Sermons
December 21, 2025 (4th Sunday of Advent)
“It came a flow’ret bright…”
Isaiah 11:1-10
In the Enlightenment era, it was often said that religion and politics shouldn’t mix.
We mainline Christians, children of the Enlightenment that we are, have bought into the notion that religion is a private matter, just between us and God, just about our individual, personal salvation. But this notion of religion as having to do only with whether or not I go to heaven when I die, but otherwise having no bearing on how this world operates, has been used to perpetrate some terrible things: you’ve probably heard about white mainline Christians in the southern United States before the Civil War, who went to church on Sunday and heard sermons about personal salvation, and were never given any reason to consider whether the Bible they claimed to believe in had anything to say about the way they treated the other human beings whom they considered to be their property.[1]
The problem is, the Bible doesn’t necessarily lend itself to Enlightenment-style pigeonholing, where we can put religion into a slot on Sunday morning and, having filled that slot, live the rest of the week totally apart from any thought about it.
No, the Bible doesn’t necessarily tell us how we should vote, and it doesn’t specifically spell out how our elected officials should act. And quite honestly, I think some of the political realities of the Bible get lots in translation, because the cultures of the Bible, of the Old Testament and the New Testament, are very, very different from our own culture.
For one thing, there is no such thing anywhere in the Bible as a representative democracy as we understand it today.
The nation of Israel as a whole, and later, after the kingdom split in two, the southern kingdom of Judah, were to a great extent theocracies…or perhaps the prophets thought they should be. The intention from the very moment the Israelites entered the Promised Land was that they would be a free people ruled by God and God’s Law. When the people demanded to have a king like the nations around them had, God allowed it—but the king was expected to rule according to God’s commandments, and the whole nation was judged by how well the king led them to follow those commandments.
After the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonian Empire in 586 bce, except for a very short time under the Maccabees (whose restoration of the Jerusalem temple and its worship practices are celebrated on the Jewish holiday Hanukkah), the Jewish people never again had an independent nation of their own, up until the modern state of Israel was established in 1948. During the rest of the time period covered in the Bible, the Jewish people—from whom all of our Scriptures, and our Savior, come—lived as subject people, first to Babylon, then to Persia, then to Syria, then to Rome.
There is no such thing in the Bible as, in the words of arguably our most religious President, “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”[2] Thus we’re not always aware of the political implications of the Biblical text.
As an example: it is thought that the earliest public Christian confession of faith is, “Jesus is Lord.” Paul mentions this confession at the start of his extended discussion of the gifts of the Spirit, which takes up the 12th through 14th chapters of 1 Corinthians.
What we may not realize is that, in the Roman world, making a public statement that anyone other than Caesar is Lord was considered treason! It was very much a political statement—to say Jesus is Lord was, in effect, to say that, ultimately, Caesar is not.
How proclaiming Jesus as our Lord plays out in 21st-century America is something with which I will leave you to wrestle, but I daresay it is potentially every bit as subversive as it was in 1st-century imperial Rome, although perhaps in different ways.
Have you ever given any thought to why it was important for Jesus to be born in Bethlehem? Again, it’s political, and potentially dangerous.
The most obvious reason is that Jesus is descended from King David. But that’s not just a little bit of trivia. It is a political statement. You see, the people believed God had made a covenant with David, that one of his descendants would sit on the throne in Jerusalem “forever.” (That “forever” was qualified, actually: his descendants would sit on that throne as long as they obeyed God’s commandments. And the Deuteronomistic History found in Joshua, Judges, 1st and 2nd Samuel, and 1st and 2nd Kings makes it pretty clear that the majority of David’s descendants who sat on that throne did not fully obey God’s commandments, and that this is the reason why the last one was overthrown and carried into exile in Babylon. History tells us there was never another Davidic king ruling from Jerusalem.)
Well before the last king of David’s line was deposed, the prophets and the people began to dream of a king from David’s family tree whose reign would be marked by complete faithfulness to God’s commandments. The prophecy of Isaiah 11:1-10 may have come from the time period when Jerusalem was being threatened by Assyria, the empire that came before Babylon, which had just destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel and scattered its inhabitants to the wind.
The first part of the Isaiah book is pretty pessimistic. The Song of the Vineyard in Isaiah 5 declares God’s judgment on the people of Jerusalem and Judah, just as a vinegrower would destroy a vineyard that, in spite of his best efforts to get it to bear good fruit, persistently bore nothing but putrid stinkberries. But as Isaiah moves forward with his prophecy, he predicts that the nations who will execute this judgment will themselves be cut down.
And then we come to chapter 11, where the prophet describes a post-apocalyptic scene. After all the desolation that is coming, the whole known world looking like a Coast Range hillside after loggers clear-cut it, and there’s a tiny spark of life: “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse…”
Jesse, of course, was King David’s father, so this is a poetic way of saying that another descendant of David will emerge, and will rule, even though David’s line will at some point be cut off.
This prophecy, as I said, likely came from a time when there was still a Davidic king ruling from Jerusalem. The prediction may well have been that, within the people’s lifetime, a king who is of David’s family would emerge, who would rule with God’s own justice and righteousness, unlike just about every king from David on, some of whom followed God’s commandments to some extent, but all of whom had very human flaws.
But after the last Davidic king, Zedekiah, was taken from the throne by Babylon, the prophecy came to be re-imagined. The tree of Jesse was cut down, nothing but a stump left standing…but one day new life will sprout from it.
The hope that came from this re-imagining, not just of this passage but others from Isaiah, and one from Micah—which King Herod’s learned men consulted to figure out that a new “King of the Jews” would be born in Bethlehem[3]—was of a king such that the world had never known. This king would perfectly fulfill God’s Law, would enact God’s justice and righteousness on earth, and his rule would be good news to the poor and the meek. He would be from King David’s family, and he would be born in David’s hometown, Bethlehem.
And that is not just a pretty picture, a pretty family in a stable with the baby in the manger. It is very much a political statement. For David was remembered as the greatest king of the independent Jewish nation, and messianic hope centered on a king like David re-establishing that independent nation, ruling from Jerusalem after overthrowing the Roman occupation.
It’s no wonder King Herod was scared: he was nothing but Rome’s puppet, so a threat to Rome’s power was a serious threat to his power.
When the subject Jewish people, whether they be in a ghetto in Babylon or in Roman-occupied Judea or Galilee, started talking about a shoot from the stump of Jesse, what they were saying was that “the kingdom of God is at hand.” And they were saying that the Son of David was their true king, not Nebuchadnezzar, not Herod, not even Caesar. And the Son of David would be born in Bethlehem, a king put to bed in a manger, forced to become a refugee before he was old enough to be weaned,[4] a king with no place to lay his head, a king who would turn this whole world upside down.
It’s still a political statement to declare that this Son of David—Jesus Christ—is our Lord above all the rulers of this world, however good and righteous they might be (and a great many of them are not, and all of them are, like all human beings, a mixed bag of righteousness and sinfulness). That’s because from the minute Jesus began his ministry, the Gospels tell us he had some pretty radical things to say. His inaugural address was given at his home synagogue, in his hometown of Nazareth.[5] He began by reading Isaiah 61:
“The spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me;
he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,
to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and release to the prisoners;
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor…”[6]
Then he sat down—because rabbis sat down to teach—and said, “Today this prophecy has been fulfilled.”
We can’t fully understand that without recognizing that “the year of the Lord’s favor” is the Year of Jubilee. It was commanded in the 25th chapter of Leviticus: every fifty years, slaves were to be released, land that had changed hands was to go back to its original owners, debts were to be cancelled. This was meant to keep wealth from becoming concentrated in the hands of a few; every fifty years, the playing field was leveled, by God’s command.
And there is no evidence that the Year of Jubilee was ever celebrated in Israel or Judah.
When Jesus proclaimed that he was the one who would finally bring about Jubilee, his hometown was astonished and pleased: surely this meant Rome would be sent packing, along with their casual cruelty and crushing taxation. It was a political statement!
And then he angered even his neighbors and kinfolk by declaring that this Jubilee was not just for his own people. They were so angry, indeed, that they tried to throw him off a cliff!
Preachers ever since have, and rightly so, been leery about making political statements in their sermons. Rightly so, because in a country like ours, where we value highly freedom of thought, faith, and speech; and in a church like ours, where we call for unity in the essentials (Jesus is Lord), liberty in the nonessentials (interpretation of Scripture, political affiliation, and the like), and love in all matters; discussions of where faith and politics intersect need to be conversations, not decrees from one person who happens to have “Reverend” or “Pastor” in front of their name.
But the truth is that the Gospel, the Good News about the shoot from the stump of Jesse, the king unlike any the world has ever known, who fulfilled every last bit of Torah[7] and was totally, absolutely, obedient to God’s commandments even to the point of death on the cross,[8] is very much political, because it has profound implications for how the world’s goods are distributed, and how the people of the world are to treat one another. And it all starts with the seemingly innocent reality that Jesus, the Messiah, the shoot from the stump of Jesse, was born in Bethlehem, King David’s hometown.
O Flower of Jesse’s stem,
you have been raised up as a sign for all peoples;
kings stand silent in your presence;
the nations bow down in worship before you.
Come, let nothing keep you from coming to our aid.
[1] It is true, as some have said, that the Bible nowhere says slavery is immoral; yet in Torah there are rules about how slaves are to be treated and when and how they are to be set free, and a case can be made that in Paul’s letter to Philemon the seeds were sown for Christians to come to understand slavery as contrary to our faith.
[2] Even though Abraham Lincoln never officially held membership in any congregation, his spoken and written words seem to indicate a man of great faith, deeply rooted in Scripture.
[3] Matthew 2:1-6
[4] Matthew 2:13-23
[5] Luke 4:14-30
[6] Isaiah 61:1-2a
[7] Matthew 5:17-18
[8] Philippians 2:8