Advent 2A

("Advent is all about loneliness, but loneliness is a complex thing. Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison describes it this way: 'There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smoothes and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind - wrapped tight like skin. Then there is a loneliness that roams...")

Pietas that is a gift of the Holy Spirit is the love of God, who is understood by us as our father in heaven. It carries with it the recognition that not just our parents, our children, our compatriots, but in fact every human being who crosses our path—every one without exception—is the beloved child of our father in heaven. And so every one—the sinful, the annoyingly stupid, the derelict, the afflicted—is one of our own.

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My wife has an office in a building where one of the tenants periodically discards dried-up orchid plants. They all end up in our home. My wife sees something more in these discarded plants than dead stumps. And sure enough, with care and in time, tiny shoots and buds appear on the dried-up, seemingly dead branches. Sometimes we treat God’s children in similar fashion. This is tragic. They may be the homeless or those with physical or developmental disabilities, discarded on our streets. Racial profiling is another way we treat people as disposable, viewing them with suspicion and behaving accordingly, sometimes with ghastly consequences.

("Jeannie and the kids had come up from Atlanta to Nashville and visited a few days. They were supposed to get on I-40 East, but a little over an hour after they left, they were lost. We told Jeannie it was an easy fix, all she had to do was turn around and go back the other way on the Interstate. What Jeannie and the kids did was repent; turn around and go the other way...")

("John's alarming forecast has the look of a scenario known to many who grew up in corn-growing country. Every fall the harvested ears went temporarily into 'corn cribs' of various shapes and sizes....")

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("A few years ago, a pastor friend told of meeting God on the highway. He said that he and his wife were traveling North on Interstate 85 when a semi began to top the crest of the hill ahead of them heading South. Above the cab, across the front of the trailer were emblazoned the letters G – O – D. As the truck drew closer and my friend saw that the side of the trailer read Guaranteed Overnight Delivery,...")

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It's hard to resist Isaiah's "Peaceable Kingdom" (Isaiah 11:1-10) when it shows up in the lectionary readings for Advent 2A. It appears to have been reasonably easy for artists to resist that scene for centuries, though. The American artist most connected with the subject is a Quaker painter named Edward Hicks. Hicks painted the subject more than 60 times over the course of his artistic life.