Notes for the Week Second Sunday after Advent December 8 2019

Dear friends, 

The old stones.  What do they know?  What have they seen and what will they see long after we have left them behind?  They don’t move. They haven’t moved for hundreds of years, except for the odd slippage here and there.  For all the winds of change, for all the constant battering from North Sea storms and from endless hot summers and freezing winters, they still stand.  Their constancy makes room for human joy or tragedy.  And, as they do, they continue to wait, like Advent, unmoved by life’s vagaries. Like John the Baptist, who waited in the desert; a place just as remote, just as beautiful, just as challenging.  

Like John and Advent, the old stones wait for something that is bigger than all the rest that any desert or ocean life, or life itself, could deliver.  For John it was the jeering Pharisees who needed sorting out, and for the old stones, it could have been a threat to hearth and home, like the Vikings coming around a coastal spit.  The old stones helped to sort them out and still the old stones wait. They silently absorb human stories, tears and laughter and help to sort them out even today, even as they wait for more. The old stones are the watchmen for all of us who wait like the Baptist, who said “God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.” (Matt: 3:9b) I think the old stones already knew that.

Some of us are faithful like the old stones.  Like them, some of us are worn and weathered by the chanciness of life and by its bewildering maze of paths taken or not, yet finding ourselves still standing.  Some of us newer stones, fashioned by old hands to fit into the life of the old stones, take our place with trust, to faithfully wait alongside.  

We are called to be like the old stones of Advent.  Seeing life come and go, looking out searchingly for what we pray will come again.  

The One, for whom we wait will come in the midst of the storms, in the midst of our fires and our fears and will defend and shield the old stones who stand so faithfully to greet Him.  And, when He comes, there will be joyous celebration and renewed strength to face the future, so that, like the old stones, we will wait with faith, for whatever  joys or challenges are to come next. 

We journey together, 

Mother Esme+

“for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

On that day the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples; the nations shall inquire of him, and his dwelling shall be glorious.”  (Isaiah 11:9b-10)