Isaiah the prophet peered over the people and saw an image: fruitless.
In a little more than a year you overconfident ones will shudder, for the grapes will fail and the harvest will not come. Shudder, you complacent ones; tremble, you overconfident ones! Strip yourselves bare and put sackcloth around your waists.Beat your breasts in mourning for the delightful fields and the fruitful vines, for the ground of my people growing thorns and briers, indeed, for every joyous house in the jubilant city. For the palace will be deserted, the busy city abandoned. The hill and the watchtower will become barren places forever (Is. 32:10-14 CSB).
The lives of the people and the leaders of those people would turn the land into a fruitless field. Their injustice. Their unrighteousness. It stripped the land bare.
For those who have woke eyes and willing sight, the fruitlessness of our own land is easy to spot. The political posturing while the most vulnerable die from coronavirus and the systemic inequities magnified by the virus. The active racism impacting black bodies and brown bodies and the aggressive hands and silent lips permitting it from white bodies. The massive unemployment and the loss of security, stability and calling and purpose felt by those who have had to file. The faith questions rising to the surface which don’t feel safe to ask out loud.
But even in fruitlessness, there is hope.
Isaiah the prophet peered over the people and saw another image: fruitful:
until the Spirit from on high is poured out on us. Then the desert will become an orchard, and the orchard will seem like a forest. Then justice will inhabit the wilderness, and righteousness will dwell in the orchard. (Is. 32:15-16 CSB)
God will pour out his Spirit and the desert will become an orchard. Justice and righteousness will grow where once only weeds could grow. Fruitlessness will become fruitfulness. The Spirit of God is powerful enough to transform all that makes our lives and our land barren into lives and a land that is bountiful.
It could be that this image lies behind Paul’s words about the “fruit of the Spirit” (Gal. 5:22) and his call for us to therefore “walk by the Spirit” (Gal. 5:16) and to be “led by the Spirit” (Gal. 5:18) and to “live by the Spirit” and “keep in step with the Spirit” (Gal. 5:25). God pours out his Spirit in us so that his orchard might replace our desert. And we have each been invited into this work by walking, following, living by, and keeping in step with the Spirit.
God sees the barrenness of our land and longs to replace it with his bounty. God grieves the fruitlessness of our land and dreams of supplanting it with his fruitfulness. This is the work of the Spirit. And this is the work of the people of the Spirit. Onto the fallow and parched soil of this country, devastatingly depleted by prejudice, poverty, power, privilege, pain and plagues, God is pouring out his Spirit and calling all followers of Jesus to be his farmers. God is commissioning us to co-labor with Spirit to break up that hardened ground, plant the seeds of justice and righteousness, and water them and nurture them, believing that we too will see our desert transformed into an orchard.
