The Second Sunday of Advent
December 7, 2008
The Rev. Steve Smith

“Merciful God, who sent your messengers the prophets to preach repentance and prepare the way for our salvation; Give us grace to heed their warnings and forsake our sins, that we may greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer.”

The road heading east out of Jerusalem drops precipitously, winding down into the depths of the Dead Sea valley, to the lowest elevation on planet earth. The Sea itself contains 6 times the salt of the ocean, and nothing lives in it, or on its boundary. With the introduction of electricity and air-conditioning, today the Dead Sea is a popular tourist spot. But for most of time, the Sea and the desert that surrounds it has been virtually uninhabitable. Nothing lives there. Nothing survives.

Only religious fanatics, political refugees, and most notably, Israel’s prophets have been drawn into its nothingness. The prophets Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah in their day retreated to the desert, as did many of the minor prophets. Closer to us in time, John the Baptist took refuge in the desert of the Dead Sea. And common to all of these prophets, at the heart of each of their oracles, was the vision that out of nothing, a new thing comes. A rose blooms in the parched ground; springs of water flow where there is only dust and sand; the rough places are made plain, the low places raised, the high places made low, and stretching as far as the eye can see, there appears a highway, upon which the Lord God Almighty comes to save the people.

Out of nothing a new thing comes. Creation ex nihilo. Out of nothing, God creates. This is the central tenet of faith for every Christian, every Jew, and every Muslim. And were this not enough, modern science itself embraces this claim, postulating that some 20 billion years ago, out of the great nothingness of space, a single spark ignited an infinite universe of stars and planets. Out of nothing, a new thing comes.

Now, friends, it is true that we are indeed far from the days of the prophets and their spectacular visions. The image of the desert being transformed into a garden of delights may be lost on us. And hearing the recitation of the cosmological origins of the universe may not be why you came to church this morning.

But I dare say, each of us, in our time, in our own place, in this life comes up hard against the nothingness of the desert, of which the prophets spoke. A few weeks ago, the monastery of Mt. Calvary, much beloved by Episcopalians around the world, including myself, in an instant was swept away in the inferno of the Santa Barbara fires. It was an incalculable loss. Nothing remained. Nothing was spared. In spite of losing everything, though, one of the brothers said this: “We are stripping away the outward symbols that eternally rest in our hearts.”

This is what Advent teaches us. This is what the prophets proclaimed. In this fleeting earthly sojourn upon which you and I are set, we are stripping away the outward symbols that eternally rest in our hearts.

It brings to mind these words of one of my favorite songwriters, Canadian Bruce Cockburn:

“Nothing is sure
Nothing is pure
And no matter who we thing we are
Everyone gets his chance to be nothing.”

So it was a week ago Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, as Jeannette and I huddled around our three week old granddaughter, Corah, with her parents, and the ICU team struggling to keep her alive. There was nothing I could do. Nothing as priest. Nothing as a husband. Nothing as a father. As the doctors held her down to draw fluid from her spine to see if the infection had gone to her brain, I knew I had arrived at my own chance to be nothing. I left the room and went back on the ward and there it was the same. Parents helpless in the face of their own private nightmare. I felt in my very bones these words of the prophet Isaiah, “All people are grass. Their constancy is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.”

It was not until we arrived home Monday night that there was any consolation or comfort for me. There, on the wall in our den was the only thing that survives the great fire at Mt. Calvary three weeks ago. It is a poem in calligraphy one of the monks of Mt. Calvary had inscribed years ago, by Ranier Rilke:

The leaves are falling, as if from far up,
As if orchards were dying in space.
Each leaf falls as if it were motioning “no”.

And tonight the heavy earth is falling
From all other stars in the loneliness.

We’re all falling. This hand here is falling.
And look at the other one. It’s in them all.

And yet, there is Someone, whose hands
Infinitely calm, holding up all this falling.

Friends, this we believe, if we believe anything. Out of nothing, a new thing comes. On the edge of night, there is day. On the edge of dark, there is light. On the edge of despair, there is hope. No sheep will be lost. Not little Corah. Not any of the wee lambs. For, “See, even now the Lord God comes with might. With saving grace. To restore all things from ruin. To create a new thing from nothing. And the Lord God will feed his flock like a shepherd. He will gather all the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep to their eternal home.”