Sermon for Sunday, December 7, 2025 || Advent 2A || Isaiah 11:1-10
Today’s sermon is about the unexpected grace of new possibilities. As we continue in our Advent season of preparation and anticipation, we practice opening ourselves up to how God is moving in our lives in the same type of unexpected ways that God moved in the lives of Mary and Joseph as they welcomed Jesus into the world. Mary practiced this openness when she said “Yes” to the angel. Joseph practiced this openness when he made a family with Mary despite pressure to reject her. Our openness to new possibilities is a symptom of the hope we place in the God who makes all things new. So let’s talk about new possibilities today: first we’ll look at the beginning of this morning’s reading from the Prophet Isaiah, then we will talk about three ways we can test that the new possibilities we are reaching for come from God.
The reading from Isaiah begins with a striking metaphor.
“A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,
and a branch shall grow out of his roots.”
Does anyone know who Jesse is in the Bible? Yes! He’s David’s father. Isaiah’s metaphor is about a family tree. David’s father was Jesse, whose father was Obed, whose father was Boaz. Obed’s mother was Ruth, the immigrant from Moab who remained faithful to her mother-in-law Naomi and followed her back to Israel. Thus David’s ancestry arose from multiple peoples coming together out of faithfulness of relationships. These are the roots of the family tree.
But Isaiah’s prophecy does not speak of a trunk or a canopy. The tree has been hacked down. This is an allusion to the people of Israel’s exile into Assyria and Babylon. The family of Jesse – while many, many generations followed David – did not live into the covenant that God had made with the people. Foreign powers cut down the tree, leaving only a stump and roots.
I think Isaiah has an olive tree in mind with this powerful metaphor because olive trees, even dead ones, will continue putting off shoots from stumps and roots. Whole new living trees can grow from the deceased remains of their predecessors. We read this prophecy during Advent because Christians identify this new shoot coming from the stump of Jesse to be Jesus. The genealogy at the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel traces the family tree from this shoot all the way to Joseph, Jesus’ earthly father. The reason Mary and Joseph had to travel to Bethlehem for the Roman census was because Bethlehem was the ancestral home of David’s family, of which Joseph was a part.
Because Mary and Joseph were open to God’s new possibilities, they watered the shoot growing from the stump of Jesse. They said “Yes” when God was moving in a surprising new way. They remained connected to each other and gave life and love to God’s Word walking among us.
Like the Holy Family, God beckons us to open ourselves to new possibilities. As we contemplate all the new roads we could walk down, here are three ways we can discern whether a certain way is God’s Good Road1 upon which to travel. New possibilities from God are (1) surprising, (2) connecting, and (3) lifegiving.
First, surprising. When we open ourselves to new possibilities, we actively let go of the control that we attempt to assert on our lives. This control is always an illusion, and the more we seek to assert control, the more vulnerable we become to an unforeseen circumstance dispelling the illusion. But when we embrace the habit of surprise, we acknowledge the illusion and set it aside. We then go about our days accepting invitations as they come rather than trying to control events. This is what Deacon Chuck does when he prays for the openness to meet the people that God places in his path each day.
Surprising new possibilities come to us on the creative wings of the Holy Spirit. As Jesus says in my favorite verse in the Bible: “The wind blows where it chooses and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.” Jesus says this about the Wind of the Spirit to Nicodemus, a man used to being in control. Jesus invites Nicodemus and us to let the wind blow us to new and surprising possibilities for our lives, things we might never have considered when trying to assert control.
As God’s wind blows us to surprising possibilities, we ask ourselves if those possibilities are connecting. Does the new thing isolate us or connect us? Is there support from our community for our embrace of the new possibility? If yes, then we can count on our community’s support. If no, then the possibility might not be from God. Or it might be from God, and we have to discern a prophetic role in bringing the community into a whole new vision.
Jesus had followers, yes, but the vast majority of his people, including those from his own hometown, did not understand or condone what he was doing. They thought he had a demon or was out of his mind. They were angry that he ate with people whom polite society had shunned. They feared he would upset the powers-that-be. And through it all, Jesus kept calling people into his vision of God’s Good Road, a vision of connection and new life.
This new life is the third part of our test. Is the new possibility not only surprising and connecting, but also lifegiving? Does it enliven you? Being lifegiving is not the same thing as being easy or fun. Lifegiving things are often very hard. They may be new vocations that lead us into challenging encounters. They may be new choices that align with our values, but will cause tension in certain relationships. They may simply be small glimmers of possibility in the midst of the worst times in our lives: little breaths of fresh air or pockets of blue sky on an overcast day.
Jesus said, “I came that they may have life, and have it in abundance.” Abundant life happens when we trust God to lead us down God’s Good Road into new possibilities. Abundant life happens when we open ourselves up to new ways of being, when we don’t constrict ourselves within the confines of the currently possible.
These three elements help us test if a new possibility may be coming from God, riding on the wind of the Holy Spirit. Ask yourself: is it surprising, is it connecting, is it lifegiving? As we move through this season of Advent, I invite you to pray with the image of the shoot growing from the stump of Jesse. Something new is growing in you out of something old. Pray for the courage to make room for this newness. Pray for the openness to be surprised, to seek connection, and to embrace all that enlivens you in every new possibility which the grace of God places in your path.
- “God’s Good Road” is the translation of “Kingdom of God” found in the First Nations Version of the New Testament. It is such an alive rendering because it imagines God’s reign as a road we walk rather than a place to go. ↩︎
Where the Wind... 