(Christ Is Coming)
Isaiah 35
As I sit down to write this first post of the new year I have to admit that I’m wishing I hadn’t signed up for this particular week. There’s no one to blame but me since it is an assignment I gave myself, but I’m still finding the process hard.
You see, today is one of those days that carries a heavy personal significance. We all have them. Days we dread, not because of any terrible new thing we anticipate happening, but because of the story we know is already married to the date. Nothing changes on “the day”. The narrative has already been written. The story is the same now as it was the day before and as it will be the day after, but somehow the marker of the specific date makes the realities more acutely felt.
Today is one of my days. Tomorrow may be one of yours.
It is cold and gross and generally depressing outside. While the weather fits my current mood, it doesn’t seem to align very well with the celebrations of new beginnings and fresh starts that are positioned here annually. You’d think that when Pope Gregory went to all of the trouble of introducing his own calendar that it would have been an ideal time to go ahead and just pick a better month than January to be the first month of the year. Imagine how much more intuitive New Year celebrations would be in April or May, when spring is arriving and plants are beginning to flower. New blossoms, new life, New Year. Sounds great, doesn’t it?
But the opportunity was missed. So we continue to celebrate new beginnings in the midst of the gray death of winter.
I was thinking about that this morning as I spent a few chilly minutes surveying my garden. The recent freeze has wreaked havoc on a couple of the plants I’d managed to nurse through the few cold snaps in our unseasonably warm fall. Immature tomatoes and peppers that had surprisingly popped up in late November will now never reach their full potential. Basil wasted. A mess to clean up.
If you let them, small losses like these can really push you over the edge when life already feels unstable. And yet, this morning as I reviewed the damage I was reminded of a quote from Rachel Held Evans. She wrote in her book, Searching for Sunday, that, “Death is something empires worry about, not something gardeners worry about.” That is an interesting insight.
Gardeners have seen plants and fields lie in ruin time after time and yet they don’t despair because they understand that where life once was, there it can be again. They have a front row seat to the regular process of decay and restoration. A heavenly promise in nature.
We see this cycle reflected often in scripture. Isaiah 34 paints a particularly vivid picture of destruction as the aftermath of life in pursuit of empire and personal enrichment. The inevitable result is that the people and even the ground are left in absolute desolation.
“Their land will be drenched with blood, and the dust will be soaked with fat.” (Isaiah 34:7b)
The entire proclamation is bleak and disturbing. Yet in spite of the seeming finality of death, this consequence is followed immediately by the joy of restoration with the presence of God in Isaiah chapter 35. Land that was barren is restored. It becomes verdant and fertile.
1 The desert and the parched land will be glad;
the wilderness will rejoice and blossom.
Like the crocus, 2 it will burst into bloom;
it will rejoice greatly and shout for joy.
The glory of Lebanon will be given to it,
the splendor of Carmel and Sharon;
they will see the glory of the Lord,
the splendor of our God.
God himself is the gardener. He brings re-creation, and life, and beauty. Streams and flowers and giant cedars replace desert dust and sulfur. He changes the narrative. Rewrites the story.
As incredible as this shift is, God’s nurturing is not limited to the plant-life. The passage tells us that people themselves are re-cultivated. Those who suffer from weakness, age and even fearful hearts are restored. The blind, deaf, and the lame are all healed. Even sighing will be a thing of the past. And I can’t tell you how much I love the idea of sorrow running from the presence of God.
When days seem dark and I find it difficult to feel comfort in elusive visions of heavenly trumpet calls and clouds and perfection — I’m profoundly grateful for a God who also resides in the fields and the dirt and the back yards of everyday life. A God so at home in a garden that even those who loved him best naturally mistook him for the caretaker.
The gardener-God is real. Immanuel is still here with us. With dirt under his fingernails. And He isn’t concerned by the darkness of death because he knows better than any of us the power of resurrection.
Pastor Allison