Advent 2A_2019

Advent 2A_2019 December 8, 2019 In a sermon I gave several months ago, I shared a story with y’all about a plant someone had given me—a bromeliad, to be exact. Do y’all remember this? It came in this little glass container, and I watered it sporadically until one day, I picked it up to water it, and to my horror, the whole top of the plant came off in my hand! (I am accustomed to killing plants, although since coming here, I’ve managed to “turn over a new leaf,.” But this was a new low, even for me!) After church and my show and tell during the sermon with my poor bromeliad, our resident plant doctor, Selina, offered to take it to her plant hospital and to try to coax it back to life. Several weeks later, she broke the news to me gently—the bromeliad was beyond any saving. Her diagnosis was that the container it had been planted in had actually killed it. It was too small, too contained, without enough air or drainage. She kindly brought me a new plant that requires very little attention or water to keep it alive and some specific handwritten instructions to assist me. Time passed, and one day Selina found me after church and said, “You’re not going to believe this! I dumped the dirt out of your old bromeliad into my yard, and now, there’s a bromeliad growing there! I’ve put it in a pot and will bring it to you next week!” The reading from Isaiah for today begins with the words, “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,/ and a branch shall grow out of his roots.” The passage goes on to talk about the peaceable kingdom that will be ushered in by God through this new kind of king. It’s all about Israel’s future hope: what it means to hope even when the future seems uncertain. And it is all about the connections between justice and peace. Because at this point in Israel’s history, things are really bad. The once united kingdom has been divided into two; the king of the southern kingdom has sold out the northern kingdom to their mutual enemies, and the northern kingdom has fallen. The people in the southern kingdom, including Isaiah, know that it’s only a matter of time until they, too, are conqured. So they long for a new kind of king who will hold justice and peace together, a king who will be God’s agent in ushering in the peaceable kingdom where enemies, predators and prey will all lie down together and be at peace. For Isaiah, he is looking at something that seems dead or dying, and he is hoping that new life will yet spring up from it. This is not an unfounded hope. It is, in fact, the hope of our calling as Christians. It can be true for society, and it can be true for own lives as well. As another writer puts it, “According to Isaiah, the transformation from a culture of fear to a world at peace begins with a stump. Out of something that appears finished, lifeless, left-behind, comes the sign of new life—a green sprig. This is how hope gets its start-it emerges as a tiny tendril in an unexpected place.”i Much like my now resurrected bromeliad-which went from being a pile of dirt in Selina’s yard to a newly re-potted plant in my office (where plants go to die!). I became curious about this bromeliad resurrection, so I’ve been doing some research. Apparently, there is a saying in the northern counties of England where something is described as being “wick.” This basically means that it is alive or lively. In the classic book The Secret Garden, Dickon teaches Mary how to determine if something is “wick”—meaning that it looks to be dead on the outside, but then when you prune it or cut deeper, you can see that there is still life and growth there. (There’s even a whole song about this in the musical version of The Secret Garden). “Bear fruit worthy of repentance” John the Baptist tells his listeners. What if, for us, that involved reflection during Advent about what containers our lives may have outgrown that may be slowly killing us? What if it meant a closer examination of the stumps of our lives—those places that appear to be dead—to look for possible signs of new life there? What if it meant examining our old, dead dreams and seeing them in the light of God’s hope, looking for ways that God may be resurrecting them, recreating them, to help us become agents of God’s peace and justice in this world that desperately needs signs of hope and new life? What if it means looking for signs that something is wick when it appears to be lifeless, dead, useless? Your invitation this week is to look for shoots that grow out of stumps, things that you once thought were dead which may exhibit signs of life. iFrom Feasting of the Word for the Isaiah passage for this week. I don’t have the book with me to cite author and page. Sorry!