While It Is Still Dark
Advent 2, Year A
Advent feels jarring. I love the beautiful poetry of Isaiah pointing us to a world made whole and Mary’s song of revolution and justice. Yet, while Advent is intended to be a season of waiting and penitence, it feels like everything around us, and perhaps within us, wants to bypass Advent and go straight to Christmas. Even at churches that practice the rhythm of the liturgical calendar, it’s hard to escape the pervasive merry frenzy. My impulse is to go hide in a cave until January.
I feel much more comfortable in Lent, where we are invited to lament and travel with Jesus to the cross. I struggle with how to celebrate Christmas and Easter when after all the rejoicing and singing, the world still looks very dark. I want to wave my hands in the air and yell, “God, where is this new world order that you promised? It’s still really dark over here.”
Fleming Rutledge tells us that Advent begins in the dark. Our pre-Advent lectionary readings provided us with “an unflinching inventory of darkness”¹that were meant to disrupt our security and complacency. She writes:
Advent is out of phase with its time, with our time. It encroaches upon us in an uncomfortable way, making us feel somewhat uneasy with its stubborn resistance to Christmas cheer.²
On the 2nd Sunday of Advent, we get the familiar text in Isaiah 11 about a shoot emerging from a stump. Isaiah and his contemporaries like Jeremiah and Amos were tasked with prophecies that included cutting, unequivocal words addressed to God’s people. For the way God’s people pursued power, wealth and privilege and ignored the needs of their communities and oppressed the vulnerable. Isaiah announces God’s disapproval and judgment. Those living in the north are exiled to a foreign land and forced to live under the occupation of the regional imperial superpower. Isaiah foreshadows the utter destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon, the next empire to follow, and the deportation of the remainder of God’s people to a foreign land. The ax cuts down the tallest trees and the lofty are brought low. It’s dark.
Yet woven into Yahweh’s judgment and rebukes, Isaiah also offers us glimpses of the dawn piercing through the darkness. Beautiful imagery of complete redemption, wholeness, the new creation, a new world. A very dead-looking stump sits surrounded by devastation. Yet, out of this unimpressive, lifeless stump, a shoot emerges. The stump refers to Jesse, David’s father, and connects this prophecy back to David’s family line. Even with the failures of David himself (a very complex character I have a hard time with) and of his descendant kings after him, God chooses this flawed lineage to bring about the complete deliverance and restoration of the world. Jesus descends from this dysfunctional family line.
God didn’t choose to “start over” with a brand-new plant, a fresh clump of clay or humanity 2.0. God chose to take what was deeply flawed and in fact dead, to bring about new life. This happens in darkness, underneath the dirt, inside the stump. This shoot will flourish and usher in a new world order where God judges with equity for the poor and weak. The Psalmist tells us that God will “crush the oppressor” and peace will abound “like showers that water the earth.” No more hunger. Cities will flourish. “[O]n that day,” Christ will be a signpost to all nations, pointing all people to the new creation, where alldistorted relationships of all creatures are made whole and new.
We are invited to cling to and ground ourselves in this Promise that is already here and yet to come. The wholeness that Isaiah describes isn’t simply something that will happen in the future, as if there is nothing for us to do until Jesus returns. Lamma Mansour, a Palestinian Christian from Nazareth and a postdoctoral fellow at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, reminds us, “[P]roclaiming that there won’t be true peace until Jesus comes anyway…[does not] absolve [our] biblical mandate to be peacemakers.” As we wait for the return of King Jesus, we are invited to bear witness to the Promise in the here and now. While it is still dark. To embrace a new way of living and being because Jesus has come. A shared humanity where we belong to each other, where our well-being is intricately intertwined with the well-being of our neighbors, near and far, particularly those who are vulnerable.
In the past few months, my refrain to the pervasive cruelty and evil against humanity has been, “I don’t know what to do with that.” Nothing sophisticated or insightful but simply a cry of exhaustion and despair. Some mornings I stand outside the ICE building in San Francisco with a few other people from local faith communities. We’re not pumping our fists or shouting demands for justice. That’s so needed too in this moment. Yet, the purpose of this particular group is simply to be with. To pray, sing and offer hot coffee and pre-packaged snacks to those waiting in line for their ICE appointments. To literally stand on the sidewalk alongside people carrying a mix of fear, uncertainty and hope. This embodied spiritual practice of presence has been what my soul and my body needed. As a nonprofit immigration lawyer, I spend so much of my day leveraging my legal skills to find a remedy that will protect my immigrant clients. Yet, here on the concrete sidewalk, I simply stand and wait with. In our shared humanity. I get to stand with Jesus in the storm, next to those who are in “the valley of the shadow of death.”
This Advent, what if we stand (or sit) and wait with those who “sit in darkness and in the shadow of death”? Show up with our bodies and our voices, in defiance of dehumanization, corrupt power and death. To look straight into the darkness. To allow it to pierce and break our hearts. To feel the dissonance of waiting and lingering. To allow ourselves to feel the visceral ache for this new creation that Isaiah describes. We don’t have to cast aside our grief to embrace Hope, to long for the Promise of a new day. Jesus is big enough to hold both. Yes, even after the joy of Christmastide and Epiphany, the world will very likely still be dark. Yet, we are invited in Advent to receive and testify to the good news of Emmanuel, God with us, in the here and now. And to stretch out our necks and strain to see the dawn on the horizon. To notice the signposts and to be signposts ourselves pointing to a “world that is about to turn.”³ To behold the shoot in the stump. To bear witness to the deep, grace-filled restoration and mending of God’s people and our unraveling world. While it is still dark.
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1. Fleming Rutledge, Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ(2018), 173.
2. Rutledge, Advent, 293.
3. Cooney, Rory. Lyrics to Canticle of the Turning, 1990.