“Those who go out weeping, carrying the seed,
will come again with joy, shouldering their sheaves.” Amen.

In today’s collect we pray for God “to stir up your power and come among us,” which sounds a bit like a plea for a superhero to come rescue us. And, in fact, the understanding that God entered human life in the incarnation precisely because God was on as a rescue mission is a foundational belief for the writers of the New Testament, as well as the early church fathers and mothers.

While we may not always think in these terms, for Christians there’s really no getting around the claim that we need to be rescued from sin and death, as we do not have what it takes to overcomes these forces on our own. Thus, as the collect says, we require God’s “bountiful grace and mercy” for the rescue operation to occur.

So far, so good. However, when we pray today for God to come among us, we may need reminding that we’re not talking about the incarnation, which we sometimes refer to as the “first Advent” and which has already happened: we’re talking about the Second Coming, something still in the future. And I wonder how many of us, outside of a church service during Advent, ever pray for the Second Coming to hurry up and get here? Isn’t that basically like praying for the end of the world? Do we really want to be rescued after all, if that rescue is going to include forbidding things like judgment, justice, and the wielding of great and unconquerable power?

Today’s passage from Isaiah comes to the rescue, as it were, stopping us in our doom-scrolling tracks with rich and inspiring imagery that provides a different, more faithful vision of what it looks like when God’s power is stirred up. This imagery of restoration, healing, and renewal is both metaphor and more than metaphor, and it will help us get a better grip on what to expect when God breaks into the human realm, with grace and mercy as well as power and judgment.

First, we should note that Isaiah announces a mission that is the same as the one claimed by Jesus at the beginning of his ministry; like Jesus, Isaiah has been anointed “to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners.” This is the good news, the Gospel, that Christians believe is being fulfilled through Jesus, but seeing it in the context of an Old Testament prophet reminds us that it has been God’s desire from the beginning of the story. This is not a new development, or something we Christians invented.

You can hear, even in these first few lines, how much Isaiah focuses on rescue—but rescue not only for the worthy or the good, or those in our inner circle. Release of prisoners, liberty to captives, is a dangerous business, requiring us to put our trust in God and not in our own wisdom or power. The riskiness of this endeavor comes as no surprise to those who have been paying attention; after all, prophets are never much interested in maintaining the status quo.

Isaiah may be anointed to speak to the people of Israel, but God’s mission of salvation is for everyone: “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.” Then and now, “all the nations” means all people, everywhere: Palestinians as well as Jews, Ukrainians as well as Russians, Democrats as well as Republicans. Whenever we take sides in such a way that we insist there are good guys and bad guys, winners and losers, those who deserve rescue and liberation and those who do not, we do damage to God’s vision of healing for all the nations.

Next, we should note how insistently this vision of release and restoration is firmly rooted in this world; it is something that will happen in our own cities and towns, fields and forests, and not something that is waiting for us up there somewhere in heaven. “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.” Can we imagine what this would look like in our own inner cities, in landscapes devastated by fracking and mountaintop removal, in underwater domains where the kelp forests have disappeared and coral are being bleached to extinction? Those places are meant to flourish, and their flourishing is God’s dream and God’s promise.

Finally, there is a great deal of human agency envisioned in Isaiah’s vision. When we look back to see who it is that is repairing the ruined cities and building things up out of their devastation, who is doing the work of restoration and healing, it is the very people that God has liberated. Those who were once oppressed and exploited are the very ones who are fulfilling God’s dream for the world. These are the ones who will be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord; these are the ones who will display his glory.

It is important for us to feed our imaginations with visions like Isaiah’s. We want to be “like those who dream,” so that our dreams lead us to health and restoration, especially in these anxious, unsettled times.

Happily, we see it in the natural world, every day, if we are alert to it. Last Sunday a group of us went on a walk late in the afternoon. It was a simple walk through neighborhood streets, meandering a few blocks to a park and then back again. One optional activity was to bring back an object that struck our imagination during the walk and then share that object (or a picture of it) with the group.

More than one person, including a young child, brought back a tiny little item, no bigger than my thumb. On closer inspection, these were tiny pinecones—or, to be more precise, redwood cones. These miniature-looking cones contain even tinier seeds, which have the potential in them to become enormous coastal redwoods. When we see what magnificence can come from something so humble and small, we see that indeed God’s ways are not our ways, nor God’s thought our thoughts—and what a good thing that is!

Those of you who remember JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings might remember the story of restoration that rounds out the trilogy. One of the worst things that the evil Saruman does is devastate the landscape of the Shire, the green and gentle place where hobbits live. Among other villainous acts, he ordered most of the trees to be cut down. One of the hobbits, Sam Gamgee, is a most loyal and faithful person, and after his adventure he happens to return home with a bag of precious dust given to him by an elf queen (as one does, at least in Tolkien’s Middle Earth!). Tolkien writes:

“So Sam planted saplings in all the places where specially beautiful or beloved trees had been destroyed, and he put a grain of the precious dust in the soil at the root of each. He went up and down the Shire in this labour […]. And at the end he found that he still had a little of the dust left; so he went to the Three-Farthing Stone, which is as near the centre of the Shire as no matter, and cast it in the air with his blessing. All through the winter he remained as patient as he could, and tried to restrain himself from going round constantly to see if anything was happening. 

Spring surpassed his wildest hopes. His trees began to sprout and grow, as if time was in a hurry and wished to make one year do for twenty. In the Party Field a beautiful young sapling leaped up: it had silver bark and long leaves and burst into golden flowers in April. In after years, as it grew in grace and beauty, it was known far and wide and people would come long journeys to see it: the only mallorn west of the Mountains and east of the Sea, and one of the finest in the world.”

A little dust, a tiny seed, and a heart that refuses to let evil and darkness have the last word. From those humble beginnings, God can and does make great things happen. While we pray for God to come again, we can also do our part now to be repairers of the breach, restoring and healing God’s good creation, including ourselves and our neighbors. In Advent, after all, we are not praying for the end of the world, but for the renewal of the world, a time to come when peace and righteousness will kiss, and all creation will once again sing of the glory of God.

“Those who go out weeping, carrying the seed,
will come again with joy, shouldering their sheaves.” Amen.