Jesus Christ – the son of David, the son of Jesse – who brings a kingdom unlike any the world had seen. He grows from the stump of human failure into the tree of life for all people. Which means this prophecy is not only about ancient Judah — it is about the Christ who comes to the barren and broken places in us.

This is not only a poetic image. As Christians, we see it as a Christological claim. Isaiah is describing the Messiah – the One who will come with the Spirit resting upon Him in all its fullness.

The Spirit of wisdom and understanding. The Spirit of counsel and might. The Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.

These gifts rest on Jesus perfectly. He sees the world as God sees it. He listens with the compassion of his Father. He acts with courage, heals with tenderness, judges with fairness, and delights in holy reverence.

But here is the heart of Isaiah’s promise for us: the gifts of the Spirit poured out on Jesus are not meant for Jesus alone. These are the gifts prayed over every person who is baptized and confirmed.

At baptism, we are “sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever.” At confirmation, we pray, “Strengthen, O Lord, your servant with your Holy Spirit; empower and sustain them.” These are not perfunctory prayers – they are moments of God’s divine generosity. They remind us that Christian hope is rooted in the Spirit’s work in ordinary, fragile people like you and me.

This Spirit is what enables new life to grow in us even in the barren seasons.

And Isaiah doesn’t stop with personal renewal. He lifts our eyes to a vision of justice and peace that feels almost impossible: wolves living with lambs, leopards lying down with kids, children leading animals once feared as predators. Isaiah is imagining the world as God intends it: a world where violence gives way to harmony, where enemies are reconciled, where creation is healed, where all people – especially the poor, the outcast, and the overlooked – are treated with dignity. Isaiah’s vision may sound far from the world we walk through in the streets of Chicago, yet this is precisely the world Christ comes to redeem.

This is not naïve fantasy. It is the fruit of the Spirit’s work. It is the kingdom the Messiah brings. And it is the kingdom to which the Church is called to bear witness.

We see glimpses of it here – whenever we feed the hungry, welcome newcomers, embrace those who have been rejected elsewhere, advocate for justice, or simply extend compassion to someone who is struggling. In those moments, the peaceable kingdom grows another inch. Another shoot breaks through the soil.

And nowhere is this more real than at the altar. Each week, we bring forward gifts of bread and wine – simple creatures that were once crushed and broken – and the Spirit transforms them into the Body and Blood of Christ. Bread and wine marked by death become for us the banquet of resurrection. In the Eucharist, the new shoot is not just promised — He is present. And in receiving him, we become what we receive: the Body of Christ, sent forth to embody the hope Isaiah proclaims.

So this Advent, where is God planting a shoot in your life? Where might new life be emerging in a place that feels barren or broken? What stump have you been avoiding because it feels too painful to look at?

Isaiah’s promise is that stumps are not the end of the story. Grief is not the end of the story. Spiritual dryness is not the end of the story.  Death is not the end of the story. God is always doing something new – quietly, tenderly, persistently – even when all we see is a dead stump.

Thanks be to God, a shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse.  Amen.