“Hope from the Stump”

“Hope from the Stump”

Isaiah 11 : 1-10 // The First Sunday of Advent 2025

Rev. Brandon Buchanan Series: The Prayers of Advent – The Prayer of Hope

Good morning, I’m Brandon Buchanan, one of the Associate Pastors here at Madisonville First United Methodist Church. Whether you’re joining us in this space, online, or listening over the radio, I want you to know how grateful I am to worship with you on this first Sunday of Advent.

In the Church, this is a season of longing and expectation—a time we carve out to anticipate the coming of Christ: both as we celebrate Jesus’ incarnation here on earth, and as we await the final Advent, when heaven and earth will be made new.

Today, we also begin our newest sermon series, “The Prayers of Christmas.” Each week leading up to Christmas, we’ll listen to one of the season’s scriptural prayers and walk through its Advent promise.

This week’s prayer is a Prayer of Hope. Our reading comes from the prophet Isaiah, chapter 11, verses 1 through 10.

Here now the Good News:

The Word or God for the People of God, Thanks be to God

Let us pray: God of hope, in this season of waiting, we bring You our cut-off places. Where we see stumps, You plant shoots. Where we see darkness, You kindle light. Let Your Spirit rest on us now— breathe life into our weariness, and open us to the promise of Your Word. Grow in us a hope that will not fade, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Opening / Candle-Lighting Connection

God of hope, we long for something to grow out of the cut-off places in our lives and world…That’s how we prayed this morning as the first candle was lit. A single flame flickered against the sanctuary’s early-winter gray, a light small enough to lose in the breath of the room— and yet, somehow, enough to change it.

The candle of hope burns beside Isaiah’s words today:

“A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.”

It’s a strange image for the first Sunday of Advent. Not angels. Not mangers. Just a stump—and a whisper of green.

I. Entering the Stump (Naming the Wound)

If you’ve ever walked through a forest after a storm, and I know many of you have, you know the sight. Trees splintered, trunks lying like bones, silence thick as grief. Once-living things now reduced to rough circles of wood and memory. That’s the landscape Isaiah speaks into.

The nation of Judah had been cut down by empires— Assyria looming like a storm with fierce winds. Their royal line, once strong as an oak, was now a stump in the dirt. Their temple was trembling, their future unsure. And the prophet dares to say: look closer.

There, in the rot and in the ruin, life is still moving. Tiny, defiant, green.

Our world knows something of this landscape. We’ve seen forests fall—literal and spiritual. Communities divided, families frayed, faith thinned by disappointment. Some of us have watched dreams collapse under their own weight. Some have lost people they thought would always be there. Some carry weariness that no amount of caffeine or worship songs can lift.

I remember After the ice storm of 2009, my grandparents lost trees in their yard that I thought would always be there. Earlier that year, I’d taken a graphic design class and created a family coat of arms filled with the symbols that made our family feel like home. One of them was their backyard—the place of summer kickball games and hide-and-seek, where those old trees marked third base and spot to hide. When the ice storm came and those trees were gone, it felt like childhood itself had been cut down.

If I’m honest, the stump feels familiar. It’s my family after recovering from the storms. It’s the church after years of decline. It’s the friend who no longer believes prayer matters. It’s the quiet disillusionment that settles in when we’ve done everything right, and the world is still wrong.

Isaiah begins right there—among the stumps— because that’s where God begins too.

II. Seeing the Shoot (Receiving the Promise)

“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 upon him…”

The word Isaiah uses for “shoot,” ḥōṭer, is delicate— not a branch that demands attention, but something you could miss if you weren’t looking closely. And yet, it carries the whole promise of God.

Patricia Tull notes that Isaiah chooses Jesse, not David, to remind us that God’s renewal won’t come through royal power but through ordinary roots. The new life will be humble, hidden, unexpected. Walter Brueggemann calls it God’s unwavering faithfulness— life rising where none should be possible. The stump isn’t the end. It’s the soil of something new.

I keep thinking about that in our own life together. In the places where we feel cut off— God may not be re-planting an old tree. God may be growing a new one from the same faithful roots.

I saw that kind of growth this past year. For years, my relationship with my maternal grandfather felt like a tree cut down.

There were actions we couldn’t take back, silences that grew thicker with time, and seasons when I believed nothing green could ever grow there again.

But as his health began to fade, so did his defenses.

One afternoon, my dad picked me up without explanation and took me to Baptist Health Deaconess, where I stood beside my dying grandfather.

His voice trembled, the way roots might tremble pushing through hard soil.

We talked. We forgave. We remembered.

It wasn’t dramatic—no thunder, no soundtrack—just quiet grace, the Spirit resting on two stubborn people who finally laid down their axes.

By the time he died, the old stump between us had started to bloom. And I realized that reconciliation doesn’t erase what was cut down; it simply proves that God’s grace is stronger than our endings.

Hope doesn’t erase loss; it grows through it. That’s harder news than it sounds. Because we’d rather start over than start again. We’d rather have resurrection without crucifixion, spring without winter, a new chapter without rereading the last one.

But Isaiah’s hope is slower, more tender. It begins underground, where roots remember rain.

Showing 1 – Hope as Shoot

Hope is like a shoot rising from a stump— a tender green thread pushing through splintered bark, refusing to believe that endings are the only truth. It doesn’t roar or rush; it whispers. It grows by inches while the forest still mourns its fallen trees. Its power is in its patience— the kind of strength that stays rooted when everything else has been cut down.

III. The Spirit’s Rest (Participating in God’s Work)

Isaiah says, “The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him.” Rest—nûaḥ in Hebrew—means to settle, to dwell. The Spirit doesn’t swoop in like a storm; the Spirit abides.

That resting Spirit carries seven gifts: wisdom and understanding, counsel and might, knowledge and the fear of the Lord. Not weapons of war but virtues of discernment. This ruler’s power is measured not by conquest but by compassion.

“He shall judge the poor with righteousness, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth.”

God’s hope isn’t just spiritual; it’s social. It heals the world by changing how we treat one another. The stump becomes fertile ground for God’s justice.

If Advent teaches us anything, it’s that God’s Spirit still rests on unlikely people in unlikely places. The Spirit rests on Mary, a young woman who said yes to God. The Spirit rests on Joseph, a man who chooses mercy over pride. The Spirit rests on shepherds watching sheep under the same stars. And today, the Spirit rests on you.

When you comfort a grieving friend. When you light a candle instead of cursing the darkness. When you forgive someone who hasn’t asked to be forgiven. That’s the Spirit’s work— resting, renewing, rebuilding the peaceable kingdom one act at a time.

Showing 2 – Hope as Candle

Hope is also like a candle lit in the darkest week of the year— a single flame trembling against the winter wind. It does not banish the night, but it keeps the darkness from having the last word. It burns quietly, steadily, until others bring their candles close and the room begins to glow with borrowed light.

So it is with the Spirit of God— resting on what remains, breathing on the stumps, kindling hearts that still dare to believe. Hope lives not in what we have lost, but in the small, shining things that refuse to die.

IV. The Peaceable Vision (Imagining the World to Come)

Isaiah’s vision unfolds like a dream you don’t want to end:

“The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.”

Predator and prey share the same pasture. The child who once feared the snake now plays beside it. Violence gives way to vulnerability; enmity turns into trust.

Is this a prophecy or a fairy tale? Maybe both. It’s certainly absurd by human standards. That’s why it’s so hope-filled. Hope, in Scripture, always looks absurd until it happens.

Isaiah’s peace isn’t sentimental; it’s revolutionary. It doesn’t ignore difference—it transforms it. It’s not the absence of conflict but the presence of reconciliation. And at its center stands a little child. Not a general, not a king—a child.

When I look at our congregation, I think of our children racing down the aisles for the children’s moment and as they head of to 222 or in the gym and the halls of Wednesday Night Alive, their laughter echoing throughout the church. Maybe Isaiah’s vision isn’t some far-off utopia. Maybe it begins when we let the littlest among us show us what peace looks like.

Brueggemann describes this vision as God’s unwavering faithfulness made visible—a world reordered by the Spirit’s life-giving power.

The peace Isaiah imagines is not partial or private; it reaches the whole creation.

From stump to shoot, from one spark to the whole earth, God’s harmony expands outward until nothing is left untouched by mercy.

 “The earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord,” Isaiah says, “as the waters cover the sea.”

Can you picture that?

Every coastline, every cracked heart, every forgotten place flooded with knowing—not intellectual assent but relational awareness: the world breathing in the presence of God.

V. Living as Signs of Hope (Sending)

So what do we do with such a vision? How do we live among the stumps and still believe in shoots?

First, we look closely. Hope often begins too small to notice. Pay attention to the green at the base of what you thought was dead. It might be a reconciliation you didn’t think possible, a prayer whispered when you’d given up praying, a child’s question that makes faith new again.

Second, we tend gently. The shoot can’t bear the weight of cynicism. It needs patience, prayer, and protection. When you see new life—protect it. Speak kindness into it. Nurture it the way God nurtures you.

Third, we share the light. Just as on Christmas Eve, one candle in a dark room flickers; But a hundred candles change the temperature. Carry your flame into the week. Bring hope into your classrooms, your hospital rooms, city meetings, and family dinners. Let the Spirit of the Lord rest on you so others can see by your light.

Friends, the pain in us—the one that says, “Nothing new can grow here”— that pain is precisely where God chooses to plant hope. Advent doesn’t deny the darkness; it declares that God is present within it. That’s the miracle of the stump and the candle. Hope doesn’t wait for perfect conditions. Hope grows right through the cut places. Hope burns right through the long night.

Closing Movement

Maybe that’s why the church begins the Christian year in the dark. When the days are shortest, when the world seems stripped bare, we light one small candle and call it enough. Because enough is all God ever needed— one stump, one shoot, one Savior born in a manger.

Isaiah saw it long before Bethlehem: A Spirit-anointed ruler, gentle yet strong. A creation healed from the inside out. A world where even wolves learn to rest.

And so we pray, as our ancestors prayed, and as our children will pray after us:

God of hope, we long for something to grow out of the cut-off places in our lives and world… Raise up leaders from the unlikely. Make enemies our friends and foes our family. Show us how to be signs of hope, witnessing to Christ so all can see your glory.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

BENEDICTION:

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen. (ROMANS 15:13)