(part of the “Waiting on the World to Change” Advent Series)

Isaiah 35:1-10 (Advent 3A)

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus 2it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing. The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it, the majesty of Carmel and Sharon. They shall see the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God. 3Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. 4Say to those who are of a fearful heart, “Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God. He will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense. He will come and save you.”

5Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; 6then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy. For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; 7the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water; the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp, the grass shall become reeds and rushes. 8A highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Holy Way; the unclean shall not travel on it, but it shall be for God’s people; no traveler, not even fools, shall go astray. 9No lion shall be there, nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it; they shall not be found there, but the redeemed shall walk there. 10And 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.

Once again, we get a vision of what’s to come.  But this is not some image of a future, far-off world.  It’s not some reward we’ll get for living semi-righteous lives.  It’s not some other place or other realm of being.   This is God’s vision for the world we have now.  And it is there already, planted and growing, in some places maybe even beginning to bloom.  But here we are, supplanted in our current ways, sometimes feeling strangled and parched, often feeling held down by things we create or things others do to us.  But Albert Einstein once said that “your imagination is your preview of life’s coming attractions.”  So, what is it you imagine?  What preview do you see?

The writer of this passage was probably writing to an exiled people, a people who had been so beat up and put down that they were having a hard time imagining anything else.  But this writer looked at a world that was in chaos and saw order, looked at a road so overgrown that it was thought to be impassable and saw a highway, and looked at the thirsty, lifeless desert and saw blooms.  And then we read of a scene that was beyond what anyone ever thought would happen.  He envisions these exiles, these people whose hopes and dreams had long been quashed and whose lives had become nothing more than an exercise in survival dancing and singing with joy as they returned home.

Yes, it’s hard to imagine beyond where we are.  We are waiting, waiting on the world to change.  And we believe it will.  Our faith tells us that.  But belief, even faith, has to include some imagination, don’t you think?  I mean, faith is not an intellectual pursuit.  We don’t read some passage in the Bible and immediately respond with faith.  We’re not called to some blind acceptance of what we’re told.  We don’t have faith in something just because we read some account of it.  Faith comes because God gives us the wherewithal to imagine it, to imagine it into being.  Imagination dares to see what the eyes cannot see.  (That kind of sounds like faith, doesn’t it?)  So, let your imaginations go wild.

It’s always there, beneath the surface.  It’s always there, planted, ready to sprout.  That’s what faith is about—imagining what will be.  I mean, imagine that everyone has enough.  Imagine that the world is at peace.  Imagine that everyone steps up to care for the earth, to slow down the decay and the destruction we humans have caused.  Imagine that everyone has equal rights and acceptance, and a voice, and a vote.  Imagine that our first concern is not ourselves but our neighbor.  Imagine that government is about our voice rather than a fight over control.  Imagine that everyone is safe from harm, safe from gun violence, safe from human trafficking, safe from hunger and hurt and desperation.  Imagine that we all see ourselves as instruments of imagination, people of faith.

In this season of Advent, we are not just called to look toward that day about which the writer of this passage writes.  We are reminded to look FOR that day, to imagine and believe it into being and to see what of it is already there.  We live within a holy tension of the way the world is and the way God calls the world to be.  But we are reminded that the blooms in the desert are already planted.  Barbara Brown Taylor says that “Human beings may separate things into as many piles as we wish—separating spirit from flesh, sacred from secular, church from world.  But we should not be surprised when God does not recognize the distinctions we make between the two.  Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars. (An Altar in the World:  A Geography of Faith, p. 15.)  So, what if everything that you saw, everything that you touched, was indeed holy–maybe not holy in the “holier-than-thou, overly-righteous, inaccessible-to-the-ordinary-human” sense, but rather “thick with divine possibility,” filled with the promise of redemption, the promise that buried deep within its being were deserts waiting to bloom?  Just imagine.

Once, when I was particularly depressed, a friend and pacifist from Holland told me something very beautiful: “The people who worked to build the cathedrals in the Middle Ages never saw them completed. It took two hundred years and more to build them. Some stone-cutter somewhere sculpted a beautiful rose; it was his life’s work, and it was all he ever saw. But he never entered into the completed cathedral. But one day, the cathedral was really there. You must imagine peace the same way. (Dorothy Soelle)

Grace and Peace,

Shelli