Through Stained Glass: Advent Word a Day -- Promise

 

“Stop for one whole day every week, and you will remember what it means to be created in the image of God, who rested on the seventh day not from weariness but from complete freedom. The clear promise is that those who rest like God find themselves free like God, no longer slaves to the thousand compulsions that send others rushing toward their graves.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor

Promise. 

Outside my house, once tress abundant with leaves are barren. 

Inside my house, there is a bloom on my hibiscus plant. 

I smiled and laughed when I came home and saw the orange-crème color petals. A sign of life in the season when creation in the Northern Hemisphere hibernates. 

In the little flower, I see the promise of the Holy One Jesus speaks of in Luke 21. When destruction begins, and begin it will, the One Who Loves Us is as near as our very prayers. 

How many times has our world seen the fall of an empire? How often do you think folx like you and me have determined the end was near? We are a people who want straight lines, to live in a cut and dry world, to exist in the binary: "X" is either that or that. 

Throughout scripture, we see that the Holy One is anything but straight … and linear. Especially when it comes to time. I love what professor Audrey West says about God's time when she writes:

"Jesus in Luke 21 reminds his followers that God is not constrained by the chronos time represented by calendar and clock, the sort of time that keeps everything from happening at once. In God's kairos time, past and future are woven together for the sake of today.

God's time is the now/not-yet that reshapes the world's present expectations—and our own."

What I hear in this, and what I read throughout scripture, is redemption is ours -- even while we wait.  I love how Jesus communicates this by pointing to nature, using imagery from creation to bring us back to the presence of the Holy One amid the end times. I find comfort in it because creation reveals the cyclical nature of life – the impermanence of life. I'm mindful of the Oak Tree in my neighbor's yard that knows both when to wear Her crown in the season of abundance; and when to let them go. 

In my sermon two weeks ago, I mentioned how the trees unveiled a new meaning of the word apocalypse. The parable of "the fig tree and all the trees" suggests the past can help make sense of the future. When buds begin to form on barren trees, we are confident that winter is ending and summer will arrive. Why? Because we have previously lived through a change of seasons or because others have told us of their own experience.

The trees, your story, and scripture – they point me back to the promise that the Holy One is and will forever be with us. 

Advent is a season of promise. It is a season that invites our attention. The stories guiding us this season point to the faithfulness of the Holy One – and the new thing They are doing. Where does it begin? Usually on the edges – in the unlikeliest of places. 

Like a blooming hibiscus plant…