December 4: The Restoration of Israel
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♫ Music:
Day 2 - Monday, December 4
Title: The Restoration of Israel
Scripture: Amos 9:11-15
“In that day I will raise up the booth of David that is fallen and repair its breaches, and raise up its ruins and rebuild it as in the days of old, that they may possess the remnant of Edom and all the nations who are called by my name,”declares the Lord who does this. “Behold, the days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when the plowman shall overtake the reaper and the treader of grapes him who sows the seed; the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall flow with it. I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel, and they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine, and they shall make gardens and eat their fruit. I will plant them on their land, and they shall never again be uprooted out of the land that I have given them,” says the Lord your God.
Poetry:
Restoration
By Mary Cornish
Everyone knew the water would rise,
but nobody knew how much.
The priest at Santa Croce said, God
will not flood the church.
When the Arno broke its banks,
God entered as a river, let His mark high
above the altar.
He left nothing untouched:
stones, plaster, wood.
You are all my children.
The hem of His garment, which was
the river’s bottom sludge,
swept through Florence, filling cars and cradles,
the eyes of marble statues,
even the Doors of Paradise. And the likeness
of His son’s hands, those pierced palms soaked
with water, began to peel like skin.
The Holy Ghost appeared
as clouds of salted crystals
on the faces of saints, until the intonaco
of their painted bodies stood out from the wall as if
they had been resurrected.
This is what I know of restoration:
in a small room near San Marco,
alone on a wooden stool
nearly every day for a year,
I painted squares of blue on gessoed boards—
cobalt blue with madder rose, viridian,
lamp black—pure pigments and the strained yolk
of an egg, then penciled notes about the powders,
the percentages of each. I never asked
to what end I was doing what I did, and now
I’ll never know. Perhaps there was one square
that matched the mantle of a penitent, the stiff
hair of a donkey’s tail, a river calm beneath a bridge.
I don’t even know what I learned,
except the possibilities of blue, and how God enters.
FLOODED
As you walk the neighborhoods in and around New Orleans, cryptic diagrams regularly dot houses. Always the same pattern and style, often adorning the front porch. Shabby spray-painted lines and numbers in an X. The contents of its quadrants each filled with numbers meaningful at first sight only to the search and rescue teams that painted them. Left: Who found it. Top: When they left. Right: Hazards present. Bottom: Who was there, living or dead. These diagrams tell a story using gnostic glyphs no one wants to know. Secret "X-codes." Crosses. "Black spots" to mark the pages of a broken community. Ancient runes, now twelve years old. They tell a story of what happened in those houses when the water rose. Damage leaves its mark. If not on the front of a house or under a fresh coat of paint, definitely grooved into the minds of former dwellers.
Life cycles of damage and warning. We rupture, we repair.
As Mary Cornish writes: "Everyone knew the water would rise, but nobody knew how much." Well, maybe not everyone. There is a tendency, like Cornish's priest at Santa Croce, to delude ourselves into thinking that damage will never come to us, those who surely have God's favor. Then God leaves his floodmark high above our altars, staining the sacred and inspiring art of saints lives blemished and bruised, the wood of the crucifix bloated and soft, its paint chipped and peeling. "Come, Lord Jesus," we pray. God answers and enters, completely reorienting us to what is real. The water loosens our foundation. The surge washes away the furnishings of life. It drowns the roots and pulls them out of place. Maybe those who find your battered dwelling will paint a cross high above your altar. And how many will be found there, living and dead? Vulnerability is the price of reality.
The Advent of God comes upon us suddenly, flashing like a flood. "God entered as a river." Or maybe He is sleeping amidst the storm. For those of us who saunter on, ignoring or covering or forgetting our fragility, Advent's storm surge breaks the levee we built for protection. God's arrival provides no instant remedy. He invades our space and fills every milliliter with His presence.
So, remembering the Incarnation rightly requires us to remember our present sufferings rightly. Yes, we ought to *remember* the present, I think, because of the future and forward orientation that Advent establishes. One day this painful present will have new meaning in the light of restoration, when the structure is secured, the ruins repaired, and the gardens replanted to yield a harvest again. ("And, after all, we have a garden in our minds."—Wendell Berry, from *Sabbaths*) But right now, God is here, and everything is a mess.
The work of rescue and repair can be small and tedious, and often we must work without knowledge or assurance of successful end results. Like Cornish's art restorationist, we may see little more than possibilities. Advent reminds us that repair work is slow and floodwaters take time to dissipate and reabsorb into the earth. But it's never too soon to start the work of repair; the possibility of all-encompassing, backward-looking, full restoration is constantly before us and rich with longing during the Advent season. There are other artists committed to the labor of restoration and repair. Again, borrowing from Brother Wendell, "we must plight an ancient troth" and work "against our doom."
Prayer:
Flood me and fill me O River of God, Water of life and death.
For I am thirsty and parched, and I want you to enter my dwelling.
Break the levee I have built around me.
Break in and rush through the streets to my door.
Leave your mark high, rearrange the furniture of my life.
Rescue me from the roof as I plan the arrangement of my next garden.
You may flood me, but please never leave me.
Amen.
Evan Rosa
Director, Biola University Center for Christian Thought
Editor, The Table
Adjunct Professor of Philosophy
About the Artwork:
Oak Tree with Birds, 1st century BCE
Unknown Artist
Fresco
Villa of Livia, Rome, Italy
Palazzo Massimo Museum
The Villa of Livia is an ancient Roman villa in Prima Porta, a suburb on the outskirts of Rome. It was probably part of Livia Drusilla's dowry that she had when she married the Emperor Augustus, her second husband. She was the mother of the Emperor Tiberius, paternal grandmother of the Emperor Claudius, paternal great-grandmother of the Emperor Caligula, and maternal great-great-grandmother of the Emperor Nero. The Villa of Livia featured a series of rooms with blue painted ceilings opening onto an outside garden, hallways decorated in black and white geometric mosaics that led to the thermal baths and guest rooms, and walls frescoed in Pompeian red. The largest vaulted subterranean room contained superb illusionistic frescos of garden views which were removed, and following cleaning and restoration, were reinstalled in the Palazzo Massimo Museum, which is known for its exhibits from the early history of Rome.
About the Music:
“Your Labor Is Not in Vain” from the album Work Songs
Lyrics:
Your labor is not in vain,
though the ground underneath you is cursed and stained.
Your planting and reaping are never the same,
But your labor is not in vain.
For I am with you, I am with you.
I am with you, I am with you.
For I have called you,
called you by name.
Your labor is not in vain.
Your labor is not unknown,
though the rocks they cry out and the sea it may groan.
The place of your toil may not seem like a home,
but your labor is not unknown.
The vineyards you plant will bear fruit,
the fields will sing out and rejoice with the truth,
for all that is old will at last be made new:
the vineyards you plant will bear fruit.
The houses you labored to build,
will finally with laughter and joy be filled.
The serpent that hurts and destroys shall be killed,
and all that is broken be healed.
About the Composers:
Wendell Kimbrough is a songwriter and worship leader in southern Alabama who believes church music should simply be good music that informs us as we sing it together. Drawing on the sounds of American folk and soul music, Wendell writes scripturally-rich songs with singable, memorable melodies. His music has been embraced by a growing number of churches, young and old, large groups and small, contemporary praise bands and traditional choirs.
Paul Zach is the Director of Worship Portico Church located in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Isaac Wardell is a record producer and composer who primarily writes sacred music. He is the director of Bifrost Arts, an ecumenical organization closely linked to the Presbyterian Church in America that produces written and recorded religious music, and frequently performs at Christian universities and conferences. Wardell founded Bifrost Arts in 2008 "to enrich the Church and engage the world with beauty and truth through music beautiful enough that non-Christians are attracted to it." He is also currently the Director for Worship Arts at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Charlottesville, Virginia.
About the Performers:
In June 2017, a diverse group of Christian leaders and musicians met in New York City for the inaugural conference of the Porter’s Gate Worship Project. Spanning cultures, denominations, and traditions, the Project’s purpose is to engage culture and offer hospitality to the world, particularly through the unifying power of music. For three days, this group of artists, pastors, and scholars - including Josh Garrels, Audrey Assad, David Gungor, Aaron Niequist, Liz Vice, and Stuart Townend - engaged in meaningful conversation about the vocation of hospitality: “bringing work into worship and taking our worship to work.” The group also recorded a live, full-length album entitled Work Songs. The final song of the album, “Your Labor Is Not in Vain,” is a creative collaboration of Wendell Kimbrough, Paul Zach, and Isaac Wardell, and features Paul Zach and Madison Cunningham on vocals.
About the Poet:
Originally an author and illustrator of children’s books, Mary Cornish (b. 1948) came to poetry late in life. After a progressive disease struck her drawing hand, Cornish enrolled in the MFA program for creative nonfiction at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, where she soon became interested in poetry. Known for her thoughtful observations of domestic life, Cornish’s work also explores the relationships between art, artifice, and the past. Cornish is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and currently lives in Bellingham, Washington, where she teaches creative writing at Western Washington University.
About the Devotional Writer:
Evan C. Rosa is the Director of the Center for Christian Thought (CCT) at Biola University and Editor of the online CCT journal The Table. He studied philosophy and linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, before working in corporate communications. When not roasting, brewing, and/or sipping coffee, you can find him surfing or hanging out with his wife and two daughters.