Like Grass

Little Bluestem, Isaiah, and the Comfort of Humility I The Word in the Wild, Advent 2, Year B

Isaiah 40:1-11

Rust colored and knee height, with silky tufts spilling from the top, Little Bluestem fields beckon from the roadside. They are a sign of winter, every bit as much as oaks bare of leaves or the sound of snow geese overhead in their tangle of v-shaped formations. Since I was a teenager, I would traipse across these fields in search of LeConte’s Sparrows, an elusive, orange faced bird that winters in Arkansas.

Grasses are often overlooked. There are lawns, of course, a bland mix of invasive species trimmed to be a uniform carpet of green. Those grasses don’t have much to offer in terms of shelter or food for the wild creatures I want to see and host in my yard. But native grasses and sedges are the base layer of any healthy ecosystem in my part of the world. It is these low lying, often ignored plants that maintain the soil, building it year after year with the death of their leaves and stems. It is their seeds, that come each fall to sustain the life of birds and small mammals through the winter, planing another generation that will grow in the spring. Grasses are humble plants in the most literal sense. They live low to the ground, and their life and death both work to build the humus of the soil.

Isaiah, this Sunday, begins from a humble place. Two centuries have passed since chapter 39 was written and in that time, Judah has been decimated, held captive in Babylon. Now, Babylon itself has fallen to another empire, and it is in this empire’s interest to send the Jewish people back to Jerusalem. Whatever the motivations, its a move that has been longed for with deep agony and now that longing is being answered with realization. A new “Isaiah” takes up the pen of the poet to finish the story that was broken off all those years ago.

The poet-prophet seeks to offer comfort. There is hope that is being kindled, a return that lies on the horizon. And yet, this Isaiah doesn’t want return to mean a loss of the lessons of exile. Israel has been humiliated and now is the time for it to continue to live in that lowliness, that humility, if it is to survive and flourish. So in answer to the question, what to say in such a time, the poet hears a message about that fragile and lowly family of plants—grass.

“All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever” (40:6b-8). These may seem strange words to offer after the call to “Comfort, O comfort my people” (40:1), but in the way of humility, there is deep wisdom of about what actually makes us flourish.

Little Bluestem is perennial grass, but in the winter months, when it has turned from green to its beautiful rusty brown, the life of the plant above ground has ended. But this ending is essential, for it is is from these dead stems and leaves that the soil will be renewed. Where new life grows is from the roots, those unseen and secret places where for a whole season the work goes quietly unseen. At the roots, each individual plant is connected to a larger network of life, often linked through the filaments of fungal mycorrhiza.

This reality of grass offers an important lesson for our own life, especially in those moments of return and hope in which the energy of renewal could lead us toward arrogance. Our life does not come from itself, nor is it sustained by its own energies. As our reading from Isaiah next week will say, “as the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations” (61:11). It is from God that our life comes, it is in God that our life should be rooted, it is to God that we go when all we have and are is ended. Our growth, our moment in the field, is brief. But there is comfort in that briefness, because we are welcomed into a wider wholeness—one held by God, a reality that will never fade away. It is rooted in such soil, dying in the humility of letting go, that we will find the true life that is not dependent upon our own achievements. To know that we can rest there, even as we fade like the grass, is a word of comfort in a world violently clinging to what it cannot release.

Among my favorite winter scenes is a field of bluestem, waving in the wind. With the breeze I can see the tufts of seed, released and spreading. These seeds move into the bare ground, onto the open places needing protection from erosion. They establish themselves and become the first agents of life on land that has been decimated. So it is to be with our lives, if we let go and allow God to use us in the greater wholeness of his kingdom. But to do that, we first have to remember, that we are like grass, a fading flower, sustained only by the word of God that stands forever.