Day Eleven
Second Sunday in Advent
Pastor Keith Fry
Christ the Lord Lutheran Church
Elgin, Illinois
Isaiah 11.1-10
Psalm 72.1-7, 18-19
Romans 15.4-13
Matthew 3.1-12
Today, my congregation is celebrating our 50th anniversary. We’re going all out: guest organist, trumpet soloist, the bishop coming to preach and preside, big cake. It’s going to be a festival of gratitude, of remembrance, and of looking toward God’s future. As I sat with the Anniversary Committee and went through boxes of archive materials, I found the bulletin for the charter service 50 years ago, and read a note extending sympathies to the Kennedy family. In total innocence, I asked, “Who were the Kennedys?”—thinking it was a family in the congregation. One of the women looked at me over her glasses in utter disbelief. It dawned on me as I blushed deeply that the family in question was that of Pres. John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated just two weeks before the congregation was chartered. (And yes, I was alive then, so it’s not as though I am too young to remember!)
I tried to imagine what it must have felt like for those folks in my congregation on that charter day. Here they were, mourning a terrible, earth-shattering loss, one that had unsettled certainties, one that had caused the future to be called into question. Yet at the same time, they were launching something new and exciting, celebrating what God was already doing among them and anticipating in great faith what God would be doing next. Deep sadness and mourning mixed with excitement and hope. What an odd, mixed-up, paradoxical thing!
Then I read these words from Isaiah about green shoots growing out of a chopped-off stump, and realized that this is always God’s way. The people Isaiah is speaking to have been hauled off into exile, their homeland laid waste, their temple destroyed… They’re grieving an enormous loss, and everything about their existence seems to have been chopped off. Yet the prophet speaks of this tender, green shoot that is going to appear, this great and powerful and just and gracious king who will usher in an era of peace—and not just ordinary peace, but peace in which the whole order of things will be turned upside down and restored to wholeness.
Many of us have experienced disorienting, hope-stealing loss. We know what it feels like: It feels just like a part of us has been cut off, like we've been left as a withered stump. The loss can come in many ways: the death of a spouse or child, loss of a job, the devastating diagnosis… In our congregations, it can be the loss of treasured members, or buildings and programs that can’t be sustained in the way they once were because of dwindling resources, or changes to beloved traditions. But whatever has been “cut off” from us, God speaks Good News to us: Life will spring up anew out of cut-off, dried-up stumps…and that life can give us new hope for a glorious future. That is the way of the Cross. Christ meets us in the cut-off places of devastation and hopelessness, and from that wood of despair, suddenly new life and resurrection can spring forth. That is the hope of Advent.
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God of new life, come to me in my cut-off places, and cause the green shoot of your hope to spring up in me. Remind me that you are the God of resurrection and new life, and that you hold the future. Through Christ our Lord, Amen.
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