The weathered dates on the earthen plate are 2000 years old.
The boys gape. They press their fingers against the glass of the exhibit, try to touch time.
I read the museum's plaque in hushed tones: Wizened and carbonized, these dates were discovered in the caves of Qumran... in the caves with the Dead Sea Scrolls.
It's the scrolls we've come to see. 
The exhibition, 200 artifacts and eight fragments of scrolls, all on loan from Israel's Antiquity Authority, fills the basement of the Royal Ontario Museum. The space is dimly lit, nearly empty on a late Friday afternoon. The city's out doing Christmas shopping. Do we remember Who's come?
The boys linger long over the coins from 1 B.C. The exhibit quotes the words of Jesus: "Then he said to them, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's."
Tallest Son looks up at me. "You think He touched these, Mom?"
I have few words on hallowed ground.
"Take a picture, Mom?"
I point to the signs prohibiting cameras and shake my head.
"Etch the memories deep, sons."
I stand long before one stone.
The rock's inscribed in Hebrew with the words "to the place of trumpeting." I read the museum plaque, noting this as the most significant archeological find of temple excavation. This stone once stood in the southwest corner of the Herod's Temple, the second temple, where, according to ancient historian Josephus Flavius: "it was custom for one of the priests to stand and to give notice, by sound of trumpet" (The Jewish War, IV, ix, 12) to mark the beginning and end of Sabbath.
I read the words on museum plaque and I don't think I've read it right so I read it again, slowly: "Jesus of Nazareth, as an observant Jew who came to the temple, would have passed by this stone."
I gape.
I stand in the place of trumpeting and want to trumpet, proclaim: God with us.
According to the museum's display, the third word of the Hebrew inscription into the stone, the word broken off, can be interpreted as either "to declare [the Sabbath]" or "to distinguish [between the sacred and the profane]."
All is now sacred.
Outside the snow falls and Toronto's busy, congested streets, dressed in its holiday style, sing with silver bells, silver coins. God has walked this sod. God has walked this sod. The whole planet's holy, glorified by the Creator, the Coming, the Christ and who can speak profanities, desecrate the Temple of here by treating the divine as trite, the hallowed as commonplace?
"Profanity is failure to see the inner mystery," writes Elisabeth Elliot.
Advent scrubs the world of its profanity.
After we've gazed upon a first century tunic, the soles of sandals from the time of Jesus (God has walked this sod), an inkwell found at Qumran from the time when the Word that spoke the world into existence came as the Word held by the skin.... we step into the darkness of the inner gallery.
I find myself before the fragments that have kept the faith.
I hadn't read before we came to the museum, which of the 900 Dead Sea Scrolls, texts of the Old Testament from 2nd century B.C. – 1st century A.D., would be included in the exhibit. It hadn't really mattered. To see any of the scrolls would suffice. Only a mere 8 of the 900 have made the journey from Israel. No one is viewing one particular climate controlled unit in which the scrolls are housed, so we approach.
"Which one is this?" a daughter breathes the words heavily in the quiet, shadowed vault.
"This is...." and something catches.
"This is ... " I close my eyes and speak the words softly.
These words I know by heart.
A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse;
from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.
The Spirit of the LORD will rest on him...—
We're standing before a 2,100 year old Jesse Tree.
A Jesse Tree that hadn't yet seen the star shining in the manger, a Jesse Tree that still only prophesied His glorious coming ... a Jesse Tree that believed. What ancient hand, a hand like mine, wrote of this Jesse Tree while waiting, longing, yearning for its fulfillment?
Children crowd around to peer into the glass boxes, into Hebrew words painstakingly inked across parchment made of animal skin.
I want the Word written on my skin.
"I thought they would be one long scroll," a son murmurs. "I didn't know they'd look so... "
"Fragile." His brother finds the word for him.
"Oh, but see..." I choke the words through burning emotion, liquid feelings, slowly trace the outline of the fragment on the glass.
"Aren't these the strongest Words ever written? Words that have beaten back time, that have spoken of Him beyond time Who steps into time, to deliver us out of time... Centuries of humanity building lives on these very words... and they hold. Don't let the tatters fool you, boys. There were never stronger, surer words."
At home by the fireplace, our Jesse Tree stands on the other side of Calvary's tree. Our Advent is one of waiting for the coming we know that comes, of prophecy fulfilled, eternal life shooting from the truncated.
My hand runs across the glass of the display, somehow brushing against the hand who wrote these Advent words, who believed the inner mystery of Christ in Christmas before there was a Christmas.
I want to tell him: It came true. It all came true.
And yes, Virginia, you'd better believe there really is a Jesus.
Jesus, the I AM who is, and advent, thousands of advents, washes out our profanity and the snow falls outside on a world made sacred by the shoot that sprung forth.
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Photos: from our visit to see fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls this Advent
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