That Voice in the Wilderness

Scriptures:     Isaiah 40:1-11, Mark 1:1-8

“Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.  Speak tenderly to Jerusalem…..”  What soothing words.  What promise there is behind them.  What hope for us as we move along our Advent journey.

But they do not come cheaply or without some pain.  This is the prophet known as Second Isaiah, and he is writing after the Israelites have gone into exile in Babylon – indeed, the Babylonian Empire has destroyed Jerusalem and carried the people off to captivity.  The disasters that First Isaiah had been prophesying about had come to fruition.  The people must have been wondering, “where was God in all their time of trouble?”

Second Isaiah was there to tell them that God was steadfast; God would always fulfill God’s covenant with the people, no matter what they did or what oppression they were experiencing. This is a gentle God, and the prophet offers pastoral images of the Lord:  “[God] will feed [God’s] flock like a shepherd; [God] will gather the lambs in [God’s] arms, and carry them in [God’s] bosom.”

But in order to hear this message the people needed to be prepared.  That’s a pretty common human phenomenon, isn’t it?  How often do you hear someone saying, “I don’t like to be surprised?”  There are those who get all curmudgeonly when confronted with a surprise birthday party.  If you’re in the audience for a talk TV show, like Jay Leno or David Letterman, say, there’s usually someone who warms up the audience before the star comes on in order to get them in a jovial mood.  Baseball teams have batting practice; operas have overtures; joggers getting ready for a run do warm-up calisthenics.  We don’t want to be thrown right into the middle of an event or a story.

This need for preparation holds true even in those more significant times of death and birth.  As we know so well from our own experience, it is the unexpected death that is the most difficult to understand – the most difficult to accept as being really real (there are moments when it’s still hard for Ann and me to accept that Bruce is gone).  We can talk all we want about the inevitability of death, but if we have not been prepared for it, there is a psychological hardship that is not easily overcome.  Similarly, the nine months that precede giving birth can be a time of preparation for parents as they become educated in birthing techniques and new attitudes that will be required by this addition to the family.  Preparation for birth needs to take place even before conception occurs.

And so with horns blaring and proclamations a-blazing all over the place here comes the ultimate preparer:  John the Baptist.  Isaiah had told the people:  “See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying in the wilderness:  ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make the Lord’s paths straight.’”  (You can just hear those opening notes fromGodspell in your mind’s ear, can’t you – “Pre-e-e-pare ye the way of the Lord; Pre-e-e-pare ye the way of the Lord.”)

It must have been odd for the people who heard him to think of John as a preparer for anyone – let alone the Messiah.  He was coarse, crude, with a one-track mind – the sort of man who demanded rather than subtly persuaded.  And it must have been odd for later Christians to imagine how the early Christians could have considered him as the preparer for Jesus.  In so many ways they were direct opposites.  John denounced the authorities, while Jesus loved them and tried to bring them into God’s Kingdom.  John saw the power of God’s terrible wrath, while Jesus saw that vengeance tempered by love.  John sought to bring judgment, while Jesus asked that no one judge another but leave judgment to God who offers it with wisdom and mercy.

Yet, in many ways, also, they were alike:  both died a violent death at the hands of the authorities; both sought to save those who were wandering through a meaningless, empty existence; both felt the Spirit of God powerfully at work within them.

So, John was an adequate human preparer for the man who was the Christ.  John was human enough to have many limitations – especially because of his condemnatory type of personality.  But he also had enough insight to recognize his limitations and point beyond himself to the Christ.  In many ways we can identify with John, particularly when we seek to talk about the importance of Christ for us with someone else (we are, in effect, announcing the coming of the Christ to someone else) – we are seeking to prepare for God’s coming into another’s life.

The whole season of Advent is a time of preparation.  Advent prepares us to prepare the world for the Christ’s coming.  And, as we have said, the world needs that kind of preparation.  The gospel writer John (different from John the Baptist) knew that when he said, “And the Word became flesh…” he was saying something that would completely shock the Greek world to which he was writing.  For the divine spirit actually to take on a human body was a concept completely unheard of to that time.  In order for the listener to accept this – in order for the light truly to come into the world, as John saw it – there would have to be preparation.  And so there was this man who, in the gospel-writer John’s words, “came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him” – in other words, that all might be prepared to accept this Christ, this true light of the world, this Word become flesh.

We know how difficult this is today.  To try to tell someone directly that Christ loves him or her is to invite rejection and ridicule – to be thought of as a “Jesus freak” – and so we don’t tend to do it very often.  The dynamic at work here is that practically no preparation has gone into helping the individual believe that this pronouncement of love could possibly be true.  This is why traditionally direct evangelism has little long-term effect, because inadequate preparation – in the form of being with that person and loving her or him over a long period of time – has not provided a sufficient foundation.

But now I’m going to do what if we were out in a car driving along would be called a “u-ey” – a 180-degree turn.  In one sense we can never be fully prepared for what the word of God does to us.  So often it will come crashing into the midst of our assurances, our convictions, yes, even our faith, and shout at us that the love of God means something different than we have taken it to mean.  John the Baptist – even with all of his pronouncements:  “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’”; “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”; and as we heard in Mark:  “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals.  I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” – even with all of these, he could not have completely prepared the people of his time for what was to come.  Nor should we feel that we can ever adequately prepare another for the power that Christ may have in their lives.  The meaning of Christmas, the meaning of Good Friday, the meaning of Easter can break in upon us in ways we least expect, and then it is to be seen whether the kind of preparation we have had in the past will be sufficient to interpret the new meanings that will come.

Helmut Thielicke, the famous German pastor and theologian, tells this story about the way the Christmas word can break freshly into unprepared lives:

“On the bookshelf opposite my desk there hangs a small photograph of which I am very fond.  I put it there so that my eye might fall on it now and then as I work.  It is certainly not an objet d’art.  Someone had merely snapped a picture of a scene in a Nativity play…..

“Frequently, one of my friends who stops in to see me picks up the picture and says with some surprise (sometimes because it is in the middle of summer), ‘Why do you have this picture hanging here?’…..

“In these cases I like to keep my visitors guessing for a while.  I ask them who they think these people in the picture are.  And the strange thing is that almost all of them give the same answer.  ‘Well now, who could they be?  In any case, one is struck by the concentrated, almost rapt, expressions on their faces.  They are obviously “in it” heart and soul and it is clear that for them it is far more than a mere play.  They are probably people from a Christian congregation…..’

“Sometimes I can hardly wait until the guessing game is over to set them straight.  ‘You’ve missed it altogether,’ I say to them.  ‘But I can understand how you arrived at your guess.  These people are really close to the Christmas miracle and have taken it to heart.  They are by no means merely playing at worship, but are really “in it”.  [You see] these men are [not] members of a Christian brotherhood…..  It is a photograph of a Christmas celebration in a prison.  Some time ago I spoke to the prisoners and visited them in their cells.  They listened – well, I can only say, like hungry and thirsty men.  The prison chaplain then gave me this picture.  “Look at this young fellow here,” the chaplain said.  “He killed his friend in a fight over a wrist watch.  Year after year he has always been entrusted with the same part.  He kneels before the crib and says,

I lay in death, in darkest night;
Thou wert the Sun that brought to me
My life, my light, my soul’s delight.

I tell you that when you hear these words out of that mouth, it goes right through you.”’”

“…the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord…..’”  Yes, we need to be prepared; but at a deeper level we need to be aware that what we are prepared for may not always be what we expect to be prepared for.  We would like to be prepared to be comforted and to be held gently in God’s hands, like a shepherd gathers the lambs into his bosom.  But there are times when that voice crying in the wilderness calls us to look inward at our own falseness and inadequacies or to look outward to those injustices still rampant in our world.  It is then that we come before this communion table in order to renew our preparedness – to anticipate that we can never fully be aware of what the voice in the wilderness is calling us to be – but also to know that whatever it may be in our communion with God and with one another we stand ready to respond.

 

Amen.

 

Dave Pomeroy

First Congregational Church/United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
December 4, 2011