Since all these things – heaven and earth – are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be?
I recently heard a friend talk about how in the assigned lectionary texts, most weeks, there’s one sentence somewhere that really seizes his attention, demands reflection and response.
In our lessons for the second Sunday in Advent this year, this is that sentence, for me.
Since all things are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be?
I’ve been thinking about it for weeks.
That’s the bit of Scripture that just occasionally floats to the top in my brain… not the much more familiar, and comforting!, beginning of Isaiah chapter 40: “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem…”
Those words are the beginning of a portion of the Book of Isaiah – which is sixty-six chapters long! – that is sometimes called the Book of Consolation. It contains many prophecies of return and restoration, after the more catastrophic words of the preceding chapters.
But even the comfort of Isaiah 40 is nuanced. We read a few verses further and find the text telling us that all people are grass, short-lived, ephemeral, insignificant. And in practically the same breath the text talks about good tidings! Good news!
The grass withers, the flower fades; surely the people are grass.
Is that good news?…
Have you noticed – have you felt – the fascination of abandoned places? Places where people, with all our busyness and plans, used to be, and aren’t, anymore?
TikTok regularly shows me videos of people exploring a derelict hotel, school, or shopping mall.
Now, I do watch those videos, and TikTok will show you more of something it thinks you like, but it’s not just me.
Posts like that regularly get 300, 400, 500 thousand likes, sometimes more.
Turning over to Instagram, a better platform for evocative still photography as well as video…
Abandoned America is a photographic project by an artist named Matthew Christopher. He has 84,000 followers on Instagram.
Another account with a similar theme, Deserted Places, brings together videos and photos from folks exploring abandoned places all over the world, and has 1.3 million followers…
A third account called simply “itsabandoned” boasts “Beautiful abandoned places” for its 1.2 million followers.
There are photos of a three-story gracious home in the woods, trees growing from a tower, the patio and steps swallowed by moss, ivy climbing the walls.
A greenhouse, elegant with stained glass – who knows where? – is being slowly swallowed by vines that have broken their way in from outside, the floor carpeted with dead leaves.
A bowling alley still has a ball and pins waiting for use, as the floor returns to earth, and ferns, moss, and trees grow in the dim daylight from broken windows.
There’s always an extra fascination for me in images of abandoned churches – glass and stone gradually falling to earth, fragment by fragment; pews and prayerbooks gently decaying back to their component molecules…
In these images, in these places, I feel some tantalizing stew of recognition of mortality, and a strange delight in seeing what man hath wrought fall to ruin, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Five chapters before those famous words, “Comfort, comfort,” the book of Isaiah contains an evocative oracle of desolation.
Of Israel’s neighbor and enemy Edom, Chapter 34 says,
“From generation to generation it shall lie waste;
no one shall pass through it for ever and ever.
But the hawk* and the hedgehog* shall possess it;
the owl* and the raven shall live in it…
They shall name it No Kingdom There,
and all its princes shall be nothing.
Thorns shall grow over its strongholds,
nettles and thistles in its fortresses.
It shall be the haunt of jackals,
an abode for ostriches.
Wildcats shall meet with hyenas,
goat-demons shall call to each other…
There shall the owl nest
and lay and hatch and brood in its shadow;
there too the buzzards shall gather,
each one with its mate.”
This is a prophecy of doom for Israel’s enemies – one that echoes what happens to Jerusalem and Judea when they are conquered, ruined, and emptied out.
But it’s also beautiful.
I want to see those ruins, don’t you?
Overgrown by thorns and thistles, inhabited by owls and wildcats and hedgehogs…
A place of death become a place of vibrant life.
Wilderness is different from apocalypse.
That was last week’s theme.
But wilderness may be what comes after.
What’s left, when all the things we built and planned and expected and relied on have dissolved.
Today – as always on the second Sunday in Advent – the lectionary turns towards John the Baptist, who announces Jesus’ arrival and mission.
John is a prophet, like all the Old Testament prophets before him. And John is, specifically, a wilderness prophet.
He preaches in the wilderness; he dresses like the wilderness, in animal skins instead of decent woven cloth; he eats the wilderness, living on bugs and wild honey.
Wilderness is an important kind of place, in Scripture.
It’s a place of chaos, danger, and clarity.
A place of life and a place of death.
A place you run to, to escape human danger, and a place where you confront non-human danger: wildcats and jackals, lions and wolves, hunger and thirst, the harsh terrain itself.
The wilderness is inhospitable at best, and hostile at worst.
And the wilderness in Scripture is a place where, again and again, people encounter the Holy.
We read this Isaiah text today because our Gospel text from Mark quotes it: “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness…”
Studying these texts this week, I realized something that I had somehow never noticed before.
There is ambiguity in the text of Isaiah 40.
Our translation, the New Revised Standard Version, says, ‘A voice cries out: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord…”’
But when Mark quotes the same text, the mysterious Voice is no longer just talking about the wilderness, it has become “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness…”
Apparently this slight quirk of translation was part of the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible that Mark would have known, called the Septuagint.
But a new translation of the Hebrew Bible by Robert Alter that I often consult renders the Isaiah verse the same way: A voice cries out in the wilderness…
Whose voice is this, anyway, that cries out either about – or in – the wilderness? It’s not clear. A footnote in one of my scholarly Bibles notes, “The identity of the voice… has been deliberately left mysterious by the prophet.” (Jerusalem Bible)
What the text does say plainly is that God’s presence will be found in the wilderness.
So perhaps the voice is also in the wilderness… or even of the wilderness.
It’s not a far-fetched thought! Just two chapters later, in Isaiah 42, Creation speaks: “Sing to the Lord a new song! Let the sea roar and all that fills it….let the desert and its towns lift up their voice!”
An ecological lectionary commentary recently introduced me to the Earth Bible Project’s principles of ecology in Scripture, including the principle of voice: That Earth is a living entity capable of raising its voice in celebration and against injustice.
And the principal of resistance: Creation not only suffers from human injustices, but actively resists them.
I immediately realized I had learned similar ideas in seminary from Ellen Davis, one of the greatest Old Testament scholars of our time.
Walter Brueggeman – another one – talks about this stuff too.
The idea that Creation or Earth has agency and a voice isn’t just 21st century ecological woo.
These are assumptions that underlie much of Scripture.
Where modern environmental science and ancient wisdom point us in the same direction, we should probably pay attention, and listen to the voice of Creation – or its component parts.
Isaiah 40 hints that the wilderness that is speaking, here, is the dry and rocky near-desert that the Judean exiles would have had to cross to come home to Jerusalem from Babylon.
But with Isaiah 34 close at hand, the wilderness that comes after civilization may well be in our minds too – those owl-haunted ruins and moss-eaten mansions…
When the post-human wilderness tells us, Surely the people are grass, it speaks with particular authority.
So what does the voice in, the voice of, the wilderness have to say, in Isaiah 40?
Human life and accomplishments are temporary. Nothing lasts.
God’s coming anyway. Take comfort. Get ready.
Since all things are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be?
This past Tuesday I attended the Wisconsin Council of Churches annual meeting. British poet Jay Hulme was the keynote speaker.
Our theme for the event was “chaplains to the apocalypse.”
An invitation to wonder, together, what spiritual community and spiritual leadership look like in this season of the world.
Jay told us – among other things – about Coventry Cathedral.
Our 2 Peter reading includes these frightening words: The heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire.
On November 14th, 1940, during World War II, that happened to the city of Coventry, a midsized city in central England.
515 German bomber planes carried out an attack on Coventry that night. Over the course of the night the Luftwaffe dropped 500 tons of high explosives and 30,000 incendiaries – bombs made to start fires.
More than 43,000 homes were damaged or destroyed; infrastructure was shattered.
At least 500 people died, possibly many more.
And when morning came, Coventry’s 14th-century cathedral church was in ruins – its wood and metal interior structure had burned and melted, and its roof had collapsed.
Surely the people are grass.
But as people who loved the Cathedral wandered among its smoking ruins the morning of November 15, something remarkable started to happen.
The cathedral stonemason found two charred beams and lashed them together into a cross, standing it behind an altar of rubble.
The vicar of a nearby church took a few of the big medieval nails from the floor – liberated as ancient beams burned – and tied them together with wire to create a smaller cross.
And the Provost of the Cathedral, Richard Howard, took some chalk and wrote two words on the charred wall of the cathedral:
“Father Forgive.”
An abbreviated quotation of Jesus’ words on the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
As the website of the Diocese of Coventry explains, Howard “wanted everyone to recognize their own part in the destructive patterns of behaviors which can lead to disaster… [and] to make a commitment not to seek revenge but to strive for reconciliation with the enemy.”
The response to disaster – apocalypse – dissolving that first began to emerge, that smoky morning, developed into a lasting commitment to peace and reconciliation work grounded at Coventry Cathedral.
After the German city of Dresden was brutally bombed in February of 1945, the Cathedral community sent Dresden a cross made from the nails of their ruined cathedral – a sign of hope, of endurance, of empathy.
That cross has a place of honor in Dresden’s Frauenkirche.
When it was time to rebuild Coventry’s cathedral, the design they chose was not one that tried to remake what had been before.
To erase the wounds, the destruction.
Instead, they built a modern worship space, and planted a garden within the ruined walls still standing.
In that garden, members of the community pray the Coventry Litany of Reconciliation every day.
Jay told us about Coventry.
The bombs – the crosses. Father, forgive. The garden in the ruins.
And he told us: When there’s an apocalypse, you have to make a choice about what kind of world you want to build among the ruins.
What sort of persons ought we to be? …
There are so many kinds of wilderness.
Literal wildernesses in their sprawling glory.
We have to protect them by law, now, but in the past they were simply the places humans couldn’t easily figure out how to tame, to use, to inhabit.
The wildernesses we leave behind when we abandon a place: derelict malls, boarded-up hotels or churches, sometimes whole neighborhoods or cities – hollowed out, haunted by crows, raccoons, coyotes.
The inner wildernesses of our lives, our hearts, disorienting and empty. Places we avoid because they frighten us.
Places where something once was, and isn’t anymore.
Some churches will tell you that the themes of Advent are things like Peace and Love and Hope.
I am here to tell you that the themes of Advent are things like Apocalypse and Wilderness.
But yes, also: Hope.
There is hope in apocalypse, hope in wilderness.
Hope in the emptiness before, and after, human striving.
Hope in naming and facing our losses and our fears.
Hope in grappling with what kind of person we mean to be.
Hope in the wilderness calling us to get ready –
Because even now, even here,
The Holy comes to meet us.
More about Jay:
More about Coventry:
https://www.coventry.anglican.org/the-story-of-the-cross-of-nails.php