Christmas Trees: An Advent Journey | Part One: Hope for a World Cut Down

If you look around at the world right now, optimism feels like a distant memory. At the turn of the millennium, many of us believed a more connected world would be a safer, fairer, more stable place. But this year, the UN Secretary General summed up our global moment with stark clarity:

“We have entered an age of reckless disruption and relentless human suffering.”

That’s a heavy sentence. And it’s tempting to either give in to despair or distract ourselves from the truth.

But Advent refuses to let us do either.

As Fleming Rutledge reminds us, Advent is a season that meets us in the tension between pain and promise.

And it’s this Advent tension that we see in the vision of the prophet Isaiah. In chapter 11, he writes to a people whose world has fallen apart. Exiled and humiliated, their national story looked like nothing more than a stump — cut down, dried out, left behind.

And yet Isaiah dares to say that even the stump belongs to God. And from it, a shoot will grow.

This is the strange hope of Advent: not optimism or escapism, but a God who grows beauty out of ruins.

A Season We’ve Made Too Soft

Historically, Advent wasn’t about cosy firesides or soft-focus nativity scenes. It was about preparing for Christ’s return. Its themes weren’t hope, peace, joy, and love, but death, judgment, heaven, and hell. These themes were not to scare the faithful, but to wake them up.

As Advent has lost much of this apocalyptic edge in many contemporary churches, so too have we lost the capacity to make space for Advent questions in our worship services, questions like:

Where are you, God?

When will the darkness end?

Why does the world feel like this?

The season doesn’t shame those questions — it makes room for them. And when we give those questions room to breathe, we glimpse a hope that might surprise us.

Promise in the Ruins

Isaiah reminds us that God does His best work in the places we assume are finished. Hope isn’t grown away from the crisis but inside it.

It’s from the stump of Jesse, after all, that the shoot will come. Not a fresh start with a new family line, but from the failed House of David.

Promise in the ruins.

This idea—that grace grows in the ruins—is echoed by the theologian and journalist Austen Ivereigh. Speaking at the inaugural Newell-Reynolds lecture at Fitzroy recently, he quoted the poet Hölderlin:

“Where the danger is, there also grows the saving power.”

It’s a line that made me recall another by the contemporary poet Gideon Heugh, who speaks of grace as “the light that our ruin lets in.”

The Hope of Judgment

Judgment isn’t a comfortable word, which is probably one of the reasons it has been usurped by “peace” in today’s Advent wreath. But I wonder if we have too quick to bypass judgement at this time of year.

After all, though it might seem out of tune with the season, the Scriptural presentation of judgement is actually a profoundly hopeful one.

God’s judgment isn’t about condemnation — it’s about putting things right. (Remember those words of Jesus that follow the Bible’s most popular verse: “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:17)

This is the justice Isaiah describes, and it is a justice that will come in the one who is himself the embodiment of justice.

And that’s a good thing.

The Hunger That Awakens Us

So what do we do with this ache? What are we to make of our dissatisfaction at the world?

Well, remembering that Advent began as a time of fasting for the church, perhaps we should see this as a season to pay attention to our hunger.

Because if you feel overwhelmed by the world, if you have a hunger for justice, renewal, or healing, maybe this hunger is not yours. Maybe it is the hunger of God finding a home in you.

Maybe your deep dissatisfaction with the world is evidence of the Spirit beginning a work in you.

At least, that’s what I am trying to remember a quarter of a century into the new millennium which began with so much promise but which has so far disappointed.

I’m challenging myself to listen to my hunger and to remember that my yearning for a better future is a sign that God is not finished with the stump of the world yet.

In fact, (to return to the Bible’s most popular verse) God loves this stump of a world so much that he sent hope in the form of his one and only son, who was born into the ruins, he entered the danger, he carried the judgment.

And he rose into God’s good future. 

In this Advent season, let it be to him that we look for our hope—the once and future King who has already come and who will one day come again to put this world to rights.

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This blog post was adapted from a sermon preached at St. John’s Newtownbreda on Sunday 30 November 2025. Listen or watch now.