Isaiah 40:1-11; Mark 1:1-8
On Monday, I drove to Springfield to see
my parents. The day began in some
anxiety. I felt like I needed to go see my parents, that this
was an important time for me to show up, not just talk on the phone. At the same time, nine hours of driving and
chatting and driving some more was a lot of time to be spending at a pretty
busy season of the year … to say nothing about all the e-mails I haven’t been
returning in any kind of timely way. But
I needed to take a road trip, so off I went.
Actually, I like driving. I like having the space to listen to NPR and
take in the wide-open countryside. There
are days when my perspective becomes pretty small, I’m afraid – only looking a
couple of feet in front of me at a computer screen or a few more feet across
the table at the other folks in that hour’s meeting. It was good to look out farther, into the open
space of late-autumn-into-winter, across the west Missouri countryside.
It was a dark day, as so many days are
this time of year. Clouds hung low in
striations of slightly different shades of gray. Bare trees poked into the gray; naked
branches reaching up like black capillaries, the trees’ darkness broken only by
a few ghostly gray trunks of sycamores among the oaks and hickory. The ground added a little contrast – fields
of short, light-brown grass, with slightly darker brown prairie grasses waving
in the wind above it. It all looked like
an Andrew Wyeth painting, and just as cheery.
Though you’re never more than a few miles
from a gas station and convenience store on this route, it was easy to imagine
the landscape around me as wilderness.
Wilderness looks different in different geographies – sometimes dense
forest, sometimes rugged hills, sometimes barren desert. For me, the wilderness was west Missouri in
early December, rolling by outside my car.
There’s something about the wilderness. Sometimes it calls to us; sometimes it scares
us to death. But always it’s potent – a
place of revelation, if we’re willing to let God be revealed.
A couple of our readings for this second
Sunday of Advent take us to the wilderness.
There, in the windswept desert landscape of Judea, with rocks and dust
all around and just a meager stream running through it, we come upon John the
Baptist. He’s there to “prepare the way
of the Lord [and] make his paths straight” (Mark 1:3). He calls God’s people to “a baptism of repentance
for the forgiveness of sins,” and “people from the whole Judean countryside and
… Jerusalem were going out to him … confessing their sins” and marking their
repentance with a rebirth in the River Jordan (Mark 1:4-5). Hearing this story may seem like an odd way
to prepare for Christmas. Here we are – shopping,
trimming the tree, going to parties, minding our holiday business – and we run
smack into a prophet dressed in camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his
waist like the prophet Elijah from Israel’s history, eating locusts and wild
honey rather than smoked salmon and Christmas cookies. John the Baptist and his wilderness can certainly
get in our way this time of year, like a drive through the west Missouri
countryside we don’t have time for.
But God puts John the Baptist into Advent
for a reason, of course. He is indeed
preparing the way for the coming of the Messiah in the Gospel story, with John
acting in Elijah’s role to signal the beginning of the end of the age. But John the Baptist is out there in the
wilderness for each one of us, too – waiting for us. There’s something to the fact that John the
Baptist sets up shop out in the desert, away from busy Jerusalem, away from the
demands of every day. John the Baptist
doesn’t come knocking on our doors, delivering introspection and repentance
like an Amazon box, left for our convenience.
Instead, John the Baptist makes people come out to the wilderness to
find him. And the amazing thing is, they go – “all the
people of Jerusalem,” the Gospel writer says.
Sure, it’s hyperbole, but it makes the point: Even the busy people of Jerusalem knew they
needed a road trip to the wilderness.
And what happens there? Is there something mystical and magical about
the wilderness that lets us find God in a way we typically can’t? You hear people talking and writing that way
sometimes, and we might hear it in today’s Gospel story, too – all those
people, heading to the wilderness in search of God. But I don’t think that’s how it works. At least that’s not how it works for me. In the Andrew Wyeth landscape of a December
west Missouri, God didn’t make some dramatic personal appearance.
So, what is it about the wilderness
then? Why do our Scriptures and our
hearts take us there? I think the first
reading this morning gives us the clue. Because
in Isaiah’s poetry, we don’t hear about the people entering the wilderness to
find God. We hear about God entering the
wilderness to find God’s people. In this
reading’s historical moment, the people of Israel are in exile, held captive in
Babylon after erring and straying from God’s ways like lost sheep over the
centuries. But now the time has come,
says a voice from heaven. “Comfort, O
comfort my people,” the heavenly messenger tells the prophet. “In the wilderness, prepare the way of the
Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” (Isaiah 40:1,3) The mountains shall be plowed down, and the
rocky valleys shall be filled, and God will come across the desert toward Babylon
to lead the captive people back home.
“The Lord God comes with might” to “gather the lambs in his arms” and
set them free, the prophet says (Isaiah 40:10-11). The people aren’t heading to the wilderness
to find a God they’ve lost. God heads
into the wilderness to find the people God loves and longs for.
But the irony is that the people had to
lose something they held tightly before they could receive the healing return
that God wanted to offer them. It took
the loss of their freedom and control during 50 years in exile before the
people were ready to hear that they had served their term and their penalty was
paid. They had to lose the illusion of
self-sufficiency, the conceit that they knew best, in order to make space for
God to act. And once they let it go, God
came to bring them home.
I don’t know what you may need to lose
this Advent, what you might be clinging to, but I’ll bet there’s something God’s
asking you to let the River Jordan wash away.
For me, I think it might have to do with wanting to see things fit together
neatly, wanting to see my work all sewn up.
I remember, three years ago, talking with a priest in Manchester,
England, on my sabbatical, the Rev. Nick Bundock. Nick and I were having lunch at a lovely spot
in his church’s neighborhood, which reminded me so much of Brookside it was a
little eerie. We were talking about the
challenges of parish ministry, and how to engage with people in the
neighborhoods around our churches, and how to deal with impossible expectations
… in other words, how to do this work faithfully. Nick said, “You know, I spent a long time
thinking my call was to sort things out for God. God would show me some problem or challenge,
and I would think, ‘I’ll take that on; let me manage that one for you.’ I think I’m finally realizing,” Nick said,
“that God isn’t asking me to sort everything out. God’s asking me to be there and help while he takes care of it.” I felt like I was looking into a mirror
across that lunch table. But three years
later, I’m still guilty of thinking I’m supposed to sort out the mess for God
rather than working with God to love people through it.
That’s probably what I need to take to the
River Jordan this Advent. That’s
probably the wilderness I need to open up for God to enter. Because, like I said, it’s not so much about us
going to the wilderness to find God; it’s about us inviting God into the
wilderness we ourselves carry. It’s
about us preparing the way of the Lord in our own hearts and souls, making the
rough places a plain so that the glory of the Lord may be revealed within them.
So, where’s your wilderness? Finding it is not necessarily an easy
journey, and my hunch is that you don’t have time to take it. But this Advent, go ahead and take a road
trip to find your wilderness. Give
yourself the early Christmas gift of looking honestly at your life and asking yourself,
“Where do I need healing? Where do I
need grace? Where am I trying too
hard? Where am I too scared to try hard
enough? What am I hanging onto so
tightly that I can’t open my arms to the Lord who’s waiting there to embrace
me?”
My guess is that, once you find your
wilderness, the King shall come precisely within it. As I left Springfield on Monday afternoon,
the darkness of the day was just as deep as it had been that morning. The browns and grays were all still there,
the trees standing lifeless and the fields painted dirty beige. Or, at least they were until the clouds gave
way for a few moments. And as they did,
the Son repainted the scene. The edges
of the gray clouds were lit with pink and purple; and the dirty beige fields
blazed gold; and the darker beige prairie grass blazed orange; and the sickly
gray sycamore trunks shone silvery white.
And in the wilderness, the glory of the Lord was revealed.
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