When I was twelve years old, our family moved to a house larger than the one we had been in. With a larger house came more yard, and with more yard came more plants to care for and more lawn to mow.
If anybody was going to do any gardening at our home, it would have to be my father. My mother, so far as I can remember, never ever so much as touched a tree, picked a flower, clipped a blade of grass, or any such thing, in her whole life. She absolutely cared nothing for green and growing things. You have heard of the radical envrionmentalists who hug shrubs, because they love them so much? Well, my mother snubbed shrubs, because she disdained them so much. And so it was clear from the very beginning that if we were to have any garden at all, it would have to be my father’s project.
As for me, well, twelve years old is prime lawn mowing and leaf raking age. When we moved to this house, the first thing I noticed was just how much lawn there was to mow, and worse, how much trimming to do. My father didn’t go with this business of mowing and leaving the sidewalks cluttered with overhanging grass. No, not him! If you mowed for him, you had to clip, with hand shears, because, you know, when I was twelve years old, they hadn’t even invented edgers yet. In fact, if they had power mowers, we didn’t know anything about them. Push, push, push! You clipped every inch with hand shears; and I discovered, with horror, that we had moved to a corner lot. That meant I had to clip both sides of not one, but two, long sidewalks, plus the curbs, plus the pathways to the front door and the side door. When I first saw that lawn, I saw my summers melting away into an endless routine of pushing, clipping, sweeping, and hauling, the likes of which would stifle any hopes whatever about baseball or bicycle riding.
But there was one bright spot, one encouraging thing. On one side of our back yard, there was a large tree, and under that tree, spreading in a wide bed, were hundreds of little green plants I was told were called “Lilies of the Valley.” As far as the shade of that tree reached, under its shade these plants had seeded and were flourishing. It was a large bed, and, glory be, it did not have to be mowed. It was not grass and it could stay just as it was, undisturbed.
My mother said, “I don’t like those lilies of the valley. Can’t we have grass there instead?” I held my breath. My father said, “Are you going to pull up the lilies and plant the grass?” My mother said, “I don’t like yard work.” Duh. As if we didn’t know. I felt like saying, “I don’t like yard work either”, but somehow guessed that that was not going to be persuasive. I held my breath and heard words that remain music to my ears, as my father rendered his verdict, “Well, I like the lilies, and besides, it’s just that much lawn that Joe won’t have to mow.!” Wow! Christmas in June! He not only made the right decision; He even understood my need!
I found myself liking, no, loving, that little green plant, the lily of the valley. To my mother it was a sprawling weed. To me it was like good medicine, it was a relief, it was healing. The lily of the valley saved me from almost endless drudgery for summer after summer!
Solomon sang of the Christ who was to come, “I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys. As a lily among brambles, so is my love among maidens”. And as last week we saw that the red, red rose was a sign of the price to be paid, the ransom to be given, so that our lives might flourish; so this week we discover that the lily is the sign of God’s healing love. It is the mark of His freely given life. And it points, this lily of the valley, to something wonderful. “I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys. As a lily among brambles, so is my love among maidens.”
And the prophet Hosea, one of my favorites, ends his prophecy with a reference to this flower, the lily of the valley, the sprawling weed that gives medicine and healing to God’s people:
Hosea 14:4-7
Nestled in the Chrismon Tree, among all the signs and symbols of Christ, is not only the rose, proudly and grandly displayed, as we showed you last week; but also humbly, almost apologetically, the lily of the valley.
Now these messages I am bringing you are not horticulturally pure. I want the Garden Club folks to know that up front. In fact, one of the Garden Clubbers, the one I happen to be married to, said to me last Sunday, “You know, it’s not really clear that the rose mentioned in the Bible is the same as the rose we know today.” And that is true. See what a mess you get into when you havea Bible scholar in your home! Yes, it is true that the word translated “rose” in last Sunday’s text is sometimes translated “crocus”, sometimes “jonquil”. One scholar says that the word might just be a generic word for “blossoming flower” and that we can never be sure to what species it referred. Nonetheless, the church, over time, has associated the passage I used last week with the rose. Long usage has made it a useful symbol. But not horticulturally pure.
The same is true today. It’s not clear that the flower referred to in the Bible is the more-or-less wild flower we know as “lilies of the valley”, which push out of every nook and cranny in Kentucky, but not necessarily in Israel. Nor it is clear that the lily mentioned in the Scripture is identical to the kind of lily we use at Easter as a sign of resurrection. But again, the long tradition of the church speaks, and gives us insight, even if it isn’t necessarily horticulturally correct. So please put aside your botany books and let’s open the heart to what God will teach us about His Son, our Savior through the symbol of the lily. The lily of the valley: is it a sprawling weed or a medicinal herb?
I
The prophet Hosea teaches us, first of all, that when God comes in Christ, it will be to heal our disloyalty. “I will heal their disloyalty.” God comes in Christ to apply medicine to the wandering, vacillating human heart. For you see, we ourselves are like the lily of the valley in one way: we act like sprawling weeds. We wander. We turn from this to that, from this fashion to that fad, and we find loyalty to our God a burden and a chore. The hymn-writer has us pegged when he says, “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love.” There is something about us that, like the lilies of the valley, wants to explore and to pop up where we don’t belong and are not supposed to be. Spreading weeds.
Last week I spoke of a fundamental reality called sin. I suggested that there is at rock bottom only one human issue, and that is what to do with sin. One way to describe sin is to see it as disloyalty. It is instability, it is the flirtatious heart. If you know your Bible, you know that this prophet from whom I have read this morning, this man Hosea, was burdened by a wife whose faithlessness became legendary. Hosea’s wife, Gomer, left him and became a temple prostitute, lusting after any man who gave her a wink and a nod. Hosea had had first hand encounters with the issue of disloyalty.
But you see, we are no different, many of us. We are no different. It is not so much that we have run after other sexual partners. It is rather that we have run after other Gods. It is that, although maybe, some day, somewhere, we walked down some aisle and took some pastor’s hand, and a few weeks later came into the waters of baptism and professed our loyalty to Christ ... we did all that, but now what’s the story? We feel distracted. We feel halfhearted. We feel less than excited about that commitment. Life has gotten too complicated. Our real loyalties are to our jobs, our hobbies, our friends, our social set. Our ultimate loyalties are to our savings accounts and to our upwardly mobile careers, to our standing among our peers. And it’s not so much that we have rejected Christ, turning our backs on Him; but it’s more that other things, other pursuits, have taken first place in our hearts. Other things just look a whole lot more interesting, and our loyalty to Christ, well, some other day, when I have more time. We are like that lily of the valley, that sprawling weed, which just takes over everything in its path and chokes out all other growth. We didn’t mean for it to take over everything; but, left to its own devices, it will. Sprawling weeds. The sin of disloyalty.
But when God chose to come in Jesus Christ, the word made flesh, He chose to come and heal our disloyalties. He came to make so clear and plain who He is, that once you have looked into His eyes, you can never be the same. The Bible tells us that in many and diverse ways God has spoken to us, through the law, the prophets, the sages; but now, in these latter days, He has spoken to us through His Son. He has come in a definitive, unique, certain way, and we can no longer be wishy-washy about Him. No longer can we put off the question about our loyalties. No longer. Either we choose Him or we reject Him. Either we accept Him or we set Him aside. But He does make us choose.
“I will heal their disloyalty.” He comes to make His blessings known, far as the curse is found. We may be like sprawling weeds, all over the place; He is the lily of the valley, a medicine for our wandering hearts.
II
But if God’s coming in Christ is meant to heal our wandering hearts, did you know that His coming as the word made flesh is also His own decision to stay the course? God’s own decision to stay with us? Did you know that in the very heart of God, there has been a conflict over what to do with us? But that His choice to come in Christ means that in the end His love has won out? Did you know that even God has had mixed feelings about this world of His? But now we can count on God’s love having the final say?
I know that what I am saying sounds a little strange. How can we speak of God having mixed feelings? Is it meaningful to speak of God’s being uncertain what He will do?
Read the whole prophecy of Hosea. Read there the portrait of a God who sometimes is disgusted by our sin, but then at other times is melted by our plight. Read throughout the matchless story of Hosea about the God who at some times knows that we deserve judgment, and He must punish us. His justice demands no less. He must punish us.
But read on, on the next page, in the next breath, about a God whose love is so deep, whose care is so broad, that He will go to any length, bear any burden and pay any price, to bring us back unto Himself. Page after page, chapter after chapter, in this Hosea’s prophecy, we learn of the intense heat of God’s wrath and then we discover the far-reaching power of God’s love.
And both are true. Both are right. We want to forget, sometimes, that God can be a God of judgment. We want to make Him into a doting Santa Claus, who exists only to dole out whatever we want from Him. But we dare not forget that before God approaches us as joy and delight, He comes as judgment, wrath, holiness. He does so because we are sinful, disobedient, and willful. He must bring judgment.
And so sometimes we experience God as something like a sprawling weed. Like the lily of the valley under my father’s tree, which, if left unchecked, would have taken over everything and would have choked out every other form of life in its way ... like that lily of the valley, God seems like a sprawling weed to us. He judges us!
You can put so many of the social ills we experience today in just that category: God’s judgment. Because we have glorified violence in our popular culture, we reap violence on our streets. Because we have played fast and loose with our sexual morality, we reap babies making babies. Because we have let greed run rampant, we are reaping the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. In countless ways, we are still encountering the judgment of almighty God. And we must. We must. He is no doting Santa Claus.
But, I tell you, in Christ, it is God’s love which finally wins the day. In Christ, it is the gracious love of God which has the last word. After all the back and forth, after all God’s turning between judging and loving, between punishing and being tender, here is the final word, here is the verdict: “I will love them freely, for my anger has turned from them.” Hear it again: “I will love them freely, for my anger has turned from them.”
Believe it or not, that twelve year old boy that wished he didn’t have to mow and trim all that lawn, that boy sometimes experienced the heat of his dad’s anger and judgment. Sometimes I cheated on that mowing job. Sometimes I tried to bully my six-year-old brother into doing most of it. Sometimes, many times, I sinned and I got caught. And so I felt the heat of my dad’s anger. I caught the business end of his strong arm. But what remains with me to this day is not only that he punished me and judged me, not only that he paddled me. What remains with me unto this day is that at the end of the day, when the house was still, and I was in bed whimpering and upset, my dad would creep upstairs to my bedside, he would put his hand in mine, he would tell me that he loved me. He may have had to whip me earlier in the day; but at the end of the day, it was that he loved me.
And so Immanuel, God with us. Not God against us, at the end of the day, but God with us. God caring for us. God loving us so much that he gave his son to be with us. “I will love them freely, for my anger has turned from them.” We thought our God was like the sprawling weed, an intrusive, life-choking growth. But He turns out, at the end of the day, to be medicine for the heart, balm for the spirit. He is the lily of the valley, the bright and morning star, He’s the fairest of ten thousand to my soul.
III
And so, on this Advent morning, because Christ has come, you and I can flourish. Because Christ has come, we no longer have to remain in the shadows; we can grow. You and I no longer cower in the darkness of despair. We can blossom. Because Christ came to heal our disloyalty and because He came as the expression of the love of the Father, we have all we need to live with victory in our voices and hope in our hearts.
Sings Hosea, “I will be like the dew to Israel; he shall blossom like the lily.” “I will be like the dew to Israel; he shall blossom like the lily.” Because God has loved us in Christ, we can emerge from every adversity and not be discouraged. We can walk through every trial, and find victory. We can “blossom like the lily.”
As I look out over this congregation, I am seeing not just faces, but stories, life stories. I am seeing men and women, some of whom began in poverty, but in Christ you found enough, and you have blossomed like the lily. I am seeing some whose losses have been great: spouses, children, other loved ones, and it has felt at the time as though someone reached in and tore out your very heart, when that death came. But in Christ you found strength, and I know some of you who, because you have lost so much, are able to give so much to others who need you. You have blossomed like the lily. Yesterday I sat at a banquet table, where one of our own was honored after a long and distinguished career as an educator, and heard from both her and her husband, first of all, words of thanks to a God who had brought them a mighty long way. In Christ they have blossomed like the lily. And then I drove across town to a hospital bed and shared with another of us, having a lot of pain and facing surgery, and from her lips came the witness that God has been with her all the way, God is there with her in that hospital room, God will love her through her surgery. She too is blossoming as the lily.
And it should be no surprise, should it? For the lily we use not just at Advent, but also at Easter. The lily we use to speak of the risen Christ, the Christ who suffered the worst this world could throw at Him, but who lives. He lives! Christ Jesus lives today. You ask me how I know He lives? He lives within my heart, and within the hearts of so many of you, who have come from the shadows to live in the sunlight. “I will be like the dew to Israel; he shall blossom as the lily.”
Life may sometimes look like a sprawling weed, the kind my mother didn’t want to see out there in her back yard. But if you wait for the father’s last word, there is medicine for the soul and balm for the weary heart. “In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, with a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.” Yes, Lord. Immanuel. God with us.
