Richard Davenport
December 10, 2023 – Second Sunday in Advent
Isaiah 40:1-11
“All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades when the breath of the LORD blows on it; surely the people are grass.” A bleak picture, but one we’re familiar with. Here we are, with winter less than two weeks away. The trees are empty. The grass is brown. The flowers are gone. What little natural beauty is still out there is restricted to the few colorful birds that hang out through the winter. Even the few wild animals you might see, such as deer or rabbits, are all brown, brown, brown. It’s almost as if winter just sucks the color out of everything.
Those of you who are really into gardening, there’s a certain amount of disappointment just built into it. You know all of the hard work you put in to plant and tend your gardens, the weeding, the fertilizing, the careful cultivation, will all be stripped away a few months later. The grass, the flowers, even trees, don’t last. We have a little Japanese maple tree along our front walk. It’s the perfect size for the space. It’s a pleasant dome shape and it just works well. Except it’s dead now. It died in a hard freeze toward the end of last winter. We need to dig it out and get rid of it, but, as usual, there’s always more to do.
It's the same for me each year. I love when the daffodils start blooming. They’re just so bright and cheery, like a bunch of little sunbeams there to perk up your day. As one of the very first flowers to bloom, you know the weather is turning when they start popping up. There are a bunch along the route as we drive Paul to school, some are placed intentionally, some have just popped up randomly near the road in peoples’ yards. They certainly brighten my day when they start showing up, somewhere in early-mid March. But, it seems like they last for about two weeks and then they’re done. Sure, other flowers bloom to take their place, but they aren’t daffodils.
What we see in miniature in the lives of flowers and trees, we see in every other living thing as well. Some move from beginning to end faster or slower, but they all make it there. In Greek mythology, Oedipus is given a riddle by the Egyptian sphinx. He is asked, “What goes on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?” The answer is, a man. As we begin learning to move around, we crawl around on all fours. As we get a little older we learn to walk, run, and jump on two feet. As we get older still, we need a little help. Using a cane helps us stay on the go. The author of the story, “Oedipus Rex,” was a Greek man named Sophocles, who lived in the 4th-5th century BC, so around 2500 years ago. 2500 years of scientific advancements and medical breakthroughs and we’re still crawling, then walking, then we need a cane.
The words of the self-styled Preacher, likely King Solomon himself, renowned for his God-given wisdom, brings the uncomfortable words of Ecclesiastes, “For everything there is a season, a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted…” The inevitable march, from birth, to adulthood, to old age, and then death.
The way life goes is the way everything within life goes as well. If you enjoy an active hobby, there was a time when you were still brand new to it, still learning. There’s the middle time, when you really get to enjoy it, then later in life, when that kind of activity becomes difficult, if not impossible. Even something like reading follows the same trajectory. You spend all of that time in your younger years learning how to read. It really is pretty difficult, learning how to interpret letters and their sounds, how they work together, what it means for a word to be in this part of the sentence, rather than in that part. How words connect to each other. All of this time we spend learning to read so that we can draw meaning out of written texts. Among the different criteria you might use to evaluate how well someone will do throughout school and later in life, reading is always right up at the top. But, you learn how to read, maybe you even spend a goodly portion of your life reading, but eventually the eyes give way. Cataracts, macular degeneration, glaucoma, whatever it is, you just can’t do what you used to.
It's probably just as well that few of us spend a lot of time really considering the inevitable decline and death that awaits us all. There are some who do and it’s no surprise they’re paralyzed by the futility of it all. You can’t escape it. That’s how it is. There are the folks caught up in a mid-life crisis who look back at everything they’ve done and see it as meaningless. They done nothing, accomplished nothing of value, at least in their own estimation. They run around looking for something to liven things up, to convince themselves that maybe there’s still time to do something with their lives.
Even though things like euthanasia and suicide sound repugnant, they make a certain amount of sense. Why deal with that decline at all? Maybe for some it’s better to enjoy life and get out before you start losing.
The pointlessness of it all, the futility of it all, everything you do eventually falls apart and comes to nothing. What’s the point? Why bother? As you spend time considering the futility of all of it, at some point God will probably enter the picture. After all, he made you. He made all of this. If it’s all destined to crumble and fall apart, then he must bear at least part of the blame for it. He made the seasons such that the flowers and trees die. He made my body subject to old age and decay. He made relationships that would naturally fade, friends and family that simply drift apart. It all falls apart. It all crumbles and fades to nothing.
You get mad at God for allowing it to happen, for designing it to happen and then putting us into this life where it’s all going to inevitably comes to nothing. You get mad at God for putting you in this position. Why make you go through all of this? It’s just rotten that this is all you have to look forward to in life and this has been the way of things for thousands of years. Everyone who has lived has gone through the same troubles. We’re used to it, but that’s only because we can’t do anything about it.
We blame God for all of these kinds of problems, but, as usual, we get it all backward. It isn’t that God designed it this way. Rather, it’s that, without God’s love and care for the world, things would be much, much worse. God is the one who allows the flowers to bloom to begin with. He’s the one that makes it so that babies can grow up at all. He’s the one that gives us the ability to learn to read or to pick up different hobbies, to crawl, to walk, to run, to learn and grow, to spend time out in the world, whether in winter or in summer. Without him, there would be nothing and we’re the ones who keep trying to push creation there, not him.
I’ve mentioned it before, but it’s a constant reminder for me about my own place in the world. When Luther considered his calling to be a pastor and theologian in the church, he recognized the fragility of it all. Not that God was weak or that God has set him up to fail or that it was destined for ruin. No, it was that, as a sinner, Luther was in a constant battle with himself. He was trying to destroy it. He was trying to bring it all crashing down. He wanted to break everything, because that’s all sin ever does.
In light of that, he wrote a prayer, which hangs on the wall in my office. It’s known as his “Sacristy Prayer.” O Lord God, Thou hast made me a pastor and teacher in the Church. Thou seest how unfit I am to administer rightly this great responsible office and had I been without Thy aid and counsel I would surely have ruined it all long ago. Therefore do I invoke Thee. How gladly do I desire to yield and consecrate my heart and mouth to this ministry! I desire to teach the congregation. I, too, desire ever to learn and keep Thy Word my constant companion and to meditate thereupon earnestly. Use me as Thy instrument in Thy service. Only do not Thou forsake me, for if I am left to myself, I will certainly bring it all to destruction. Amen.”
It isn’t God that brings it all down. It’s me. God doesn’t deserve all of the grief we heap on him. We blame him because we don’t like the idea that the fault is really ours. God’s love is such that he doesn’t leave us here to wither and decay. He doesn’t leave us here to collapse under the weight of our own sins and bring everything to destruction.
This world is destined to decay and fall apart. With sin there’s no other possible outcome. Sin destroys. It ruins. It kills. Everything in this world will die because of sin. It’s only because of God that anything else is even possible. You can’t see what God offers here in the world, because everything in the world is tainted by sin and subject to death. Without God, you wouldn’t even know such a thing were possible. You wouldn’t know there’s a whole other world where such things don’t happen at all, it just isn’t here.
Paul and I have been slowly working our way through Frank Baum’s Oz books. You’re probably familiar with the Wizard of Oz, but that’s just the first of 13 or so involving the land or characters of Oz. Some have Dorothy, some have the wizard, but all tell the story of the magical land of Oz in some way.
It’s that magical character that the producers of the 1939 movie attempted to capture. If you remember the story, Dorothy is there working on her farm in Kansas when a cyclone tears across the plain. Dorothy and her dog, Toto, hide out in the farmhouse, which is picked up by the cyclone and whisked away. Of course, if you remember the movie, then you also remember that magical moment. Everything up until now has been in black and white, but when Dorothy steps out into the land of Oz, everything is in bright color. She looks around in astonishment. The producers worked hard to maximize that impact, spending days finding the perfect color for the yellow brick road and opting to make the witch’s slippers ruby, instead of silver like they are in the book.
That transition, from the drab, colorless world of decay and death, to the bright and brilliant world of life and vibrance. We are the ones who are stuck in this world, not because God threw us in here, but because this is the world, the life, that we made it. It’s time to confess our sins, our finger pointing and attitude of blaming others for our own misdeeds. Instead, we look to God for deliverance.
When we see Jesus out and about during his ministry in the Gospels, we see him walking through a world plagued with sin and death, a world plagued with misery, sorrow, and decay, a world where everything is falling apart. It’s a drab, colorless world where everything eventually ends in darkness. Jesus comes spreading the kingdom of God. It’s as if color washes over the world as he walks about and interacts with the people. Suddenly something existed that wasn’t there before. It’s a world they couldn’t see and knew nothing about until Jesus shows them first hand. He brings light and life into a world of darkness and death.
At the world’s bleakest and most grim, where darkness covers the sun and Jesus hangs on the cross, the vibrance of his life snuffed out. He goes the way of all living things. He’s buried in the tomb. Winter has come for him as it does for us all. But then, the bright dawn of Sunday morning. Spring has come, and with it color and life. A spring and summer that will never succumb to the darkness of winter.
On this day in Advent, we consider the work of John the Baptist, the one who announces the arrival of the promised messiah. He proclaims, “In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.” John announces the coming of the cyclone, as it were, the one who restores what is broken, rights what is wrong, the one who brings light to what is dark.
The grace of Christ brings the kingdom into the world. The love of God brings color and life. God restores and brings a new world. We look to God, not to make the world better, though he does do that. We look to him to make the world new. He comes here to forgive us and purge the darkness, darkness from ourselves and from the world. He comes to usher in a new world.
This Advent, we reflect again on what the season is all about. We are the ones lost in the darkness of our sins. A tiny baby is born in Bethlehem, born into this world of darkness, not to be lost in that same darkness, but to triumph over it. He grows up into adulthood, he is lifted on the cross, he closes his eyes, and his life fades to black. But then he opens the tomb and it’s as if the ink bottles are tipped over, color pouring out everywhere. New life is here, life beyond death, life without decay. Christ is born to bring that life to you so that you may be carried out of this world and look to the eternal life of joy to come.