The Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee



The Third Sunday of Advent, Year B, December 11, 2011, St. Barnabas' Church, Tullahoma

“For as the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations*” (Is. 61:11).

 

In the early 1930s millions of people starved to death in one of the most agriculturally abundant places on the earth, in the Ukraine, the breadbasket of the Soviet Union.  The reasons for this artificially induced famine were political.  Josef Stalin’s aim was to eliminate a whole class of people, perhaps even a whole People, the Ukrainians themselves.  Given the totalitarian system itself this seemed like an achievable goal.  The people of the land were kept from their harvest by soldiers; food and livestock was seized and carried off; communities were “blacklisted” and sequestered from contact of any sort with the outside world.  The farmers and peasants, the victims themselves, were blamed for the lack of food in the cities, adding insult to injury.  Survivors were deported, fields lay fallow, and villages were deserted.  In the midst of abundance and the promise of prosperity, only a wasteland was left.  It’s a bitter story that deserves to be better known by those willing to stretch their sympathies and enlarge their compassion.

 

Of course this is an old story, repeated since the 1930s with terrifying frequency and with even more disastrous results, elsewhere in Eastern Europe by the Nazis, and in China and Cambodia.  Our sympathies have been stretched and stretched again.  But this old story of desolation echoes also in the Biblical story of ancient Israel, which (long before any of this) was reduced to a wasteland and a ruin by invasion and exile.  The Babylonian army emptied out the cities of Judah and destroyed the land’s prosperity in order to work their political will.  So the prophet Isaiah says, “Your holy cities have become a wilderness, Zion has become a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation” (Is. 64:10).  He continues, “Our holy and beautiful house… has been burned by fire, and all our pleasant places have become ruins” (Is. 64:11).  Even God’s Temple had been destroyed by the rapacity of the enemy.  Part of the prophetic word to us in Advent conveys the sense of boundless loss, inextinguishable grief, and utter hopelessness that colored the experience of God’s People, trodden down and exiled, starved and burned out. 

 

Yet in the midst of this, God’s faithful folk at all times have had hope, the gift of the future that the prophets have foretold.  Isaiah’s prophecy sees the waste places restored: “The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad”, he tells them (Is. 35:1); in fact the same people who once carried them away in to exile will come and serve them and tend their flocks and fields.  “They shall build up the ancient ruins, they shall raise up the former devastations; they shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many generations” (Is. 61:4).  What had been reduced to nothing shall be restored and spring forth once more.  “For as the earth brings forth its shoots”, so the prophet says, “and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations*” (Is. 61:11).

 

“Righteousness and praise”: Now that prophetic word ought to make us realize that there is more to the story than a promise to restore the land and to rebuild the cities.  The garden that bursts forth is something more than a garden, and the walls to be repaired are more than simply a place to live.  The hope that the prophets hold out for us in Advent is not simply the return of a People to the Land, but the hope that God’s People will receive a Savior who will lead them into the Kingdom.  The Messiah comes to give hope for a future where God’s People live in communion with him and with each other, a future in which tears are wiped away and righteous is at home, as the Book of Revelation says.  What a hope!  It is the hope that we have in Advent, the promise of Jesus’ death and resurrection that means new and everlasting life for us.  We await his birth, the birth of the Savior, his breaking forth within each one of us.

 

Where can you see the new life springing forth in your community, here at St Barnabas and all around you?  Well most fundamentally there is the prospect of renewal and repair of St Barnabas’ fabric, very much on the mind of your Vestry as well as on the Bishop’s mind.  Remember, church buildings and facilities are always, first and foremost, tools for the mission and ministry of the Church.  That’s why St Barnabas’ Church is here, serving this community and advancing God’s mission in this place.  Those confirmed and received today are the living reminders that our work goes forward.  There is abundance all around us, and hope for the future.  God has been good and he continues to be good.  This Advent season, what good thing will God bring to birth within us, in the lives of these people and in the life of St Barnabas’ Church?  What is our hope for the future?

 

-  The Rt. Rev’d John Bauerschmidt, Bishop of Tennessee

Back to Bishop's Forum