Third Sunday of Advent
Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11, Psalm 126
A minister in Santa Fe tells the story of a drought she lived through in New Mexico. For ten long years, there was almost no rain, in a land of little rain to begin with. Centuries-old pinyon trees that covered the hills throughout northern New Mexico became susceptible to bark beetles and died by the thousands. A once green landscape turned grey with dead trees. For the people who lived there, she said, it felt like a death in the family.
Then one summer, it rained. Within days – days! – fields of wildflowers sprang up. Yellow cow-pen daises, purple asters. People couldn’t believe their eyes. Every patch of ground was covered with wildflowers that had not been seen in a century. It turns out that rain alone was not the reason for this riot of color. The needles of the dead pinyon trees provided mulch and nutrients needed by the seeds that had lain dormant for decades. The trees would never be restored, but their death gave birth to new beauty as far as the eye could see. [1]
We have been journeying with the ancient people of Israel during Advent, and today we are entering the devastated, grey desert of their former homeland with them. After decades of exile in Babylon, they have started to return home – but to a home that had been destroyed, sometimes down to the last block, by the Babylonian army. There is joy here, deep joy. But there is also an awful lot of devastation to repair, a lot of homes and cities to restore. Think of an Iraqi refugee coming home to a house reduced to rubble. How quickly could the joy turn to weariness over the sheer amount of work to be done, over how much had been lost?
And so we hear in the psalm, which was written after their return home from exile, both of these notes. That high note of joy: mouths filled with laughter, tongues loosed in shouts of joy. Returning refugees so deliriously happy they wonder if they are dreaming.
And yet, only one verse later, we hear the lower note of pain, of need: “Restore our fortunes, O God, like the watercourses in the Negeb. May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy.” It’s interesting to note the magnitude of the people’s request in this psalm. The Negeb is a desert in that region whose very name means “dry,” “parched.” It is one of the hottest, most desolate deserts around. The people’s plea is for not just springs, but watercourses – rivers of water – to flow again in this dessicated land. And they plea not just for gladness or mirth but for the Hebrew word rinnah – which means a loud cry, a proclamation of joy, a shout of victory. Three times in this short psalm, the writer refers to this rinnah – translated here as shouts of joy.[2] Not smiles, not quiet contentment. The people are asking for coursing rivers of joy -- for fields of long-dormant wildflowers -- in the midst of their desert.
In the passage from Isaiah, then, we hear God’s promise to these joyful, devastated people via the prophet: (read Isaiah)
Yes, the prophet promises, the seeds of their tears will bear a harvest of joy. In fact, the prophet piles on the metaphors in his attempt to communicate just how lavish this restoration will be: the community will no longer wear sackcloth and ashes but the festive dress reserved for a bride and bridegroom – rich robes, garlands of flowers, necklaces of jewels. The community will be like “oaks of righteousness” – long-lived, large trees with spreading branches. Their homeland will no longer be a grey desolate desert but a garden spot.
But there’s one more metaphor, one more promise. The restored people who were once themselves the oppressed, the brokenhearted, the captive will become priests, will become ministers to the oppressed, the brokenhearted, the captive. The renewed, restored people will serve as intermediaries between God and all who need God’s restoration. God will use them, use their pain, use their exile, use their oppression to comfort and free others. More than simply being restored, they will become the restorers.
When one of you tells me of a pain so deep it could devastate your life, I take note. I start watching, and waiting. What is going to grow from this devastated place? If the pain can be endured, experienced and finally embraced, something always starts growing. The tears of grief or bitterness or shame or loneliness water the seeds, and eventually flowers, long dormant, begin to bloom. The writers of the Psalms believed that weeping or keening while you planted the crops made them more productive. And I believe the same thing is true in our spiritual life. The tears of devastation can bring forth a vigorous, productive flowering… the fruit of compassion, the fruit of wisdom. They can bring forth the fruit of a ministry, sometimes even a calling.
Think of the person who has endured the death of a loved one who can then comfort those who similarly mourn. The abused child who becomes a counselor binding up the wounds of the next generation of abused children. The person scarred by the church who goes on to minister with a special sensitivity to those whose hearts the church continues to break. The gay man who spends the first part of his life in a fearful closet and spends the second part as a fearless liberator, freeing those captive to ignorance and shame, changing a city called San Francisco and the world. More than simply being restored, they become the restorers. Their former brokenness becomes the mulch that brings forth the new growth, the new creation.
The pinyon pines are dead. The houses are rubble. The promise is not that things will be restored to their original state. The promise given to Israel, and to us, is that from death, from devastation – even the devastations of many generations – a new creation can come. And the promise given to Israel, and to us, is that God has called us to be the community of priests, the community of ministers, that raises up the former devastations. Using our tears as long-needed rain, God causes a desert to bloom.
Amen.
[1] From Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary.
[2] Ibid.