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.

“Complex Comfort”

Second Sunday of Advent

Isaiah 40:1-11, Mark 1:1-18

I thank God every day that I am still able to fix everything in Patrick’s life through simple comforts – a kiss where it aches, a particularly goofy facial expression, a cookie that magically makes all the hurt go away. These are the simple comforts of childhood and, thankfully, as we age, these simple things – a kiss, a joke, a sweet treat – can still provide comfort. During a rough patch, one of you said to me recently, “I just can’t wait to come to church on Sunday. I know I’ll feel better there.” The simple comfort of community – what a gift. A hand on the shoulder, a hug, a hymn. A listening ear. Thank God for simple comforts.

In our Hebrew scripture text for today, the people of Israel are finally getting some comfort. As I mentioned last week, this part of Isaiah – called Second Isaiah – was written after Israel’s homeland had been destroyed and the people deported into exile in Babylon. It is the lowest period in their life as a people thus far, made doubly harsh since they believe their exile it is due to their own sin. If only they had been faithful to God, this would not have happened. But finally, after decades in exile, they hear, these words: “Comfort, O comfort my people,” says the prophet.. “Speak tenderly to her. Tell her that she has paid her penalty, that she has served her term.” The prophet Isaiah is telling them that their time of exile is almost over, that God will save them, that they will be able to go home.

The author of Mark uses some of Isaiah’s words to speak his own words of comfort almost 600 years later. The person speaking these words is John the Baptist who, for Mark, is like the voice that announces comfort to the exiles in Babylon. “Although first-century Jews were not in exile, they were under foreign occupation. It was if the Babylonian exile had followed them home.”[1] And so John tells these people that a powerful one is coming, the promised Messiah, the one – so people thought – who would rescue them from occupation.

The people of Israel in both Isaiah and Mark’s time are a people defined by a tragic past, enduring a painful present. Isaiah and John both give them a future tense – they give them hope. You will be going home. Your savior is coming. But the comfort being offered is not a simple kind of comfort – like a kiss that makes it all go away. The comfort offered to the people is a more complex comfort.

True, God is coming to save them, says Isaiah. But this God is a complicated God – both a tender God, who feeds her flock like a shepherd, gathering the lambs into her bosom – and a God who “comes with might,” who demands that the “valleys and mountains of human inequality be leveled out.” This is a God “for whom bringing comfort can also involve upsetting those who have grown comfortable with status quo living”[2] – or, as the saying goes, a God who will afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. God’s future is coming – but, depending on who you are, you may not find it, at least initially, very comfortable. This is a complex kind of comfort.

True, your Messiah is coming, John says. But some paths need to be made straight in the meantime. John is not talking about political or military preparations here – straightening highways so that the liberator’s army can march through – cleaning up corrupt political establishments – in other words, preparations the people might be expecting to hear about, given the imminent arrival of a liberator. No, the paths needing to be straightened are much more personal. You need to take stock of your lives, John says – where are you living in wrong relationship? What needs to be healed? What needs to be confessed? What needs to be forgiven? This is a complex kind of comfort.

The people have been given a future tense. A hopeless people have been given hope. But they have a lot of preparation to do in the present, during this threshold time between what has been and what will be. And it is not easy, simple work. It demands the rearranging of priorities and relationships as they prepare for the inbreaking of God into their lives and their world.

And so this is the complex comfort of Advent, this threshold time between what has been and what will be. We are expecting the birth of Immanuel, God with us. We have a lot of work to do to prepare.

When I was pregnant with Patrick, after 2 ½ years of trying to conceive, my overwhelming emotion was ambivalence. I’ve talked to enough of us who have been pregnant to know that I am not alone in this. In fact, during my pregnancy I read a book by a midwife who said that the number one emotion pregnant women report experiencing is not joy but ambivalence. It was a great relief to me. I’d have fleeting moments of joy, but for the most part I was anxious and just sort of… confused. This thing that was happening in me and to me was bigger than anything I’d ever experienced before. It’s like my mind couldn’t quite make sense of it: Who am I? Who am I becoming? How am I changing? And in the midst of all these ponderings, I was busy preparing – doing the actual physical work of making space for a new person in our life.

Pregnancy is one of the classic “liminal” or threshold states, so no wonder it is the overriding metaphor for Advent. A liminal state – that place where we are in transition, where we are in between – is characterized by ambiguity, openness, indeterminacy. One’s sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation. Liminality is a period of transition where normal limits to thought, self-understanding and behavior are relaxed. It is a sometimes scary, sometimes hopeful, often unpredictable. It offers a mix of possibility and peril.[3] We needn’t have been expecting a child to have had liminal moments – being a teenager, being in between jobs, being on pilgrimage, moving to a new place, moving into a new phase of our lives – these are all liminal or threshold states. As a country, we are in a liminal state right now – not just between presidents but between two different visions for who we are as a people.

And as a people on a journey of spirit, we are in that place right now. Our Advent work invites us to open ourselves to the complex comfort of preparing for the promised one: What has to be made low and lifted up in you? What needs comfort, what needs challenge? What needs to be reprioritized, healed, forgiven? What future tense might God be drawing you toward? What way is God making within and through you? What way are you making for God?

[1] From Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary.
[2] From the Advent worship resources found in Leader magazine, Fall 2008.
[3] Some of the description on liminality was found on wikipedia.org.