The Jesse Tree: Offering: How to Find Hope in a Despairing Season

Advent 2021 – The Jesse Tree 

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

Yesterday a group of friends gathered, virtually, to pray for a former student in critical condition.  The outpouring of love and faith was inspiring.  Still, it’s impossible to see a woman, typically one who radiates joy, a wife and mother of young children, so close to death in what should be the prime of her life.  

Earlier that day another friend texted to say that her father, who had just entered hospice the day before, had passed away.  

Right before bed Sophia shared that a friend, one we’d hoped to see over Christmas, is in the ICU with COVID.  

Times like these I don’t want to pray, contemplate, or even pass on fruit of contemplation.  How do we find hope when rage or despair feel more natural?  

Day Sixteen – Offering: 1 Kings 17 & 18

Today’s readings center around various types of offerings.  The fruit of the land, a symbol of the covenant relationship between God and Israel, have been offered to Baal, a local fertility god, including young children. God’s response is a drought.  This isn’t arbitrary and capricious on God’s part.  If king Ahab insists on leading Israel in offerings to a fertility god as a way of ensuring a bountiful harvest, God will disrupt that plan by reducing the land’s fruitfulness.  

In the midst of this grand narrative of conflict between king and prophet, Yahweh and Baal, our story zooms in on a poor Sidonian woman.  She, like everyone around her, is suffering because of the drought.  When she meets Elijah and he asks for food, her response is pointed on the edge of despair.  “As the Lord your God lives, I have nothing baked, only a handful of meal in a jar, and a little oil in a jug; I am now gathering a couple of sticks, so that I may go home and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it, and die.” (1 Kings 17:12) But, as this vulnerable woman offers hospitality to the prophet, she and her son are both sustained.  

This story is layered.  This Sidonian woman, from the community where Baal was worshipped, is sustained in the drought by offering a portion of her food to the fierce Yawist prophet.  

It seems to me we’re in a drought, of sorts.  Compassion, cooperation, resiliency, adaptability, and stability all feel in short supply.  While the bitter fruit of fear, rage, and despondency seems to multiply.  

In this season of drought perhaps we are invited to offer a portion of the meager emotional resources we have, to pray with those who haven’t given up hope, to grieve despite the fatigue, to pray our rage, in the hope of transforming it.  

What limited resource could you offer to God today?