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“O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree, how lovely are your branches.”
We’ve reached the season where saccharine, jingly holiday tunes blare from every speaker imaginable, subtly shaming you for being behind on your shopping and a little too stressed out to truly be in the holiday spirit. All of your favorite pop artists have put out a holiday album so that the world can have yet one more belted out rendition of “Winter Wonderland” or “Joy to the World.” But this carol, O Christmas Tree, seems to have mostly escaped being “pop-i-fied” – perhaps because it is not about superfluous and generic holiday cheer. I looked it up – I couldn’t find a single rendition by Kelly Clarkson, or Ariana Grande, or Mariah Carey. O Christmas Tree praises the evergreen tree for its beauty, its constancy, its unfading life, especially in the darkest days of winter — a fitting metaphor for the season anticipating the arrival of Jesus, the eternal God’s very life breaking into a weary world. But today, our scripture readings talk about a different kind of tree. Isaiah, in particular, offers us a deeper and older song about a tree—a promise sung long before the first Christmas tree ever stood in a home or sanctuary. Isaiah sings: “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.”
Isaiah speaks these words into a moment of national collapse. Israel’s monarchy—once a mighty tree under King David and King Solomon—had been reduced to a remnant through conquest and exile. Cut down. Lifeless. Hopeless.
And there is good reason for the people to have lost hope. God had promised that the Messiah, the one to save them, would come from one of David’s descendants. But now, David’s royal family tree has been cut off, making it all but impossible that the promised Messiah could ever arrive. The Assyrians have conquered the northern kingdom of Israel, and Jerusalem and the southern kingdom of Judah are about to fall as well. The prophets may be accusing Israel of violating its covenant with God … but as Israel’s hope for deliverance has been severed, they are left to wonder if God has abandoned their covenant too.
So perhaps we can imagine how difficult it would have been for the people of Israel, staring at the remnant of what used to be their kingdom, to believe Isaiah’s prophecy.
Perhaps you know what it feels like to stand over a stump and say, “This used to be something living.”
Dreams cut down.
Relationships severed.
Health compromised.
Faith weakened.
A future that seems impossible to imagine.
When a tree is chopped down, what we see looks like death. There are no more lovely branches overhead, arms prayerfully extended toward the heavens, colorful leaves adorning. We see what used to be a living and growing thing.
But the thing is, a tree that is cut down but not uprooted is not dead. We might not see the root system of a tree, but it will often continue to draw nutrients from the soil. Far underneath what the human eye can detect, life is still present.
Perhaps you’ve walked by a tree stump and seen something like this.
A branch shall grow from its roots…God deliberately chooses deep roots, reaching back to Jesse, David’s father, reminding Israel that the story is not over. The stump may look dead, but the roots hold promise.
God does not promise to replace the stump. God does not say, “I will uproot this tree and plant a new tree elsewhere.” Instead, God chooses the very place of loss as the place where new life will rise. Grace grows not beside our pain but out of it, rooted in the same eternal evergreen God.
Many years ago I was living through a season when my life was feeling rather… stumpy. My life felt like a remnant of a life that used to be vibrant, good, maybe predictable, a life that made sense. It was a season when I had a lot of questions for God about why some terrible things had happened.
Then I came upon this tree.
This tree was a whole sermon. Struck down and left for dead, still, somehow, it had life in it. And against all odds, it would not be defeated. A shoot sprung up from its stump. It grew again. The rough edges where the tree was cut had been made smooth. The trunk, once a severed limb, had become a strong base from which the tree found new life.
How lovely are its branches.
And I heard God’s spirit whispering, “this is what I do. I bring growth where there seems to be death.”
A shoot will come from the stump of Jesse.
A shoot:
not majestic.
not powerful.
not yet full-grown.
But alive.
Out of the dry wood, a shoot appears—small, vulnerable, improbable. For Christians who read this passage from Isaiah, this shoot is the Messiah, the descendant of Jesse, the Christ who comes to reign with wisdom, justice, and peace. The new branch rules not with the senses, not by what his eyes see, or by what his ears hear; but with covenant relationship. Through justice and mercy and love. Righteousness and faithfulness are the belts he wears – the very things Jesus is clothed with is who he is and what he will do.
Isaiah’s prophecy is full of hope for the future. Standing on this side of the story, thousands of years later, we might easily be able to see that future promise and trust it. We see the tree, chopped down and regrown, and know how the story ends.
But it is much harder to have that hope when you’re staring at a stump. When you don’t see any possibility for life and you’re staring at a dead remnant. And it is precisely in THOSE moments, in THAT place, that this promise and prophecy comes. Because God often plants hope in places we have written off.
And this is what we need to know today: God’s work often begins where human hope ends.
Not from a palace, not from a throne, not from a flourishing tree—but from a stump.
A small, surprising shoot of life.
When we sing, “O Christmas Tree, how lovely are your branches,” we are drawn to the promise of green in a world of gray, the assurance of life in a season of dormancy. But Isaiah’s shoot goes beyond loveliness. It is a sign that God’s faithfulness reaches deeper than our despair.
The beauty of the evergreen is that it does not wither when the world grows cold. The beauty of Christ is that he brings life into what is cold and lifeless.
Christ is the branch that bears the fruit we long for:
Justice for the poor
Righteousness in judgment
Peace among enemies
Safety for the vulnerable
In “the already and the not yet” of Advent, when we tell the stories that prepare the way for the coming of Christ, what we are actually doing is telling the stories of the roots of a tree cut down and growing again. We are drawing our nutrients from the soil of faith as we anticipate God’s promised reign of justice and peace. Let every heart prepare him room; that we might be the place Jesus takes root and grows; that we might bear the fruits of healing, reconciliation, and repentance. “How lovely are your branches,” indeed. Amen.
