Advent 3 Sermon - Isaiah 35:1-10

Below is the sermon I preached last Wednesday night. This is what happens when the Californian tries to preach hope after five and a half feet of snow. You get a sermon where the good news statement is: "Someday spring will come."

So I brought something to share with you today. This is my Christmas cactus. I know he looks sort of sickly; this is actually really good for him. I got this little fellow from a cutting off my grandmother’s Christmas cactus, who got hers off a cutting from her mother, so this guy’s been in the family for a while. On the front of your bulletin you’ll see a picture that looks very much like my grandmother’s. Her’s is huge, overflowing its pot. And every Christmas it produces so many flowers that it turns purple. My little guy, I’m delighted that for Christmas he has created this new little shoot…

It is not my cactus’s fault that he is so spindly; he has had a pretty rough life. My dad cut him from my grandmother’s in California and carefully grew him roots. Then he had to fly from California to Chicago in dad’s suitcase, where his roots fell off. So I had to grow him new roots in a cup over the summer. Then I planted him and stuck him in the window in my apartment, where the breeze frequently knocked him to the ground, so I had to scoop him off the floor and replant him several times. I forgot him when I went home for a month, so he suffered alone without water. And then, to get him here I had to drive him a thousand miles in the back of the Jeep, smashed between the window and a suitcase to keep him upright. I’m not sure on the laws about transporting plants over international lines, so to get him across the Canadian border and then back into the states, I hid him under a sweater for two days, which he did not like at all. And now he sits here in Syracuse, stable for the first time in his young life, trying to recover from a life of travel and upheaval, so far from my grandmother’s warm living room.

In today’s text, Isaiah paints a picture of a desert in bloom. And not just in bloom, but abundantly green and lush. We are talking radical climate change. Streams of water rush through the arid dry lands. It will be so rich and fertile that it will become a swamp.

Let’s take this in context. Judea is a desert country. On the front cover of your bulletin there is also a picture of the Judean wilderness. It is a hot, dry, dust-bowl of a place, parched by the middle eastern sun. The Jordan River is the only water to snake through the region, and it meets its end in the Dead Sea. Because there is no outlet, the water of the Dead Sea is thick with minerals. Nothing can grow there; nothing can be sustained by its water. Hot, dry, the only water too thick to provide life, it is a wasteland.

In the middle of this, Isaiah says, crocuses will bloom. Streams of fresh, cool, water will rush until the desert is alive with life. This is not just a few blossoms on my little cactus; this is a radical reversal of how things are. And not just will the desert become a jungle, but the blind will see, the deaf will hear, the lame will not just walk again, but they will leap like deer. This is new life on a grand scale. When God comes, things are different, radically different. God dreams big.

Last week it snowed for ninety-seven hours straight. Ninety-seven solid hours without so much as a slowing in the fluttering whiteness. Even the heartiest snow-lover can get a little bit weary at a storm that dumps four feet in four days. Every day I sat at the front window of my house and watched the snow piled on the bushes rise to meet the icicles growing down from the roof. I wondered, and maybe you did too, if this storm would ever stop. Or if Lake Ontario would just continue to dump its entire contents on my front lawn, until nothing is left but a vast dry lake bed and my poor, buried little house.

And then, Wednesday morning, something surprising happened. I was driving to work, slipping and sliding down Valley Drive on the way to Seneca Turnpike, when a flash of light caught my eye. I blinked, squinting as the light became brighter. It was the sun. I looked up into the brilliant blue winter sky, blinking at the sunlight reflecting off the snowbanks. The sun lasted for maybe five minutes, before the clouds rolled back in and the snow started again. But in that moment, I heard the faint sound of crocuses blooming, of streams rushing wild through the desert, of new life, of hope, of spring. This bright blue sky reminded me that God is still working in the world. Even in the depth of winter, even when I cannot see it, God is still bringing about the restoration of everything, bringing water into deserts of desperation and despair. Living water, abundant water, water like we cannot imagine.

I have huge hopes for my sad little Christmas cactus. Hopes that it will one day blossom and grow like the one at my grandmother’s house. That its yellowish leaves will turn to deep rich green and it will burst forth from its pot. That someday it too will turn magenta and grow heavy with the weight of its blossoms. It may seem impossible now, but this little Christmas cactus has that potential inside of it. And I believe that it someday could be as big and lush and flowering as my grandmother’s cactus. But the hope I have for my little cactus dwarf in comparison to the hope God has for the world. Hope that life-giving water will rush through deserts of pain and despair, nourishing and refreshing us.

Pastor Gaetz has taken to walking into the office every morning and announcing, “isn’t today a lovely spring day.” As the snow whips and billows outside, my cheeks pink and my hands chapped from shoveling, his pronouncement about spring seems far away. But Pastor Gaetz is right, as far away and as foreign as spring may now seem amidst this world of white, spring is coming. The days are coming again where sun will beat down as fiercely and overwhelmingly as snow currently blankets the world. Like streams in the desert, this abundance of white will transform into a lush, green wilderness.

In today’s reading from Isaiah, God promises new life. And not just new life, but new life abundantly, from the most desolate and unexpected of places. God’s advent into the world is not of small change, but of total renewal, of complete reversal. God’s promises are extravagant, abundant, unimaginable. God comes to bring sight to the blind, sound to the deaf, joy in the midst of sorry, sunlight in the depth of winter. God’s visions for our lives are bigger than we could ever imagine. In the dark places and times, do not be afraid to dream big. Because the promise we have is that God dreams even bigger. Amen.