Green Volunteers

Green volunteers.

A shoot shall come out from the stock of Jesse and a branch shall grow out of his roots. —Isaiah 11:1

The fuchsia sitting in my kitchen reminded me of this verse from Isaiah that we frequently hear read during Advent.  On Mother’s Day 2020, I bought home a flourishing hanging basket for Laurie.  You know, they grow them in a greenhouse and get them looking perfect when you buy them.  And then it tends to go downhill from there.  It made a beautiful display on our front porch during the early summer.  However, as often happens as the dog days of summer progress, the intense heat took a toll on the partial shade loving plant.  (Confession: We may have forgotten to water it at times, which didn’t help.)  By fall, I thought the plant was pretty much dead but...  

 

Apparently, a remnant survived.   The picture on the right was taken on November 14.  Yes, a fuchsia was blooming in November!  How 2020 of it.  How warm our world is becoming!

 

I am a fan of Carrie Newcomer.  One of my favorite songs of hers is “You Can Do This Hard Thing.”  You may have seen a video of people singing this song with her that circulated back around Easter.   Here is the chorus:

 

You can do this hard thing.

You can do this hard thing.

It’s not easy I know, but I believe that it’s so.

You can do this hard thing.

 

We certainly had to do some “hard things” during 2020 haven’t we?  For more than nine months, a pandemic has had the world in its grips, and though promise of a vaccine seems to be shining some Advent light into the darkness, we still don’t know exactly when life will return to any semblance of “normal”.  Even when that day comes, we know life will never be exactly the same as it was before COVID, and the fear of the unknown is always a hard thing for us humans.  The pandemic has thrown our nation into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, which is certainly a source of hardship and anxiety for many.  If that’s not enough we’ve had our nation’s original sin of systemic racism thrust to the forefront of our consciousness this year—and that’s a hard conversation for all of us.  Add to all that an existential climate crisis that has seemingly become impossible to deny (although some still do).  This hard thing is beyond any one person’s (or nation’s or religion’s)  ability to adequately respond.  Yeah, I’d say it’s been a hard year!

 

I guess we’d like to know that things will get easier in 2021.  Certainly, we pray that will be so.  But we don’t get a guarantee about that, do we?  Life on this Third Rock from the Sun can be mighty hard, there’s just no sugarcoating that reality some days.  Where do we look for hope?

 

Perhaps creation hints at an answer?  My favorite verse from “You Can Do This Hard Thing” is the last one:

Here we stand breathless and pressed in hard times.

Hearts hung like laundry on backyard clothes lines.

Impossible just takes a little more time.

From the muddy ground comes a green volunteer. 

In a place we thought barren, new life appears.

Morning will come whistling some comforting tune.  For you...

Back to my fuchsia.  Since it still had a bloom and was in a basket, I decided I would try and preserve it.   Before the first killing frost, I bought plant inside to see if I could bring it through the winter.  The transition from outside was a bit harsh.  I made the mistake of sitting it in our doorway for a day or so.  The plant quickly dried out in the darker, climate- controlled environment of our home.  It lost some of the few meager shoots it had left.  The cat may have contributed to the carnage; I think she ate one of the blooms.  I once again thought the plant might be done.  But I picked it up, carefully watered it, and placed it in a sunny spot in our kitchen.  I’ve kept watering it every few days.

 

The picture on the left was taken today.  A green volunteer!  A branch growing out of roots!   And maybe, just maybe, a new flower bud?  It’s an annual, so I have no idea if I can bring it back to flourishing, but it does appear to be growing, so I’m curious to see what happens. 

 

I remember a line from the movie Jurassic Park:  “Life finds a way.”  Nature bears witness to this.  Think about areas ravaged by volcanic eruptions or forest fires.  Life comes back in abundance afterwards.  In fact, the ash can provide nutrients for new life.  Eventually, life wins.

 

In the movie, those dinosaur embryos were all supposed to be one sex—but somehow life found a way to replicate. The dinosaurs began to reproduce in the wild and the natural order of the world was thrown out of balance.  Humans were no longer alone at the top of the chain of being.  I don’t know if this really could happen, but when we witness how tenacious nature is, we might not be too quick in our human arrogance to say what is “impossible.”

 

Let’s not forget that our Creator reigns over all creation.  God made the rules and though God usually doesn’t, it seems occasionally God may choose to alter them.  Regardless of whether it be through supernatural or natural means, God routinely does hard things—even things that from our perspective seem “impossible. “ 

 

This is the wisdom the Angel Gabriel imparts to Mary (and to us) during the Annunciation (Luke 1:26-38).  When Gabriel tells Mary that she is to give birth to the Son of God, she quite naturally wonders: How can this be—Luke 1:34.  He explains to Mary that God’s Spirit will come upon her and ends by saying: For nothing is impossible for God—Luke 1:37.  

 

Mary: One of God's Green Volunteers

We can see the theme of God doing the seemingly impossible for Mary and for her people, Israel, running throughout the Magnificat (Luke 1:46–55).  This is a song Mary sings a few months after learning she is pregnant, while she was staying with her relative Elizabeth, who is pregnant with John the Baptist—her own miracle baby (Luke 1:5–24).

 

Mary is viewed as theotokos; she is the “the God-bearer.”  To borrow from our plant analogy, she is a Green Volunteer.  Think of the double meaning here; we use green to refer to someone young, untested, unproven.  That sure describes Mary! In a time and place devoid of God’s active presence, God chooses Mary to be the conduit of a New Day.  But that day won’t come without pain.  Birth is always painful.  Nevertheless, Mary is willing to do the hard thing that God calls her to do as a young, unmarried, Jewish woman.  Her response is: I am the Lord’s servant.  Let it be as God says—Luke 1:38.  She co-labors with God to birth the impossible.  (Although I think the physical labor pain was uniquely Mary’s.)

 

While some debate the factuality of Luke’s account of Jesus’s birth, it’s hard to argue the actuality of the story of Mary (and Joseph).  Mary serves as an Advent archetype for us.  While we are not called to literally give birth to Jesus,  Mary’s example reminds us that we are—each one of us—God-bearers.  Christ dwells within each of us and is “birthed” through each of us in a unique way.  

 

God will call us to do hard things at times.  How will we respond?  Will we open ourselves to the “birthing” as Mary did—even when it seems impossible?  

 

During this Advent season, I pray our eyes will be opened to see those unexpected green volunteers, those shoots coming out from the root like on my tender fuchsia plant.  May we, like Mary, become Green Volunteers ourselves.  God has turned to many other Green Volunteers throughout history to accomplish God’s purposes.  May these examples from Scripture and from nature remind us that much like creation—God our Creator always finds a way—and often, that way is through us.