All Flesh is Grass…All Flesh Shall See the Glory

The Second Sunday of Advent, December 10, 2023

Today is the second Sunday of Advent, and the emphasis of today’s readings is mostly on preparation for the coming of the kingdom of God, or what my friend Chuck Queen just calls “God’s World.” Christians believe that God’s World was revealed in the incarnation of God within the finite life of a human being, Jesus. But also that God’s World comes in the ultimate sense that I spoke about last week where all of what we experience here in this world of joy and sorrow gets taken up into the fullness of God and given ultimate meaning.

Last week I spoke a bit about longing. Today I want to talk about this period of waiting between the first coming of Jesus and the final glory when, as St. Paul writes, God will be all in all. Because waiting amidst human suffering is not easy.

Mark opens his Gospel by telling us that it is the good news of Jesus Christ. What is the good news in today’s texts for our lives here in 2023? How can they help us be better humans and better Christians?
There are four themes here that I want to highlight.

• First, in Isaiah we read that all flesh is grass. Meaning that we are finite beings with a limited lifespan, in the whole scheme of things no longer than that of a blade of grass.
• Second, while it is true that all flesh is grass, it is also true that all flesh shall see the glory of God.
• Third, we see the idea of the wilderness as a place from which new pathways to God’s greater life emerge.
• Fourth, we see that the baptism of repentance is a baptism of the Holy Spirit.

Let’s look more closely at these four themes.

All Flesh is Grass

First, all flesh is grass. We hardly have to be reminded that we are finite beings, or that everything alive will eventually die.

I came face to face with that hard truth in the last couple of weeks after I had to say goodbye to my beloved dog, Bobby. Some of you met him. He was my happy little terrier mix who charmed just about everyone he ever met. When he literally ran into my life in a classroom in Claremont, CA, I had no plans to get a second dog. I already had my 50 lb. lab mix named Cotton and my cat Chelsea. But Bobby wormed his way into my heart and our lives.

Cotton started declining when I lived in Tennessee, and I had to say goodbye to him just before I moved to Florida in 2021. He was fourteen and a half years old. I was devastated by that loss. And while I originally believed Bobby would live a much longer life, he had a heart condition and the medications for that taxed his kidneys. He wasn’t even 12 years old when we said goodbye. So, yes, I know the truth in the statement that “all flesh is grass.”

All Flesh Shall See the Glory of God

And yet the prophet Isaiah tells us that when the glory of the Lord is revealed, “all flesh shall see it together.” All flesh shall see and be in the presence of the glory of the Lord. This idea reminds me of something from psychologist Carl Jung’s autobiography. In that book, he wrote,

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away – an ephemeral apparition…Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.

You may not be familiar with the term rhizome. A rhizome is a type of plant that has individual stems growing above ground but which are all actually one organism, connected by a common root system, underground. In fact, one of the oldest organisms that exists on earth is an aspen grove in Utah called Pando Populus. The entire system spans 160 acres and is actually only one tree.

The many slender tree trunks growing above ground are an optical illusion because the real life of Pando Populus is the bigger life underground. So when Carl Jung talks about how the blossom blooms and fades, and blooms and fades, to me that is like our own human lives that seem so short. We bloom and we fade like blossoms, but the divine life of God from which we all draw life never fades.

And so even though we perish as individuals, each one of us, we are promised, will ultimately be held within God’s divine life. St. Paul says this in 1 Corinthians when he writes,

…for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. But each in its own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.

And then Paul goes on to say, “When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him, so that God may be all in all.” As my friend Doug King likes to say, Paul does not say “all in SOME.”

All flesh is grass – we live but a brief time on this earth, but all flesh will be taken up into the glory of God when God draws all things to God’s self.

The Wilderness is the Birthplace of New Paths

Now that’s good news in terms of the way things will ultimately turn out, “but Pastor Sheri,” I can hear you saying, “what about right now when things aren’t going so well for me or my family members? What do we do when we can’t find our way, when it feels like we’re stuck in this wilderness of not knowing, of struggle, or despair?”

Here we are in the wilderness, and what do our texts today have to say about that? They tell us that it’s the wilderness from which new ways, new directions emerge. Remember that the Israelites wandered in the wilderness for 40 years before being led into the promised land, and Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness before beginning his world-changing ministry. The Israelites had to step into the Jordan River to reach their new life on the other side. And those baptized by John went down into the same river lost and struggling but came out of it raised to a new life.

The Baptism of Repentance is the Gift of God’s Spirit

Mark tells us that John came preaching a baptism of repentance. These days, we typically hear that word “repentance” as being about feeling sorry for the bad things we have done. But the Greek word used here is metanoia, which is so much more than our English word repentance. Metanoia is about going beyond your current mindset, or heart orientation. It’s about embracing a completely different and transformed way of life.

John says that his baptism is with water, but that Jesus will baptize with the Holy Spirit. Throughout the history of Christians following the way of Jesus, the act of baptism is meant to symbolize the dying that has to happen before we can be raised to a new life, a new way of being, the life of the Spirit of God within us. Baptism is meant to be about our willingness to let go of our old, ego-driven mindsets so that we can let God’s way be our way.

On our own, we struggle with letting God’s way be our way. We get very attached to old habits and beliefs. I wrote a song about this very thing called “Crack in the Door.” It’s about those times when we so desperately want to be free of something that has kept us in bondage, but maybe we’re not quite ready to let a long-time belief go. In those moments when I can’t honestly pray that I’m willing to let something go, I’ll pray that I’m willing to be willing to let it go. And I have found that just that crack in the door is enough for God to begin to work.