2 Samuel 7: 1-11; Luke 1: 26-42
There are daffodils on my dining table today, bright yellow trumpets, with a sweet song. My garden is barren and brown, the trees are bare, and the rose bed is at last empty of the withered rose trees that never took. But there are daffodils on my table. Spring flowers in wintertime. And only yesterday I saw on a leafless rose bush down the street a bloom of palest pink, shaking in the winter wind. Here in the cold of winter, a rose is growing.
Isaiah foretold that there would be a new shoot 'from the stump of Jesse', one who would revive a degenerate kingdom, bring to bloom a nation which had fallen into decay. And years after Isaiah, the rose-tree symbol was the inspiration for many medieval songs and legends about Jesus or, more often, about Mary. The rose grows when brutally cut down to a stump, beauty blooms from dry sticks. And there is the miracle too of the tender and fragrant flower that grows on the sharpest thorn. Later in the service we will sing a carol that is based on a German medieval song. In the original text, the rose was Mary, but the translator has carefully disguised this and concentrates instead on the 'flower' born of Jesse's tree - Jesus himself. But the image is as powerful either way - a rose blooms in the cold of winter, at the darkest midnight hour.
Like most Protestants, we think little of Mary. Along with the Christmas lights and baubles, she is one of the decorations we unpack every year for Christmas, a strange and welcome seasonal presence who will go back in the cupboard in the New Year. When Mansfield College Chapel was trying, not long ago, to make itself more ecumenical, someone noticed that among the many figures in the statues and stained glass, there was no Mary. And someone bought a small wooden statue and placed it on a shelf down one of the aisles. It was not long before she was christened nervously 'Our Lady of the Radiator'. The traditions which venerate her are strange to us.
'Hail, Holy Virgin, most blessed Mother
of God, bright star of the sea.
Hail, ever glorious, precious pearl,
beautiful as the lily, shining
and giving perfume as the rose.'
Or, as the hymn goes, 'Lo, how a rose is growing, a bloom of finest grace'. Perhaps such images do not stir us and they seem to belong to a distant time, and people different from us - like the songs of courtly love or the fairy tales we left behind as children. Amidst the robust realism of our reforming faith, these seem incongruous sentiments - like daffodils on a dining table in the darkest hours of winter. But then maybe Christmas is all about incongruity, of things being where you wouldn't expect them to be, of kings in stables and angels in sheepfolds and of God in human flesh. And certainly Christmas is about new life where all seemed dead and dying.
But if Mary is at best marginal to our faith, then Elizabeth is even more so. I have included her today by adding some verses to the lectionary reading. Her story is part of our faith too. And her story begins with suffering and loneliness and shame. She was barren and she was old - she was what some people would so unkindly and cruelly have called 'a dried up old stick'. She did not conceive. This was her fate. She would wait for the questions to come whenever she met someone new. 'You haven't any little ones yourself?' And sometimes she would deny that she desired them rather than admit this limitation of her powers or this lack of the blessing of God. But sometimes she would be honest and the tears would flow and she would be pitied. And in the darkness of the night she would often weep for the countless babies she had not borne. But then, late in life, in the winter of her years, beyond the time for such things, she conceived. And Elizabeth had a cousin called Mary, a young woman with a very different story. She was too young to conceive, too innocent, not yet tested in the ways of life. But, like Elizabeth, she found herself pregnant. With her also it was not the time for such things. There would be a scandal. There would be talk. And her body was young, so young to carry a baby and bring it into the world. And she was frightened. She hurried away to visit her cousin Elizabeth. It might have been that Mary's easy fertility would mock Elizabeth's long struggle, but these two women recognised each other's pain and joy and they held each other.
The stories of these two women seem far apart. One pregnant too young and afraid. The other pregnant at last after long years of pain, yearning and shame. But, like so many women today who in such different circumstances lie next to each other in a hospital ward, they learn to share each other's pain and hope. And though their experience is different, they have much in common. Both Elizabeth and Mary know that new life comes to bloom where it is unexpected and where some think it ought not to be. A rose grows in the cold of late winter, a daffodil blooms too early, the blossom comes before even the first frost has sparkled on the ground and a common dandelion pushes its sun-like head through the concrete-cracked pavement of a city street.
Many of the common symbols of Christmas take up this theme. Here the sacred story, secular celebrations and the old pagan memories unite. We place evergreen trees in our homes and decorate them, to celebrate the life that is persistent through the winter's cold. We gather holly and ivy to decorate our homes. We celebrate the birth of Christ at the turning time of the old winter solstice when the darkest hours of winter begin to turn at last and the brightness of the Sun returns to end the darkness. In all of this we are joining in ancient celebrations of the strength of life and light - which though fragile and tender will not be defeated by the forces of darkness, sin and death.
There is a Scandinavian legend called The Story of the Christmas Rose. The story tells of a family of robbers who live deep in the forest. They have been made outlaws by the bishop and so they have to live in the forest because they have nowhere else to go. One day, the mother of the robber family is out begging and she sees that the gate of the monastery garden has been left open. She peeps in and admires the honeysuckle, roses and jasmine. When the abbot discovers her in the garden he expects that she has never seen such flowers and wants only to steal them. But she tells him that this garden is nothing when compared to the garden they have every year in the forest at Christmas. In that garden, which blooms only on Christmas Eve, there are flowers you would not touch they are so beautiful, Christmas roses with frail silver petals and pale gold stamens. The abbot longs to see the flowers and he asks whether she would take him there on Christmas Eve. He says he will ask the bishop to pardon the robber family if only he can see the roses. And so when Christmas Eve arrives the abbot walks deep into the forest. At first the forest seems as dark and gloomy as ever. But then the darkness turns into a pink dawn, the snow melts from the ground and emerald shoots grow before his eyes. And there, at his feet, the abbot sees the silver and gold flower of the Christmas rose. He thanks God for allowing him to see this miracle. He takes back some roots from the roses and plants them in the monastery garden. Nothing happens in the spring or in the summer, but on the next Christmas morning the silvery flowers grow with their golden stamens. And, the bishop sends a pardon to the robber family and they leave the forest at last and make a home among their friends.
Here again is the miracle of beauty and life growing in unexpected and infertile places - in the tangled depths of the forest instead of the neat monastery garden, among the robbers and outlaws instead of the holy men of the monastery. This kind of story is told so often in so many different ways - it speaks of a truth we all know or have learned. That new life comes not only where it is deserved, expected or planned, not only where the ground is fertile or the time is ripe. New life comes often when it is unexpected, when hope has faded, when all seems cold, hard, dried up - or yet too young and unready.
There are many kinds of winter, many kinds of barrenness and infertility, many kinds of emptiness with which we all live. There are many sweet and beautiful things for which we all long. For many of us, the landscape of our lives looks often barren and bleak, with dried up stumps of trees and chill winds of fearfulness. Wherever you look you can see the bleakness of mid-winter. At the turn of the Millennium, the people of earth are braving the cold together. Look only to Chechnya to see the chill, the churned up mud, the shattered homes and pinched fearful faces. The churches speak of an ecumenical winter, in which the warm hope of former dreams for unity has faded. And as the individual people we are, we know, each one, the cold touch of sadness, of fear, of sorrow. We know our own hearts and wills to be sometimes dried up as deserts, as we try to pray but words don't come, or as we look like a sorrowing stranger on the barren stretches of the lives we lead.
But the story of Christmas tells us that no matter how cold it is, no matter how bleak the winter of whatever kind, that God will grow new life where it doesn't seem possible. And not just new life, but life as beautiful and tender and fine as a rose. The desert will bloom like a rose. It matters not much whether you think of Mary as the rose, or her child Jesus, or whether you find the rose of finest grace in some other gift of God. For as another carol goes,
'King Jesus hath a garden full of divers flowers'.
There are daffodils on my dining table. There are roses in the cold of winter. Dried up sticks will yet blossom into life. The holly bears a berry. And deep in the deepest forests of the world's pain and your sadness the Christmas roses wait to bloom. Amen.
© 1999, Susan Durber
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