The Root, the Shoot, and the Promise of Christ
By Alan Swartz
December 7, 2025, EUMC &
BCUMC, Advent 2a
It seems that the prophet Isaiah, we hear so much from
Isaiah during Advent and during Lent. Indeed, if you were to listen to a
recording of Handel’s Messiah, the first part of it focuses on the season of
Advent and Christmas and the second part on the seasons of Lent and Easter. And
all throughout his great work, that great oratorio, he has music with the
setting of the words of the prophet Isaiah. These are the words we are reading and
hearing during the season of Advent. Today we hear about one of the most
powerful images that Isaiah uses. Even Paul uses it in his reading today. That
image is the stump of Jesse.
Isaiah talks about the image of a tree stump. You go out
into the woods and you see where a tree has fallen over or somebody has cut
down a tree and there’s a stump there on the ground. Sometimes it may be low to
the ground, sometimes it may be up from the ground. And most of the time if
there’s any signs of life in that stump, it’s because of the decaying nature of
the stump. There may be insects living in the stump. There may be lichens and
moss and mushrooms and other fungi growing in the stump. But here he talks
about the possibility of life in a different sense. He talks about the hope of
new life, a sprig of hope that springs forth from the trunk, from the root of
Jesse.
Back in the late 1990s, my oldest son came home from high
school with a set of CDs. There were two CDs in this little box set. That was
before the days when things were on DVDs, and that was what people used before
things were put on a USB drive, and now people just download the stuff from the
internet. It is just so accessible now. But back then, on two CDs, I had this
new operating system that I had never heard of until he brought it home that
day from his computer lab at J. F. Webb High School in Oxford, North Carolina.
Those discs contained version two of Red Hat Linux.
Now, Red Hat is a company you may have heard of. It is now a
subsidiary of IBM. And there’s a big building in downtown Raleigh. If you go
downtown, especially in the evening, you see it right up in the skyline. Red
Hat! It’s all lit up way up there in the sky in one of those tall buildings.
Red Hat is an operating system. It’s a version of Linux, which is an operating
system that runs computers. Now, most of you, if you have computers, you
probably don’t use Linux. You probably use either a version of the macOS or of
Windows. There are some similarities between Linux and Mac, but not that the
typical user would be aware of or know of.
You see, when I installed that version of Linux on a
computer using those CDs, it was a rather lengthy process, a rather gruesome
process, and quite a learning experience because it’s not something that always
worked well the first time you did it. And sometimes it required two or three
attempts before you got it right. One of the things that was especially scary
for me, a newbie in all of this, was the fact that I had to do things from the
command line. You all know what the command line is; you open up a little
terminal window with a command prompt and you actually type in a command for
the computer to do. You don’t click on nice little icons or buttons. You
actually type in a command, and you have to do it exactly in the language and
syntax that the computer is looking for. Otherwise, it will have no idea what
it is that you’re asking. It is not like artificial intelligence where it will
figure out what you’re trying to say or ask for. You have to type the command
in the exact manner that it wants and expects for an instruction. In DOS, back
before Windows, you might type in something that you wanted to delete a bunch
of files, for example, and it would ask you, “Are you sure?” That was to give
you a moment to think and ask yourself, “Do I really want to do this?” Now
Linux, it doesn’t ask you if you are sure. If you type in “delete all the files
on this disc,” it assumes that’s what you want it to do. So it’ll just go ahead
and do it without asking if you’re sure. It’ll just do it. So in that sense, it
can be a very dangerous operating system.
What makes it so dangerous is that when you’re doing that
stuff, you’re doing it as (and this is the point I’m trying to get to) you’re
doing it as the root user. The root user. A user account, which is what you all
have when you open up your Windows or Macintosh computers, lets you operate
software like a word processor or a spreadsheet or a web browser, but it won’t
let you destroy the contents of your disc. It protects you from that. If you
want to do that, then you have to use what’s called a root account, or in
Windows they call it an administrator account. And so when you go into the root
account, you can do anything you want. For example, if I were to open up a root
window, type in my root password, and if I were to type in…
rm -rf /
…and press enter, it’ll wipe every single file off my hard
drive. Every single file. Everything that makes the computer run and operate.
Everything that makes the printer work. All of your data. Everything. And it
won’t even ask me if I’m sure. It assumes that’s what I want to do. The root
user has the power of the life or death of your computer. Because of this, the
root user is sometimes called “God Mode.”
I say all this is because Jesus wants to have root access in
your life. He wants to be the root user in your life. In today’s text when it
talks about Jesus being the root of Jesse, what it’s talking about the history
of the people of Israel and their desire for a human king. They were jealous of
the other nations because they had kings and they wanted a king like they had. So
they went to Samuel and they said, “Samuel, give us a king. We want a king.”
And Samuel said, “You have a king. God is your king.” “No, no, no. We can’t see
God. We want a king that we can see.” Samuel goes to God and says, “Lord, they
want to have a human king.” And God says, “Give them what they want. You let
them know if they do this that the king is just going to tax them. He’s going
to conscript your sons and send them to war. He’s going to make your daughters his
servants and slaves. He’s going to take away from you a large portion of your
crops and your earnings.” And the people said, “That’s okay. We want a king.”
So they got one. And as much as that was a slap in the face
of God, God blessed that kingship. He blessed David. He made a covenant with
David, an everlasting covenant. Now David’s father is Jesse. So David is a
descendant of Jesse. And all the kings of Judah, the southern kingdom, were
descendants of Jesse. And this was the hope of Judah: that that promise that
God made to David and all that would follow him would be kept. God would keep
his word to David generation after generation. A descendant of David would sit
on the throne until that day when the Babylonians came and they wiped out the
line. They wiped out the temple. They wiped out the city of Jerusalem. They
took the people of Judah into exile. They wiped out the line of David. All that
was left was a dead stump.
And Isaiah and the Apostle Paul remind us that there is new
life coming out of that stump. There’s that sprig of hope growing. You ever
walk down a concrete road and you see a little crack beginning to form, and it’s
because there’s some grass or something trying to grow up through the concrete?
You’re thinking, that concrete there, that’s some tough stuff. It’s made to
last. And yet, here is this little blade of grass just pushing itself up
through this crack. It’s going to widen that crack. It’s going to break up that
concrete. And that which seems so powerful will be broken by something that
looks so weak but is full of life.
Paul reminds us that Jesus is the root of Jesse. That means
that that promise that was made to all the descendants of Jesse, all the
descendants of David that sat on that throne, were made because of Jesus. Jesus
is the root of Jesse. Jesus becomes that final descendant of the line of Jesse
on the throne of David. He is the beginning and the end. He becomes the King of
Kings and the Lord of Lords. It’s a present reality. Even though right now we
live during this Advent time of the two seasons—we have the celebration of the
birth of Jesus in Bethlehem a long time ago, and we have the anticipation and
the expectation of his return over here on this side—we live in that in-between
time. But even though it’s in between, we know that it is a reality ever
present even now. Jesus is King of kings. Jesus is Lord of lords. And this is
where we place all our hope, all our trust. It’s where we have all our
confidence. He’s the root. He’s the shoot. And all the promise we have is the
promise we have in Christ. That’s who we are.
When John the Baptist saw all those Pharisees and Sadducees
and others that came to be baptized, he said, “Who warned you to flee the wrath
to come?” But he didn’t just send them away. He baptized them and he said, “Bear
fruit worthy of repentance.”
We recognize there are still those things in our lives that
we need to name and push aside by the power and presence of the Holy Spirit.
Those things that still hold us back, those things that still cling so closely,
those things that still trip us up, we need to be able to recognize them, name
them, and move them aside by the power and grace of God. And then we live in
that new age in the promise of Christ.
+ In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
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