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This is a
sensuous season, a season of smells, sights, sounds…
...chestnuts roasting on an
open fire,
Jack Frost nipping at your nose;
yuletide carols being sung by a choir
and folks dressed up like Eskimos...
Jingling bells and sleigh bells
and silver bells, a mother’s deep prayer and a baby’s low
cry. It’s a season for the senses. Isaiah the prophet turns
poet when he tries to picture the promise of God’s
salvation, the hope of God’s redemption, the joy of God’s
good news, and new life in our midst.
But
first, Isaiah describes God’s judgment of evil.
The poet prophet exhausts his
wildest imagination to picture the desolation with
smoldering ruins, haunted by wild beasts, the stifling
stench of decay and the heavy silence of death. It’s
something right out of Dungeons and Dragons or The
Lord of the Rings:
And the streams of Edom shall be
turned to pitch,
and her soil to brimstone.
Hawks and porcupines shall
possess it;
owls and ravens shall dwell in it.
They shall call this kingdom “No
Kingdom At All.”
Thorns, nettles and thistles
shall grow there;
It will be haunted by jackals
and an abode for ostriches.
Wild beasts shall meet with
hyenas;
And there shall the night hag
alight and the vultures shall gather. (Isaiah 34:9-14)
I’ll bet you didn’t know there
were porcupines and hyenas and night hags in the Bible, did
you? The King James Version says “the screech owl,” but I
kind of like the dark mystery and graphic impact of the
“night hag.” This is powerful stuff. Isaiah uses graphic
imagery to capture the feeling of darkness and destruction,
the recompense for evil and sin.
The Welsh poet R. S. Thomas died
in 2000. He was a parish priest as well as a poet. He was
not well known to me, but Peggy Rosenthal called him the
“finest Christian poet of our day.” When he first went to
Wales, the harsh realities of the stark countryside made him
wonder where God was in this godforsaken place and what his
role as priest could possibly be. He turned to poetry to
express it, and wrote out of what he called “the muck and
blood and hardness, the rain and the spittle and phlegm of
Welsh farm life.” (Peggy Rosenthal, “Poet of the Hidden
God,” Christian Century, Jan. 17, 2001, p. 4)
Isaiah does the
same thing. He writes out of the harsh, hard realities of
his world, desolation and destruction—perhaps natural
disasters, like hurricanes and earthquakes, the seemingly
endless pursuit of war and lingering torture and terror, the
omnipresence of evil and the burden of sin.
Can
you sense it?
Taste the dusty dryness
of the soul…like an arid desert?
Feel the harsh wind and bitter sting of the unfairness
of life?
Hear the screech owls of fear and the night hag of anger
and resentment?
Smell the sickening stench of death?
If
you can, then you are ready for chapter 35.
The wilderness and the dry land
shall be glad;
The desert shall rejoice and
blossom like the crocus.
It shall blossom abundantly, and
rejoice with joy and singing.
Then the eyes of the blind shall
be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped;
Then shall the lame man leap as
a hart and the tongue of the dumb sing for joy.
For waters shall break forth in
the wilderness,
and streams in the desert;
The burning sand shall become a
pool,
and the thirsty ground springs of water.
And the ransomed of the Lord
shall return,
and come to Zion with singing;
Everlasting joy shall be upon
their heads;
they shall obtain joy and gladness,
and sorrow and sighing
shall flee away. (Isaiah 35)
Can
you feel it? Can you hear it? Can you smell it and taste it?
In the place of barrenness and
brokenness, there is beauty and new life. In the valley of
sorrow, there is joyous singing. In the desert, streams of
living water.
We live in a prose world….a
world of hard, cold facts, where we count the numbers and
the numbers count. We read the bottom line and look for
statistics. Sometimes poetry and fantasy are the only things
that can cut through the harsh realities and the hard prose
of our day to go to the soul and touch the heart. Perhaps
that is why C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien have become so
popular. Maybe that’s why Christmas always touches us, every
year, in new ways. We need fantasy, poetry to be able to
imagine a new world and a new creation.
So Isaiah turns to poetry. He
sings a song of joy which overcomes and outlasts the worst
that life can bring. Isaiah offers a hope, even in the
wastelands and desert times of our lives. As in our baptism
ritual, Isaiah acknowledges the darkness, the presence of
“evil, oppression and injustice in every form in which it
presents themselves,” and he says that even in the darkest
of times, there is still the hope of joy bringing new life
and hope.
It’s the word of Advent,
echoing across the ages to bring good news of great
joy…great joy… great joy in the coming of the Savior.
Several years ago while I was
working on the staff of the Board of Higher Education, we
visited the country of Angola. We went to provide training
and support for pastors in that war-torn land. This is the
nation with more land mines than any other place on earth.
Fields and farms, rivers and streams, paths and dirt
roads—all intentionally mined to disable basic human life,
blocking access to food, water, travel, communication. In
the downtown of the capital, Luanda, it seemed every
building was pock-marked from gunfire. Main streets were not
just filled with Michigan-sized potholes and leftover bomb
craters; it seemed the walking wounded were on every corner.
It was as if Isaiah’s poetic imagery had become a painful
reality of sights and sounds and smells in this crowded,
war-ravaged city.
The pastors gathered that day,
many of them walking for more than a day to get there. None
of them owned cars and there were few buses. The best of
them were lucky to have bicycles. Still, they came in their
“Sunday best”…thread-bare suits and over-worn shirts and
ties, but cleaned and starched as best they could by hand.
When we gathered you could feel
the weight of their ministry on their shoulders, see the
devastation in their faces, sense the heaviness in their
hearts for the needs of their people. They had seen their
churches destroyed, their people scattered, family members
and church members lost and killed. They had seen it all and
they carried the pain with them as we gathered.
But then we began to sing. Like
all the Methodists of Africa, they love to sing. We sang
“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch
like me” and it seemed the weight began to lift. When
we sang “through many dangers, toils and snares I have
already come,” I knew they knew what they were
singing about and their voices began to lift. When we got to
“O for a thousand tongues to sing, my great Redeemer’s
praise,” the voices became stronger, their backs
straightened with courage and the pock-marked, war-scarred
church building began to shake with the force of their
singing. And in the despair of a parched and brutal land,
there was joy—radiant, deep, joy.
Joy…like streams in the desert.
Joy…like springs of living water breaking forth in an arid
land.
Joy…like blossoms blooming out of the desert waste.
Oh, I know we can analyze
Isaiah’s poetry scientifically. We can explain away the
phenomenon of blossoms in the desert. We know that just
beneath the desert floor there are often flowing rivers of
water, aquifers of life, and every once in awhile one of
those streams will break through in an artesian well,
overflowing with new life. We can explain it scientifically,
but for the Methodists of Angola, and for you and me, there
is a stream, an underground aquifer of living water, welling
up to everlasting life; a river of joy blossoming forth like
crocuses breaking through the crust of ice in the early
spring. Underneath the waste places of our lives and the
dead places of our souls:
-
Deeper,
stronger than the crusty floor of our hardened souls,
runs the river of God’s new life.
-
Deeper,
stronger than the darkness of our war-torn world, flows
the spring of living water.
-
Deeper,
stronger than the arid emptiness of the parched,
spiritual wilderness of our God-hungry souls, refreshing
waters break forth and the dry dust of our spirits
begins to blossom with joy and gladness.
Great
joy: deeper and stronger than the desert itself,
springing up to eternal life.
Can we allow the beauty of
Isaiah’s poetry to touch the depth of our souls this
Christmas with the promise of new life and abundant joy?
Great joy, like the current of a great underground aquifer,
bursting out in living streams in the desert.
We’re not talking about mere
happiness here. Happiness is often a response to the good
things in our lives. Happiness is often based on
happenstance. Happiness is dependent on having, on
happenings, on experiencing the blessings of the world and
all the good things life has to offer. We Americans have
made the “pursuit of happiness” our life’s mission, but
often we miss the real joy.
There’s a big difference between
happiness and joy. Joy is something much deeper and
stronger, flowing at the very source of our lives, bringing
hope and confidence regardless of what life might do to us.
The opening this week of C. S.
Lewis’s wonderful Chronicles of Narnia introduces him
and his writings to a whole new generation, and I am
delighted. You really must read the books, not just
see the movie, and then follow up with The Screwtape
Letters and The Great Divorce. When Lewis—Oxford
trained academician, critical scholar, hardnosed
thinker—told the story of his conversion to Christianity, he
described his intellectual struggles and his theological
arguments. But then, when he finally came to sharing his
encounter with Christ, he titled the book, Surprised by
Joy.
Surprised by joy…like an unexpected stream bubbling up in
the desert.
When contemporary theologian
Frederick Buechner speaks of his encounter with God, he
describes a day when he was listening to the great preacher
George Buttrick, and he writes:
…and then there came one
particular sermon, with one particular phrase in it. He said
Jesus is King because he is crowned in the hearts of people
amid “confession, and tears and great laughter.” It was the
phrase ‘great laugher’ that did it…did whatever it was that
it must have been doing all the years of my journey up till
then. (F. Buechner, Sacred Journey, p.108)
Great
laughter, like blossoms of flowers in the arid places.
When Thomas
Merton, Roman Catholic monk, spoke of the joy of Christmas,
he used capital letters and bold print to make the three
words “the great joy” stand out when he wrote:
When the
joy, which is “The Great Joy,” explodes
silently upon the world, there is no longer any room for
sadness. No circumstance, however trivial, is to be left out
of The Great Joy. (A Thomas Merton Reader, page 360)
The good news of Advent is
as simple and as dramatic as this: Jesus comes to bring us
great joy.
Jesus comes into our desert
places to bring rejoicing and gladness.
-
Jesus
comes like an unexpected artesian well, bubbling up with
hope like pools in a dry land.
-
Jesus
comes as the crocus of spring, blossoming through the
crust of winter snow.
-
Jesus
comes, in the words of Isaiah:
To strengthen the weak hand and
make firm feeble knees,
To say to those of a fearful heart, “Be strong, fear not!”
Then, says
the prophet poet:
…the eyes of
the blind shall be opened and the ears of the deaf
unstopped;
The lame
shall leap as a hart and the tongue of the dumb shall sing
for joy.
And sorrow
and sighing shall flee away;
For waters
shall break forth in the wilderness, the desert shall
rejoice with joy and singing.
Does all this poetic
imagery speak to you? Does it make any sense at all?
I realize it doesn’t fully
answer all the tough questions of life. It doesn’t fully
address the need for justice in the world, the cry for
peace, and the prayer for freedom. It doesn’t deal directly
with the lingering racism, the latent prejudice or
intolerance of other religions which is rampant in our
society this Christmas. It doesn’t deal with the agony of
AIDS in Africa or the personal tragedy of loneliness. There
is more to be said and more work to be done. But the song of
Advent gives us the courage and the hope to move in
confidence through the challenges before us. It makes firm
the feeble knee and strengthens the weak hand for the work
ahead with a vision of what can be and what will be by the
grace of God.
Can
you see it, smell it, taste it, hear it, feel it?
Can you
sense the underground river of joy welling up to eternal
life? Joy like streams in the desert, bubbling up to eternal
life.
When Lucy and Peter and Susan
and Edmund first make their way through the wardrobe and
into Narnia, they find a world frozen under the curse of the
White Witch; a land of hopelessness and death where Lewis
says it was “always winter, but never Christmas.”
Hard, cold, where living things are turned into lifeless,
stone statues. But planted deep within the heart of Narnia
is the hope that one day, Aslan the Lion (Lewis’s
Christ-figure) will return to break the spell and restore
life to Narnia.
Finally it happens. Aslan
returns and God’s love begins to soften the hard, frozen
landscape. Like Isaiah, Lewis describes it in the language
of spring breaking through the wasteland of death:
Every moment the patches of
green grew bigger and patches of snow grew smaller. Every
moment more and more of the trees shook off their robes of
snow. Shafts of delicious sunlight struck down onto the
forest floor. Then the dwarf said to the White Witch, “This
is no thaw…this is spring. Your winter has been destroyed, I
tell you. This is Aslan’s doing.”
(Lion, Witch and Wardrobe, page 118)
No more let sins and sorrows
grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground.
He comes to make his blessings flow.
Far as the curse is found,
Far as the curse is found,
Far as, far as the curse is found.
Good news
of great joy.
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