This advent I decided to let go. The last two years I have pushed myself to post daily during spiritual seasons of preparation, Advent and Lent. This year I said: no thank you. It’s been a hard enough pre-winter and I just don’t care.
Isn’t giving up such a blessing? Once i made the freeing decision not to squeeze spirituality out of my empty toothpaste tube self, my always scrappy, always creative church decided to create a community advent devotional, so I picked up six of the 24 dates of that series. And now that Christmas is a week away, I’ve got a tidy series of posts to drop. Which is good because the drunken elves of Christmas – I mean, my children – have completely trashed my home in their cookie-high decorating frenzy and I’ve got a lot of cleaning to do.
Isaiah 11:1-5
The Branch From Jesse
1
A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse;
from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.
2
The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him—
the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding,
the Spirit of counsel and of might,
the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord—
3
and he will delight in the fear of the Lord.
He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes,
or decide by what he hears with his ears;
4
but with righteousness he will judge the needy,
with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth.
He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth;
with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked.
5
Righteousness will be his belt
and faithfulness the sash around his waist.
Has 2020 made you feel like you’re watching a tree fall in slow motion? Creaking, shuddering, some smashing and crashing and then an unsatisfactory flump as it hits the ground? Maybe you had plans for this year. My list included a theater performance I was really proud of, misfortunately scheduled two days after the first stay at home order. A pregnancy that didn’t take. The desperate desire to travel, anywhere. A cancelled 30th-and-40th joint birthday bash with my sister. And I wasn’t planning on the nonstop decision fatigue about every small interaction with the world outside my home.
What a dead stump of a year.
And yet, out of this blunt representation of death, I can see small shoots of life. This is what nature – Mother Nature, the name I now insert anytime I read “Holy Spirit” – coaxes out of her creation: rebirth. Renewal. Different branches, growing in different directions but still the same roots, the same entanglement with the experiences that all of humanity at any point in history is sharing: sorrow, joy, loss, hope, resurrection.
Isaiah, with his poetic mind, sees new life where there is currently a dead stump. “A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.” Isaiah’s branch is wise, compassionate, not concerned with climbing the ranks of the system but instead with justice for the poor of the earth. Good God, how I need to tie the wildy careening tire swing of my life to this particular branch.
It’s Advent, and we’re all looking for hope. Can you find the tiny buds that are sprouting from your stump of a year? One day they will bear fruit, and the birds of the air will nest in them.
God of the dead stumps in our lives, we want to feel you moving beneath the hardened earth. We want to sense a connection to your living root system which gives life to all life. Be our hope this advent. Amen.