Isaiah 35: 1-10 (links validated 10/16/22)

The rose bush really had no business being there. The ground was too hard with too many rocks. The rest of the yard could barely sustain grass, much less a three-foot high rose bush. Trash from the street collected against the fence and the children found bottles of various brands in the yard on a regular basis. The backyard of the Bristol Street house was no rose garden, not by any stretch of the imagination. That lone bush with the red roses really had no business being there. My friend Joan had planted it when she and her family first moved from the housing projects across Bristol Street to the small frame house with the tiny backyard. She and her husband had lived in the inner city for 8 years by that time. With a third child, they needed more space than they’d had in the apartment – as well as some degree of privacy. Of course, people kept coming by at all hours even at that house. That came with the territory, or at least with their ministry...

In his book The Longing for Home Buechner describes a scene set in, of all places, Sea World in Orlando, Florida. One day some years ago Buechner, his wife, and his daughter were sitting in some bleachers at Sea World to watch a killer whale show. As Buechner describes it, what with the sun glistening off the water, the clear blue sky above, the handsome young people in bathing suits who were running the show, and in the center of it all the exuberant antics of those magnificent whales, suddenly Buechner, his wife, and daughter discovered their eyes were filled with tears. Why? Buechner thinks it is because they had caught a glimpse of God’s peaceable kingdom, of the way things should be but mostly aren’t, and the joy if it all nearly crushed their hearts...

("The sacred baby Jesus enters into our secular world, the extraordinary into the ordinary, the heavenly into the mundane. The British writer G. K. Chesterton captures this divine descent into the human in his poem The House of Christmas...")

"As Frederick Buechner once noted, happiness pops up pretty much where you would expect it: graduations, weddings, award ceremonies, births. But joy is more unpredictable. Joy can and often is present at also happy occasions but it is just as likely to show up at funerals and in the wake of great national or international tragedies...."

F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of America’s most admired authors in the 1920’s, found himself on the backside of a devastating spiritual desert. By 1936, at the age of 39, his life had been through an emotional shredder. In a remarkable series of articles in Esquire Magazine, he said he realized that his life had been mortgaged to the hilt in a physical and spiritual sense. Poignantly, he described his destitution saying, "In a real dark night of the soul, it is always 3 o’clock in the morning—day after day."...

The Winter Crocus (Crocus Hyemalis) grows after Israel's long, hot summer. It is among the earliest plants to bloom. The crocus isn't much of a sign as far as volume and height go. The plant is stemless and stands only 1"-3". Its value as a sign (and symbol) is in its ability to withstand the drought of summer and to sprout, sometimes in anticipation of the rain. When you see the crocus you know that the rains are coming. In an arid land, this is indeed a sign...

It was Christmas Eve, and, as usual, George Mason was the last to leave the office. He walked over to a massive safe, spun the dials, swung the heavy door open. Making sure the door would not close behind him, he stepped inside. A square of white cardboard was taped just above the topmost row of strong-boxes. On the card a few words were written. George Mason stared at those words, remembering... Exactly one year ago he had entered this self-same vault. And then, behind his back, slowly, noiselessly the ponderous door swung shut. He was trapped--entombed in the sudden and terrifying dark. He hurled himself at the unyielding door, his hoarse cry sounding like an explosion. Through his mind flashed all the stories he had heard of men found suffocated in time-vaults. No time clock controlled this mechanism; the safe would remain locked until it was opened from the outside. He would have to wait until tomorrow morning. Then the realization hit him. No one would come tomorrow--tomorrow was Christmas...

Hope is always a word spoken out of place. As the poem “Anyway” says: People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered. Love them anyway. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Do good anyway. If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway. The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway. Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway. The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds. Think big anyway. People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs. Fight for a few underdogs anyway. What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway. People really need help but may attack you if you do help them. Help people anyway. Give the world the best you have, and you’ll get kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best you have anyway.

Recently I was lost in the desert of legal paperwork. Applying for a loan to provide for my mother’s long-term care, I encountered one obstacle after another. It was like the carnival game “Whack A Mole.” I would get one contract signed and think, “There, I’m done.” And then a complication would pop up. And another and another. I got to the point of saying, “How can I navigate this trackless waste? I don’t think I can get there from here.” Hope faded and joy was hard to find. But as I began to work on this Sermon Starter, the lovely language of Isaiah 35 focused my mind on those wonderful Advent words, “Your God will come to save you.” And then he did, in the person of a traveling Notary Public, a humble, compassionate, aging Christian who had heard me preach years ago. He showed me the way through the desert. And I am singing for joy. I wouldn’t say that “everlasting joy” has crowned my head, but at least I’ve had another foretaste. For the moment, “sorrow and sighing have fled away.”

Early this year parts of California near Walker Canyon and Lake Elsinore experienced a “super bloom apocalypse,” where long dormant desert flowers in the hot dry desert exploded into bloom after rain and snow melt from the mountains watered the thirsty ground. The bloom was so vibrant and full this year that when satellites in space took pictures you could easily see the areas where the bloom was occurring. But the bloom doesn’t happen every year. The last time was in the spring of 2016 and depending on weather conditions it might not happened again for another 10 years. We have to be patient and notice the signs, when the weather and water conditions are just right, and then we see the miracle of the desert blooming...

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