What can we say December 4? Advent 2

   Beyond this week's texts, check out my "God Became Small: Preaching Advent" blog with thoughts on how to preach this peculiar season, with loads of illustrative material.

   Both our Old Testament and Gospel texts play on images of shoots and branches, the defiant growth that emerges even out of a seemingly dead stump. John’s vision is more violent, an ax whacking away at what only seems to be sturdy and living.

   Isaiah 11:1-10 interests me with its obsession with virtue – something we aren’t obsessed with at all, even in church life. I constantly return to one of the incandescent moments in Mark Helprin’s marvelous Winter’s Tale: in this thoughtful ramble on wealth, fame and possessions, Hardesty’s father says “Little men spend their day sin pursuit of such things. I know from experience that at the moment of their deaths they see their lives shattered before them like glass. Not so, the man who knows the virtues and lives by them. The world goes this way and that. Ideas are in fashion or not, and those who should prevail are often defeated. But it doesn’t matter. The virtues remain uncorrupted and uncorruptible. They are rewards in themselves, the bulwarks with which we can protect our vision of beauty, and the strengths by which we can stand, unperturbed, in the storm that comes when seeking God.”

    Maya Angelou suggested that “Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.” Notice the word “practice.” Courage, honesty, integrity, wisdom, character: these virtues are to be practiced, like skills. And I’m unsure about his, but Pádraig Ó Tuama reports that in American Sign Language, “the sign for courage implies strength that comes from the body, with both finger-spread hands beginning at the chest and moving out to form the letter ‘s’ for strength.” What is interesting is that the sign for ‘fear’ in British Sign Language uses the same finger-spread hand and touches the chest. It occurs to me that courage comes from the same place as fear, and where there is fear, there is the possibility of courage.”

    Fear and courage. That’s Advent.

    I’ve written before on Matthew 3:1-12 and will reiterate a few thoughts now. Years ago, I heard a great sermon suggesting you never see John the Baptist on any Christmas cards – and yet he’s the pivotal way in to all the Bible’s Christmas stories! A Church member heard me say this and devised for me history’s first (only?) John the Baptist Christmas Card!  It really is a season of “confessing sins” (a superlatively Advent-ish thing to do). Maybe we’d prefer not to be dubbed “You brood of vipers!” – but is this the case? “Bear fruits worthy of repentance” – and “Do not presume…” How much presumption is there in the Christian religion – and especially at Christmas!

   I always wonder if Shel Silverstein’s children’s book might, oddly, help us think about the ax being at the root of the tree. Do you know The Giving Tree (which works well at Christmas with a cut tree in your house, right?)? The tree provides shade and apples to a young boy, until he grows up and drifts away – only to return in need of wood for a house, then wood for a boat to go far away, and then for simply a stump on which to sit: a hard journey indeed – for the boy and for the tree!

   Trees amaze. Richard Powers's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Overstory, is about nine quirky misfits who eventually unite to protect trees - which are enormously important in the environment and the economy! 

    J.R.R. Tolkien loved trees as a child, and as he wrote The Lord of the Rings, especially with his Ents who spoke slowly "because anything worth saying was worth saying slowly, and anything worth hearing was worth hearing slowly." His grief was heightened by the ravaging of forests for the big ironworks and war munition manufacturing in Birmingham - mirrored in Isengard, Saruman's domain and factory of evil.

    Trees matter in Scripture - in today's readings, in Psalm 1 ("like a tree planted by the water"), in Jesus' apprenticeship with is dad as a woodworker, and even in the cross itself (Nikos Kazantzakis, in The Last Temptation of Christ, envisioned Jesus being forced to craft crosses for the Romans!).

   After John’s fuming is done, Luke reports that “with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.” We sure believe in preaching as Good News – but clearly, for John the Baptist and Luke, the “good news” isn’t something sunny, positive, cheerful, or happy. It’s about vipers and axes, giving away one coat if you have two (so isn’t a closet purge in order?). 

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   Check out my book, valuable for preachers and laity during Advent, Why This Jubilee? - reflections on carols, sacred and secular.