Advent 2

Isaiah 11:1-10; Ps. 72; Rom 15:4-13; Matt 3:1-1

The Rev’d Dr. Deborah Meister

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 on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. (Is 11: 1-2)

Every year, I look forward to those words — those strong hopeful words redolent of new life. They bring me hope: hope for the future, hope for this earth, hope for our God. The passage is so strong, and the poetry so beautiful, that’s easy to overlook its context: this is not the sudden blossoming of a long-dormant tree. It’s new life from a tree that has been cut down: life where there has been destruction and death. If you’ve ever walked in the woods, you’re likely to have seen this: a stump or a broken tree, to all reason lost past saving, but with tender sprouts of green emerging from the base or the top. The tree which refuses to die, quietly negating the power of death.

That image — the stump, the remnant, the broken-yet-living people — has a long tradition in Scripture. When Isaiah was first called as prophet, standing before the Heavenly throne, the Lord tells him to prophecy the complete destruction of the people, not just once, but over and over again, “until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without people, and the land is utterly desolate,” but then adds one word of hope, “The holy seed is its stump.” (Is 6: 11, 13) And prophet after prophet has spoken of God’s true people as a remnant: the humbled and chastened survivors of the calamities they have brought upon themselves, scattered first into exile, and then, after a time of purification, gathered again by God and brought back to their own land. The message is clear: the world as ordered by human beings will not endure, but the divine harmony of God is even now breaking through to bring in a new world, a world of justice, wisdom, and peace.

Looking at the world today, it’s hard not to feel the power of that vision — not the pie-in-the-sky images of gentle baby Jesus, but the world-disrupting power of God who breaks apart all that is not perfectly holy, in order to bring in what is. We seem to be living through a great unraveling, in which everything from the environment to the rules-based international order to systems of social care are disintegrating or being remade around us. I know I’m not the only one in this congregation experiencing a profound disquiet, as systems we trust are failing and values which are fundamental to us are being violated with impunity. Even that language, which I just used, is a problem: speaking of “systems” and “values” and “order” conceals the flesh-and-blood truth: that vulnerable people are being hurt and killed, by action and by deliberate inaction. And we, who have the privilege to live in a country which tries to be honorable, are not immune from these effects. All people are, ultimately, vulnerable.

It’s hard to know what to make of these realities. It’s almost the reverse of the promise: breaking down what seems to us to be of God, rather than what is opposed to him. Many of us are in fear, sorrow, anger, and disbelief. But underneath all those very human and natural reactions, we must ask ourselves the key question of Advent: Where does our allegiance lie? To what have we given our heart?

That is the question in the spiritual life, and the fact that we are Christian does not get us off the hook. When John the Baptist emerges in the wilderness roaring about broods of vipers, the people in his sights are the Pharisees and Sadducees, the most devout religious people of his time. They come to him confessing their sins, and he urges them to “bear fruit worthy of repentance,” in other words, to live lives worthy of the God to whom they belong. This was not an easy demand in a land under Roman occupation. Rome demanded the allegiance of the heart, from both Romans and subject peoples. They held themselves up as the greatest power on earth; they conquered lands with armies dressed in bright armor and sexy scarlet cloaks; they offered education and roads and bridges, sanitation and culture and bread. Anyone could opt in, and why wouldn’t you? The enticements were so alluring. Even the Sadducees, the powerful spiritual leaders of Israel, worked hand-in-glove with their Roman overlords, and received power and influence in return. They may have believed they were trying to help and protect their people, but John reminded them that there is a fine line between necessary accommodation and complicity, and between complicity and allegiance. To what had they given their hearts?

I’m not speaking, of course, only about ancient Rome; those same temptations are alive and well today, particularly in the threat coming from so-called “Christian nationalism.” We’ve heard a lot about this in the United States — the attempt by those now in power to create a nation in which Christians (by which they mean, conservative White Christians) enjoy a privileged legal status, while members of other faiths are seen as somehow un-American — but the same forces are at play in Canada. This week, the Anglican Church of Canada released a statement about it, writing, in part, “Canada’s longstanding commitment to religious pluralism has enabled members of many faith communities and those with no faith commitment to live in civic harmony with one another without sacrificing their respective theological convictions. A growing threat to this principle of pluralism and inclusion is the ideology of Christian nationalism, which …implies that to be a good Canadian, one must be Christian. This ideology can provide cover for discrimination against marginalized groups and can increase threats and violence against religious communities at home and abroad. In that light, we denounce Christian nationalism as a distortion of the gospel of Jesus and a threat to Canadian democracy.” (Statement on Christian Nationalism, 12/1/25)

Ultimately, what we are talking about is heresy. We don’t talk much about heresy at this Cathedral, where we strive to be a welcoming and inclusive community for all persons, wherever they are in their spiritual journey, a place where we may all grow in faithfulness together – and we all need to grow! But we need to know who we are to make others welcome as they are, and to help them decide whether this should be their home.

Christian nationalists refuse to understand the true nature of the relationship between God and earthly power. God’s promises to the ancient Hebrews included the gift of land, and that promise runs through each of their covenants. But Christ’s promise to us involves neither territory nor dominion. Face to face with Pilate in the last hours of his life, Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world.” And when Pilate presses him, saying, “So you are a king?” Jesus replies “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.” (John 18:37) And again, in Luke, when the crowds ask Jesus when the kingdom of God will come, he replies, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.” (Luke 17: 20-21) The distinction is clear: unlike Rome or ancient Israel, Jesus did not come to establish an earthly kingdom, not even a theocracy. Instead, he came to change the hearts of the people, detaching us from the temptations and imperatives of earthly power, so that we could have the spiritual freedom to live with integrity and with joy.

Here in Québec, of course, we are faced with a different danger: not Christian nationalism, but the exclusion of spiritual voices from the public square. At first glance, these seem to be opposites, but I’m not sure that’s true. In both cases, authorities who believe they know the truth are seeking to constrain what others believe and how they are able to express those beliefs. Each stance — Christian nationalism and aggressive secularism — seeks to invade and control the sanctuary of the heart. To co-opt our ultimate allegiance.

The truth is, it’s always a temptation, not just to offer other people what we have found, but to make them be part of it, just as it’s a temptation to think that we, ourselves, have the ability to bring in the better world that God envisions. And it’s true: we have some capacity to make change that betters the lives of others, and it’s part of our faithfulness to use it. But this world and its structures remain stubbornly human; even at our best, we will not, by our own strength, bring in the Kingdom of God.

When God breaks into this world, he shakes our earthly realities, just as a green shoot nested in the crevice of a stone will eventually break the stone to pieces. And that rupture, painful though it may be, is a necessary part of the work. The world order we have enjoyed has not been good for all. The comforts of our lives are part of the over-consumption of the earth. Even the human rights we seek to give to every human being (and which I cherish) have been, at best, partially realized. We must not confuse human structures or earthly powers with God’s ultimate ends.

In 1944, a Jesuit priest named Alfred Delp was imprisoned for participating in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. From his cell, awaiting execution, he wrote, “the great question for us is whether we are still capable of being shocked or whether it is to remain so that we see thousands of things and know that they should not be and must not be, and that we get hardened to them.” He then added, in words which should be in every heart today, “It is time to repent… We must do this with a decision that comes out of these very horrors we have experienced…and because of this our decision will be unshakeable even in uncertainty.”

It is in being shaken out of our false certainties and imaginary worlds that we will be saved, not by misguided trust in earthly power, but by being rooted in what is most real: that Christ was born among those whom power disregards; that he died among those whom power condemned; that his cross still stands in judgement of those who seek power by coercion, violence and division; for he himself has promised, “They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” (Isaiah 11: 9)