The Jesse Tree: Our Primal Need for Meaning

Advent 2021 – The Jesse Tree 

This is a series of reflections on daily readings designed for families during the season of Advent.  

There’s something primal about our Advent celebration.  It begins in fire.  The striking of a match.  The lighting of a candle atop an Advent wreath.  We sing a song of mourning, O Come, O Come, Immanuel, keening for God to come and ransom his people.  Perhaps it this raw emotional realism that drew us to celebrate Advent in the midst of grief and loss.  

I sincerely hope that you are not in a season of grief, but if you are, you’re in good company.  Perhaps reflecting together will warm our hearts toward God and one another.  

Day Two – Creation, Genesis 1:1 – 2:3 

I’ve never really been interested in arguing about creation and evolution.  As much as apologists and new atheists thump their chests, I can’t bring myself to care all that much.  Perhaps it’s because both seem to be reading an origin story as though it’s something different.  This beautiful Hebrew poem isn’t interested in evolutionary biology or carbon dating.  It seems, to me anyway, to be focused somewhere else.  

Do we live in a meaningful universe?  Now, this is a question to keep you up at night.  Is there meaning in the data of quarks and quasars?  Is there significance in the stories we tell, or the songs that birds sing?  

The creation story speaks to this question.  In the ancient world, just as in the modern, most origin stories pointed towards meaninglessness or to political expediency.  We can assert, quite plausibly, that human beings are cosmically irrelevant.  In this view we are the random recombination of particles and proteins organized to pass on genetic information.  But a vision like this is hopeless.  It’s answer to the question, “do we live in a meaningful world,” is an emphatic, “no.”

It’s also easy to punt this question into politics.  Ancient systems of thought imagined power as coming from the gods, contemporary systems of thought see power as coming from popularity. Meaning is only relevant to the degree that it creates, sustains, or challenges systems of power.  Meaning, in this vision, is simply a mask we put on our thirst for power.  

In contrast the ancient Hebrew origin story asserts that the breath of God hovered over the primordial waters.  Speech, order, symmetry, relationship, and harmony are not accidental.  They are good gifts.  The reason we can grieve and lament in the face of loss is that life is not trivial, meaningless, or reduced to power plays.  Instead, right in the middle of the primordial chaos is the speaking, creating, generous, and good God.  

We tend to think, when faced with chaos, that God is absent, hidden, or far off.  How would a vision of God present in the midst of chaos help you to face grief with greater hope?