This devotion was prepared for our Parish Advent afternoon, gathering around the four candles of the “life-sized” Advent wreath in the Knox church. The four readings from Isaiah are the Old Testament readings for Advent in the lectionary year A.
Candle 1
This is Duch from Cambodia.
He has a wooden leg because he trod on one of the 3.5 million land mines that were laid in Cambodia during its long years of war. The war may be over but the weapons live on, buried, hidden until they explode. Thousands of people around the world (many of them children) are maimed, injured and killed by them every year.
The United Nations, through its multinational peace force, has a huge program throughout the world, disarming and destroying land mines. It is dangerous, slow and costly work.
Isaiah speaks in this reading about war ending and peace being established when God begins his rule in the world, through His Son Jesus. He says that when this time comes the weapons of the past will be disarmed – swords will be turned to ploughshares and spears to pruning hooks.
However this peace takes time. Peace is not just a gift of God it is also a task from God. We, who belong to God, are the very ones who are called to beat the swords back into ploughshares. We are called by God to work for peace and healing. We are called to Cambodia and Angola and Mali and many other places on earth, where land mines are buried.
We who have never known war and violence in our land, are called to pray for peace in our world, for those who live with fighting and distress everyday, to support the work of others who are disarming land mines of all kinds, disarming and undoing the weapons of war, seeking to heal the damage of war.
Duch’s life will never be the same, but he has experienced healing, and now lives in peace.
Our response: Pray for peace
Candle 2
This is a large Mountain Ash gum tree. Only seven weeks before this photo was taken, the forest surrounding this tree was burned by a savage bush fire. Everything was black and dead – reduced to ash. A once lush green hillside is totally bare except for the black dead trunks of the gum trees.
Yet like all the other trees in that burned dead forest, this one is sprouting new life and branches! There is a miracle hidden inside these trees which enables them to come back from death – this is the power of God’s own gift of life.
Isaiah’s image of the stump of Jesse is the same. King David’s family was finished. The royal family that gave Israel its kings had been cut off and burned out. They had been wicked and evil anyway – not living up to the job God have given their ancestor to lead Israel to know him.
But long after the great kings were forgotten and all the power and might of Israel was just a story, the impossible happens: a green shoot appears on this dead rotten stump. There is a new descendent of King David, a new royal son, a new day for Israel. The Jesse tree begins to grow. It begins with one small green twig – a little child born in the night back in David’s hometown, Bethlehem.
This did not happen because somebody somewhere kept a dream alive. The dream had died. It happened because the life-giving hand of God was as at work, bringing life out of death. The promise He made hundreds of years earlier to David, that a descendent of his would be always be king, was being kept. Out of the ashes, long after everyone else has forgotten about it all, God remembers.
God is at work in this way in all of us too. He has not forgotten his promises. He never gives up, no matter how long it has been.
In our lives he can bring new beginnings out of the ashes: he can grow a new tree from a dead stump. He can give us back hope and joy: to the widow who has lost a life’s partner, to the couple who cannot have children, to the worker who has lost his job and his dignity, to the young person shattered by injury or illness, to the orphan child in Thailand, to all who are broken, God will give a new beginning, new hope and a new life – and that new life will grow right out of the ashes of the old.
Our response: Hope in God’s promises
Candle 3
This is a picture of a crocus – a small flower that grows from a bulb. It lies dormant most of the year and then suddenly – at the perfect time – sprouts up through the ground and into flower – one flower only. It is a tough little survivor that comes up year after year.
They are famous for doing this in barren, dry and even arctic-ly cold places.
This is the flower that Isaiah speaks about in this reading This is the flower that sprouts in the desert of Sharon, which is dry and wild and lifeless.
It is a wonderful symbol of what God does in all of our environment. We human beings are quickly robbing ourselves of our future through our destruction of the very habitat we need to live. Our abuse and neglect of creation is fast destroying the very reliability we need to live and function.
We continue to destroy rain forest, burn fossil fuel, pollute rivers and oceans. We find ourselves in drought and flood as the balance is upset.
Yet, God’s creating and renewing force in our world stubbornly keeps the desert crocus flowering. God’s goodness keeps providing. Plants still grow new leaves, and seeds still grow, food is still produced, the rains still come, the seasons still come and go. Despite everything we do, somehow our earth is still beautiful and fruitful and good.
The crocus that grows in the desert reminds us of what beauty God brings even in the harshest places.
And as we face a future clouded by concerns - global warming, climate change and the frightening things we are told to expect from it, we should never forget that God’s loving hand is also at work in our environment, that he does his work, that he gives his blessing and healing and growth, as he has for thousands of years already.
The world is more than a machine – it is a creation. And the loving creator is still here.
Our response: Pray for our environment
Candle 4
“The baby is moving” she said. She felt it – another person distinct from her – inside her womb, moving independently of her, and yet deeply connected to her, so vulnerable, so tiny and unable to live without her protection.
This miracle and mystery impresses itself on every expecting mother. And yet this picture of a joyfully pregnant mother does not show us everything. In Europe today the womb is, statistically speaking, the most dangerous place a child will inhabit – using the current figures, an unborn child has just over a 50-50 chance of being terminated.
This picture of the expecting mother does not show us the reality of pregnancy in the ancient world either, in which the process of pregnancy and birth was very dangerous and unpredictable.
A new-born a child is a miracle, to no small degree because of what they have survived. Vulnerable, delicate and dependent, weak.
Yet this was the sign God chose to give his people in Isaiah’s day, and it is the human means by which God brought his Son into our world as our Saviour. Why not something stronger and more robust?
This is the strange wisdom of God – he came to us as a baby – making himself weak and dependent, vulnerable, at the mercy of infection and illness. Here he reveals himself – as he did later on the cross – as power made perfect in the small and weak.
In doing this, God embraces what it really is to be human, to share this human life in the world. God’s story begins like ours – a woman shall conceive and bear a child.
Our response: Rejoice in God’s sign to us