I don't know how many thousands of people were in the British Museum in London the day we visited. It was late July, and in the cavernous entry room the crowd was large and noisy. I looked at the signs pointing in every direction for various exhibits and wonders to see, I heard the buzz of people speaking a dozen different languages, and then ... it all stopped. It was quiet. Movements around me crept to slow-motion speed. There it was, right in front of me. The Tree of Life.
I had read about it, even described it in a sermon once. The Tree of Life was made by artists from the war-torn country of Mozambique. It's constructed out of metal; you might glance at it and notice nothing more than that the old metal pieces were put together in the shape of a tree. But if you look harder, the pieces of metal stop you in your tracks. Grenades. Pistols. Mines. Chains. Machine guns. All were so rusted that the color seemed to drip from one item to the next. They were real, too. They had been collected from houses and roadsides, dug up by plows trying to plant crops and restore some semblance of civility to a land that has recently known only the pain of civil war and death.
I can't say all that I felt as I stood frozen in front of the Tree. Sad. Angry. Moved.
I had this desire, this urging for something different, a different world in which people made different choices. I wanted things to be a whole lot closer to the way God had apparently intended them to be from the beginning. I had a sense of nostalgia, a longing for, as C.S. Lewis says, "the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited."
Advent seems to me to be a time for such things. We get hints. We wait. We wait to celebrate something that has already happened and hear the beauty of the story unfolding that culminates, surprisingly, in apparently nothing more than the entrance of a baby into the world. The child, of course, grows and does far more than shaping some rusty weapons into a tree of peace. Jesus' climb to a tree of death and out of a tomb of darkness allows people back into the presence of God. People like us. The world is totally changed, and yet not changed. The scents and echoes and bits of news that became manifest finally in Jesus are more than enough, yet we wait for more that is still to come. Another entrance, another coming at which point more than a museum crowd will freeze in amazement. The whole world will finally be put right. Come, Lord Jesus.
Dan Baumgartner is senior pastor at Bethany Presbyterian Church on Queen Anne. This article is reprinted, with permission, from the Bethany Briefs newsletter.
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