Advent 30

The First Sunday of Advent, November 30, 2008

Isaiah 1:1-9 

Your country is desolate, your cities lie in ashes.  Strangers devour your land before your eyes; it is desolate as Sodom in its overthrow.  Only Zion is left, like a watchman’s shelter in a vineyard, a shed in a field of cucumbers, a city well guarded. 

My rancher friend, Perry, is in a nursing home now.  His tidy, 400-plus acre ranch in the Texas Hill Country lies unused.  The cows and one bull that came running for the hay in the trailer that he hauled behind his pickup truck, are sold.  Those cows gathered around Perry, as he cut the baling wires, like puppies—one-ton puppies.  “Git on now,” he’d growl, pushing one away as he threw quarter bales onto the ground. 

Perry’s half-acre garden, high fenced against the white tail deer, is now a field of thistles.  No more rows of tomatoes, no more beds of cucumbers.  The goats are gone, and all over the hills the tree branches are beginning to grow below the goat-high line that they’d been eaten to.  The stock tanks, man-made ponds (Perry-made ponds, actually), still have catfish, but no one goes each sunset to scatter feed, causing the water to roil with gray shimmering.  Mice have taken over the barn where Perry butchered the buck I shot.  This beautiful ranch (“just a backyard,” according to Perry) is desolate.  The one who lovingly worked the land and tended the animals is gone.  His heirs, his grandchildren, don’t want to ranch.  Ranching is hard work, seven days a week, for an erratic and ordinary income. 

The land, divided into six pieces, one for each grandchild, will probably be sold to city people wanting a place in the country.  The ranch, unoccupied and desolate now, will someday be beautiful again, but in a different way.  Perry is gone, his grandchildren are without the resources to either ranch or build homes; but new owners will come and transform those 400 acres.  Someone else will love this beautiful land, and it will live again.   

In the meantime, Perry’s land waits, as the earth waits for the One who is to come.