December 4, Second Sunday of Advent: Isaiah 11:1-10; Matthew 3:1-12

My wife has an office in a building where one of the tenants periodically discards dried-up orchid plants. They all end up in our home. My wife sees something more in these discarded plants than dead stumps. And sure enough, with care and in time, tiny shoots and buds appear on the dried-up, seemingly dead branches.

Sometimes we treat God’s children in similar fashion. This is tragic. They may be the homeless or those with physical or developmental disabilities, discarded on our streets. Racial profiling is another way we treat people as disposable, viewing them with suspicion and behaving accordingly, sometimes with ghastly consequences.

There are plenty of reasons to be fearful these days—we don’t need anyone to fan the flames of fear. In a May article in the Atlantic, writer Neal Gabler addressed his economic anxieties as a self-described middle-class American. He confessed that if he were faced with a $400 medical bill or car repair, he would not be able to pay it. According to Gabler, nearly half of Americans would have trouble finding $400 in a crisis. This produces fear, which in turn leads to a preference for building walls instead of bridges, to blaming and demonizing others as the source of our insecurity. In the face of dried-up stumps we become vulnerable to feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. And so we give up on others and discard them.