Is “hope” the right word?

Read: Ezekiel 37:1-11

 

Second Sunday of Advent - December 8, 2013

The Rev. Kenneth R. Elkin

 

Some years back, I was traveling in northeastern Spain with our daughter Katy toward the seaside village of Cadaques.

We were on a road that made Jack's Hollow Road and others over our mountains look like superhighways.

As the road twisted and climbed over the mountain, in the valley below there was an abandoned estate.

Only the stone walls of the house and other buildings remained standing.

On all of the slopes surrounding the derelict buildings were dry stone retaining walls which made up little terraces that extended all the way up the slopes.

It must have taken generations to construct those terraces, and yet there they were, dry and abandoned, and without the olive trees or other crops that must have once stood there.

It was a scene of sad desolation in spite of the evidence of all of the human work that had been expended there over the centuries.

 

It reminded me of a portion of the vision of Ezekiel, where he sees a valley full of the bones of the hope of Israel: “...and behold, they were very dry,” he reports.

The heavenly voice questions Ezekiel: “Can these bones live?”

What could the prophet answer?

The bones are dead, desiccated, decomposed, dried out.

Is there any other possibility than what appears to be utter death?

All that the prophet can manage is a very quiet “Lord, you know.”

The prophet sees only the prison of death; any other possibility is only within the imagination of God. “Lord, you know.”

 

The problem in Advent is that we get  stuck right at this point.

So much of the time, we, too, see only the marks of death and little else.

Are we able to do anything which matters ...or alternatively,

is everything that we do already determined?

What a depressing situation, either way!

It would mean that we are in a prison.

This prison may be as high and as wide as the world itself, but still a closed system,

full of probability without possibility,

where no good surprises lurk,

where one day is as bad as the next.

 

All of us have the occasional “gray” or “blue” day when tedium triumphs temporarily;

 but what I am referring to now is to an overall sense that nothing new is possible.

When we are ready to give up, then we need to turn to the prophet Isaiah and hear his word as we do this morning:

There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.

“Come on, get realistic,” someone will chide.

But remember that what some call “natural laws” are only man's observations about what has happened in the past.

We may use them as predictions of the future, but not as guarantees.

God may yet do a new thing.

If we do not allow for that possibility, then we have declared something else to be god in place of the Lord God Almighty.

Our powers of observation and imagination are at a dead-end; something new can only be by God's  action to surprise us.

That is the thing for which we pray in Advent.

Come Lord Jesus, quickly come.

Come and bring new beginnings where we see only dead ends.

Come and make life to spring out of death.

Come Lord Jesus, we need you so much.

 

It is easy to give up when the weather turns grey and the mood becomes cynical.

– World War I was the “war to end all wars”, but it wasn't, 95 years and 1 month ago.

– The attempts to “make the world safe for democracy” are assaulted and twisted in drearily predictable ways.

– Peace, by which we mean everything in its proper order and relationship, is never going to be achieved by even our most determined efforts.

– Isaiah's vision of a new shoot from a dead stump, and lions and lambs lying down together, is utterly impossible for us to make happen, no matter how clever we are.

Nature no longer red of tooth and claw must be nature remade!

The only way we can live now is by the sacrifice of one kind of life, plant or animal, for the sake of another.

Life cannot thrive chewing on sand!

Jesus coming as a real person, living and dying as sacrifice for us and being raised to a new kind of life – that is the only hope for a change in today's grim reality.

 

Some are agitated about world events.

Others are burdened with individual problems:

– minds that are clouded

– bodies that are failing

– spirits that are dismayed.

Some have lost loved ones,

some have lost health,

some have lost hope.

Come, Lord Jesus, quickly come.

We need a new heaven and a new earth, remade from the one we have known, one which fully embodies what God has always intended our life to be.

Come, Lord Jesus, make it so.

 

In the Star Trek series, when Captain Picard said “make it so,” it was with the confidence that his engineers could solve whatever technical problem they faced.

With how much more confidence can we pray to the Lord God?

– dry bones can live

– new shoots can spring from a dead stump

– fresh hope can rise in place of despair

– community can be formed in place of loneliness

 

The hills are bare at Bethlehem,

No future for the world they show.

Yet here new life begins to grow,

From earth's old dust, a greenwood stem.   [LBW#61.1]

Come, Lord Jesus, quickly come.  Amen.