Season of Advent

Sometimes serving in this Jerusalem/West Bank context feels like an extended Advent. It doesn’t feel like that in the sense that I’m constantly anticipating the end of time. But it does in the sense that I often feel like I’m hoping for a big moment or announcement or turning point, followed by a brighter day for everyone here – for our Palestinian and Jordanian Christian companions of the ELCJHL, for their Muslim and Jewish neighbors in Israel and Palestine, and for the whole region.

 

Maybe it is a more mundane expectation than watching for the end of time. But I suspect it is also a more immediately relevant one – one more grounded in what matters for people’s everyday lives.

 

Perhaps this is one of the benefits of looking at scripture from an historical perspective. From that perspective, I don’t read our text from Isaiah as speaking about the end of time either. Nor is it about prophecy fulfillments in the present time, or the birth of Jesus. Rather, the context is ancient Israel’s experience of exile, loss, bloodshed, and destruction. The interpretation presented in the text is that this comes about – or is coming about – because of God’s judgment, which may be strange to our understanding of God. But the prophet moves ultimately to a note of promise, which the Israelites experience in the late 6^th century BC/E: homecoming, repair, and healing. It is not about the distant future for its original hearers. It is not a promise about the end of time, or the coming of paradise where storms and scorching heat will be no more. But it is a promise of a more immediate future, where there is no more bloodshed, and where belonging, comfort, and shelter against the storms are not just for some, but for all. It is, in short, about their own time.

 

In the words of the Psalmist, while “weeping may stay for the night, rejoicing comes in the morning.” But some “nights” are longer than others. And as with the ancient Israelites, the diverse peoples of today’s Holy Land have wept for an unusually long night. There has been exile, loss, bloodshed, and destruction. Still, we look forward with hope to a morning of rejoicing for all God’s children, here and around the world, when the bloodshed ends, and  when there is belonging, and comfort, and shelter for all - not at the end of time, but in our own time.

 

-Jeff