There is truth and then there is .....not truth

Perhaps these cheerful little sayings make it easier for us to get through life, but in the end, they are not the truth.  I am talking about those pithy proverbs like 'time heals all wounds' and 'the race goes to the swift and the battle to the strong'.  In the end, the experiences of our lives teach us that these are generally true but not the kind of truth you can bank on.

There are wounds that time cannot heal; deep and painful wounds of both the emotional and physical kind.  We know that the race is not always to the swift: often good people are left standing at the gate and the lazy, evil, demanding, anti-social (use whatever word you want) people get rewarded.  In this world, that is not how things work.


In America we embrace eternal optimism.  We try to convince ourselves that anyone can work hard, get a job and 'pull themselves up by their bootstraps'.  Unless you are so poor you don't even have bootstraps.  Unless you are one of the 13 million Americans who don't know where their next meal is coming from.  Not only that, if you think that all those hungry and poor are of a particular race or that they live in our inner cities, think again.  Feeding America (check out the website) indicates that the majority of the hungry in America are Caucasian and they live in rural areas.  On the back roads of Oswego and Onondaga County.

Cheerful little sayings just paper over the realities.  At the core, we continue to long for a life with a little less struggle, greater security, civility among all, even peace.  We want a world different from the one we have........and no matter how hard we work, we cannot bring this new creation into being.  We cannot fix what is broken.

But there is one who can.....who has......who continues to bring new life into our midst.  The Prophet Isaiah spoke of the shoot that comes from the 'dead' stump of the house of Jesse.  It is a new life, tender and fragile, but persistent and determined.  Isaiah points to One Who Is Coming who will turn the world we know into a world we would not recognize. The lion will lay down with the lamb.  The child will be safe playing over the snake's den.

Isaiah points us to the coming Jesus.  Not just the Jesus of the manger, who in fact, came 2000 years ago, but to the Coming Jesus:  coming again to make all in all, a new creation, a peaceable kingdom, a place of life with the Divine.

It takes Jesus to turn the world around: to make the struggle easier, the land safer, the people kinder.  It takes Jesus to turn us around so we seek the life that feeds all spiritually and makes us one in God.

No wonder the Advent cry is "Come, Lord Jesus"

We could use you.