Season of Advent

Dark, humid and steaming, and putrid beyond description. That’s what I imagine it would be like after 40 days locked inside a boat full of every kind of animal on earth. Or maybe, as we look closer at the text, it’s 150 days, …or 190, …or 7 months plus 40. It’s hard to say. But it’s clear that a very long time is suggested – more than enough that some of us might wonder whether it would be better to throw ourselves into the flood.

So when Noah releases the dove following all of that time, he has to be praying, “Please God. Let that dove find a place to land on this earth, so we can go back out into the world and live and breathe again. Please, God! …Please.”

In this second week of Advent – the week many of us follow a theme of “peace” – we may find ourselves praying a similar prayer: “Please God. Let peace find a place to set its foot upon this earth...”  For like the dove, peace cannot land in mid-air, or in a flood of hatred or injustice. To live and grow, peace needs a landing place: an equitable society or relationship, a hand reaching out in repentance or forgiveness, an effort to understand another’s needs, an intervention of the strong on behalf of the weak, a mutual decision to start again. Many kinds of places can be a landing place for the dove of peace. But the dove must find one available somewhere.

Of course, in our text, the dove does not find a place to land, at least right away. Instead, it returns to the ark from which Noah sent it out in hope. But Noah does not give up; nor does he close the door. Instead, he reaches out, and brings it back in to care for, and to nurture, and to release in hope yet again in seven more days. Maybe we find ourselves needing to do likewise.

But here hope and peace come together. Because, after these seven more, Noah releases the dove again, and gets an olive branch. …And seven more days.

…And after these additional seven, he releases the dove again. And finally, at long last, a new earth.

-Jeff