Sermon Text: Isaiah 35.1-6 Title: "That Blooming Desert"

Preached: December 13, 1998 (Third Sunday in Advent and Children's Christmas Program)

In recent years, in the era of global warming and de-forestation, we have encountered a new threat to God's gift of creation. We have found desertification. Areas of the world which used to have a plethora of plants now lie vacant, and void of life. As the environment changes and the ravages of humanity wax even fiercer upon our increasingly tiny globe, the wastelands grow and grow and grow.

And desertification has also occured in metaphorical ways as well. For sections of urban expanse have been robbed of everything which gives life. Areas which once fed abundantly the local economies, areas which once housed all kinds of people, areas which once provided opportunity, community, and commerce, have been left like clear cut forests, torn down and then abandoned by those who once benefitted from their existence. In so many ways, they are as dry and vacant as the Palestinian wilderness in the eighth century BCE. And we might say that west central Oakland is one of those places. {Even a Fox cannot live in such a desert.}

The desertification of our cities has been bad enough when the big trees have been removed -- the stores and shops, the homes and churches; but the desertification of Oakland, and many other cities across the country, has been especially bad because the land has become untenable for the smallest plants. Citiwide, statewide, and nationwide, the priorities of society have begun to drain the life from the smallest plants -- they see the children, society's children, our children, as unruly weeds, immature, ignorant and rude, best segregated from society, or better: cut down before they spread into more cultivated areas. By choosing to put less and less money into education and ever more money into prisons, our society dooms our cities to be forever deserts of poverty.

Yet, even within a desert there can be good news. Did you hear the good news that Keyondra read for us? The good news for those of us who sit in the desert and feel its dry power? "The desert and dry land will become happy; the desert will be glad and will produce flowers. Like a flower it will have many blooms. It will show its happiness, as if it were shouting for joy."

Isaiah is talking from exile, imagining that the land devastated by the Babylonian armies a generation before would return to health. The desert has appeared where Isaiah's society used to live and thrive; now it is devoid of cultivation and filled with wild dogs. But Isaiah is seeing a time when God's people will return to live in Judah and re-establish themselves. Greenery, both metaphorical and physical, will return. God's power is about to be revealed.

We read this passage during Advent because of the coming promise. We anticipate Christmas for the hope that it brings us. No matter what dry wilderness surrounds our being, the approach of God's salvation revives us, awakens us, envigorates us; God's power will be revealed; and shortly, we know, it will come in the form of a child... a baby: potential without guarantee; helpless but not hopeless, the future appearing now. In plant terms, Christmas does not bring a forest, nor even one huge sequoia but only one small weed-like tendril, beginning the work of re-forestation by bringing flowers to the desert.

This morning, the promise of Christmas approaches again; and here, within this sanctuary from the wilderness around us, we will see some flowers begin to bloom. They may seem a bit metaphysically undernourished; they may seem uncultivated. We may wish to view them, at this stage, anyway, as wildflowers -- yet still remembering that all God's flowers -- roses, gardenias, carnations and camellias -- all God's flowers were, once upon a time, wild flowers.

The flowers we see and hear from this day, are OUR flowers growing now in the desert. They are making the desert happy. They are, this year, God's Christmas present to First Baptist Church of Oakland. And I hope we can unwrap that present with joy, and appreciate the solemnity and importance of the gift -- thankful that they are here. And then, perhaps, we can accept the gift, and tend the garden, watering it with encouragement in the soil of our own faith, and adding the fertilizer of our grace and hospitality. And perhaps, the plants which grow in our corner of this desert will grow strong against the drying winds of society, to re-forest this corner of the world, and to make the deserts of Oakland show their happiness and shout with joy.