The Jesse Tree: Light in the Dark

Advent 2021 – The Jesse Tree

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

Over a decade ago, in a season of grief and loss, our family found hope in the practice of reading and reflecting together through the narrative arc of scripture to the birth of Jesus.  Since then, our girls have grown from playful preschoolers to writing college essays.  This tradition has endured through adolescence and has become an anchor of connection and life.  

Why should the simple practice of gathering around an Advent wreath, lighting the appropriate candles, singing the Advent hymn, and reading then reflecting on these stories be so powerful?  While I’m sure there are multiple factors, including our family’s love for reading aloud, and parents vocationally immersed in teaching scripture, I suspect there’s something more primal, more essentially human going on.  

As the world gets darker and darker, we kindle fire.  As the world feels increasingly menacing, we tell stories thick with grace.  Jon, reflecting on the sweep of biblical history and his experience of Jesus wrote, “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”  (John 1:5) As we are caught up in the story of God and humanity, we find that light shines in tears, grief, disappointment, and struggle.  In a world without guarantees we give up the illusion that we can force the world into our image and take our place in the story begun in ages past in the hope of an age to come.  

Day Twenty-Six – Light in the Dark

I’ll never forget the first time we read Luke’s account of Jesus’ birth.  Most of the images we associate with the nativity story are from Luke.  There are angelic visits, shepherds, and the baby wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.  So many things to strike a child’s imagination.  “Do you girls have any questions?” I asked.  Our youngest pulled her thumb out of her mouth, “Yes,” she said, “what does, ‘rule over’ mean?”  

I’d read right by that phrase.  It had been in the first line of Luke 2, more of a comment than a translation, that emperor Agustus was ‘ruling over’ the whole world.  “It means being the boss over other people, whether they like it or not.” Sophia said.  Our youngest pulled her thumb out of her mouth again, “Oh… I like to do that.”  Her sister gasped, “Yeah! I hate it when she ‘rules over’ me!”  

Here, gathered around our wreath, was the primeval struggle of humanity.  Who gets to ‘rule over,’ and how do we feel about it?  The contrast in the story of Christmas is that the true king is comfortable with obscurity, revealing himself to the vulnerable, weak, and marginalized, by becoming those things too.  

The light that overcomes darkness, whether the darkness that puts rich against poor, nation against nation, or sister against sister, incarnates itself in and among the weak.  The God we find in the grit and grime, in the marginal and vulnerable, is capable of meeting us in our darkness and vulnerability too.  

What are the dark and difficult places you long for light?  How might this story encourage you?