The Second Sunday of Advent
Scripture
Isaiah
40: 1-11[1]
1Comfort,
O comfort my people, says your God. 2Speak
tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her
penalty is paid, that she has received from the LORD’S hand double for all her
sins.
3A voice
cries out: “In the wilderness prepare
the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. 4Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places a plain. 5Then
the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the LORD has
spoken.”
6A voice
says, “Cry out!” And I said, “What shall
I cry?” All people are grass, their
constancy is like the flower of the field.
7The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the
LORD blows upon it; surely the people are grass. 8The grass withers, the flower
fades; but the word of our God will stand forever.
9Get you
up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with
strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear; say to
the cities of Judah, “Here is your God!”
10See, the Lord GOD comes with might, and his arm rules for
him; his reward is with him, and his recompense before him. 11He will feed his flock like a
shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom,
and gently lead the mother sheep.
Epistle
– 2 Peter 3: 8-15a[2]
8But do not ignore this one fact, beloved,
that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are
like one day. 9The Lord is
not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you,
not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance. 10But the day of the Lord will come
like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the
elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and everything that is done
on it will be disclosed.
11Since all these things are to be dissolved in
this way, what sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and
godliness, 12waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God,
because of which the heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved, and the elements
will melt with fire? 13But,
in accordance with his promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where
righteousness is at home.
14Therefore,
beloved, while you are waiting for these things, strive to be found by him at
peace, without spot or blemish; 15and regard the patience of our
Lord as salvation.
Gospel
– Mark 1: 1-8[3]
1The beginning of the good news of Jesus
Christ, the Son of God:
2As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, “See,
I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; 3the
voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight,’”
4John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness,
proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 5And people from the whole Judean
countryside and all the people of
“But What Sort of People Should We Be?"
Surrounded by children during a worship service one time, a
pastor asked them to tell him what they knew about John the Baptizer. One little girl's response was to twist up
her nose and blurt out loudly, "Yecchh!
He's the one who ate bugs!"
While that doesn't seem the most significant aspect of John's legacy, it
has found a definite place in the story and at least one child's imagination.
I'd venture to say that it's not likely that any of us will
see images of John the Baptist in department store windows this holiday
season. He's a man of the desert,
clothed in the rough garb of a wilderness prophet, who eats whatever he can
find in such a desolate place. His
message is never about himself, though; he points toward another one whose
message and life will be far more powerful than his.
It's good to be reminded at the very beginning of this
story of this glimpse into John's logistics, of the stuff of prophecy,
discipleship…vocation. The voice sent to
cry out from that wilderness is not a disembodied voice. It's a human voice, an eternal Word, maybe,
but given expression in and through our humanity. It's important for us to know that. To prepare the way for the incarnation a call
has gone out to real people, people who need food (however exotic!), clothing,
shelter and companionship. People
responding to a sacred call such as this nevertheless have real needs; they too
have dreams, hopes, frustrations…disappointments. We are chosen as we are – with all of the
demands that that makes on us, with all of the ways in which such a sacred call
mixes with the complexities of our personalities and all that it means to be
human – and asked "to prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the
desert a highway for our God."[4]
Modern technology may have caused us to discard all of
these biblical images as anachronistic, at best, and pointless, at worst. The advances of industry have enabled us to
level entire mountains and build highways in areas that ancient people would've
considered impossible. I've watched our
son's neighborhood in
One of the tenets of Zen practice, I understand, is that if
we "sit" long enough we'll begin to recognize that the
"now" encompasses both our collective past and our unknown future. This "now" is the advent that we
live into in new ways every year. I
think that all of our biblical readings given to us for today underscore this
understanding of reality – as the "then," "now," and
"not yet."
Both John and Jesus would have us frail and fallible people
go out into the wilderness of our own lives in order that God might meet us
there – in the hardness, the desolation, and the dryness of ourselves. It's there, by way of a human voice, that we
hear a divine and eternal Word spoken to us.
It's in our mortality, finally, in the very midst of our faults and
frailties, that the "glory of God" is revealed – if it ever is. The way of God is in and through such wilderness. And, yes, I understand: it's most often not a way that any one of us
would choose or a place that we might otherwise want to be. It can be a fearful and formidable
place. As someone noted once:
There is
a tendency for us to flee from the wild silence and the wild dark, to pack up
our gods and hunker down behind city walls, to turn the gods into idols, to
kowtow before them and approach their precincts only in the official robes of
office. And when we are in the temples,
then who will hear the voice crying in the wilderness?[5]
You and I need to hear that voice. We need to be that voice, reminding us of our
mortality, calling each other to repentance, but also offering each other
tender consolation. It is the work of
wandering in the wilderness – and no more important than now when our church as
well as our country seem to be going the wrong way. Our journey into and through the wilderness,
though, must be reclaimed as what it once was:
preparing the way for an encounter with God – indeed, it prepares us for
just such an encounter that we might otherwise ignore. This journey is the privileged place of
encountering all that we would name as holy.
We would do well to pray with these same words of the poet:
…Lead me
at times beside the still waters;
There
when I crouch to drink let me catch a glimpse of your image
Before
it is obscured with my own….
Preserve
my tongue and I will bless you again and again.
Let my
ignorance and failings
Remain
far behind me like tracks made in a wet season….
But let
me leave my cry stretched out behind me like a road
On which
I have followed you.
And
sustain me for my time in the desert
On what
is essential to me.[6]
Given our destiny, then, we ought to learn how to be fully,
happily, human while capable of imagining a radically different world than the
one we live in now, willing to journey into the wilderness to meet the God who
promises such a world, faithful in inviting and sustaining everybody else on
the journey, working to prepare the way.
This is one of reasons that I always love what one of my
favorite authors – poet, prophet, essayist – Annie Dillard has to say. She invites us to open our eyes to the
mystery of the moment. Her words might
serve as an antidote to the temptation to fall into over-sentimentalizing this
season. Listen to this:
There
were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation….There
never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.
There is
no less holiness at this time – as you are reading this – than there was the
day the
Purity's
time is always now…."Each and every day the divine voice issues from
Sinai," says the Talmud. Of eternal
fulfillment, Tillich said, "If it is not seen in the present, it cannot be
seen at all."[8]
We might do well, then, to
ask ourselves at some quiet time where and how the sacred – some of us would
call it God – comes into our lives.
Becoming mindful of these times, and giving thanks for them, can help us
to hear the message and finally become the people that we've been created to
be. Trying to make the best of things –
in ourselves and in our world – we always will be faced with mountains of
habit, with fear of the unknown, fear of disapproval, as well as a wilderness
of uncertainty and any number of threats to our self-image. We need to remember that we've already been
comforted and reassured. Now is the time
to be the body of Christ that we claim to be.
* * *
[1] Second
Isaiah is the anonymous prophet of the late exile. Preaching somewhere around 540 BCE, he
accentuates the aspect of hope for the depressed and impotent exiles. This new era in
[2] Writing somewhere between 125 and 150 CE, the author of 2nd Peter appeals from Rome to his audience in the general area of northern Asia Minor where some members of the Christian community were disparaging belief in the so-called Parousia (Greek for "presence"), or Second Coming of Christ. They were actually having one hell of a good time, justifying their immorality on the basis that the Christ hadn't come back and it didn't look much like he ever was – in effect insinuating that either God was no longer in control of the world's history or, worse, never really had been in control in the first place (Just as an aside: If there is a "second coming," as far as I'm concerned it happens when we take the reality of the Christ into our hearts and incorporate him into our lives – i.e., in my theology there never will be a miraculous and apocalyptic intervention by God; if the course of history is going to change, for better or for worse, it will be because we make it happen.).
There's an
interesting parallel in the literary histories of this reading and the one
today from Deutero-Isaiah: both were
written after the destruction of the
[3] In the
Gospel According to Mark it's the activity of John the Baptist that heralds the
beginning of the good news concerning the life of Jesus (The Greek term for
"good news" – euangelion – implies a kind of
imminent salvation comparable to the work of God that we've read about in
Isaiah 40: 9, et al.). The expectation of the early church was that
with Jesus' return as "the risen Christ," an entirely new order of
creation would be established. That it
didn't happen in their lifetimes became both an embarrassment and a deep
disappointment (We see its vestiges in the millenarian movement – as
"prophesied" in Revelation 20 – that, oddly enough, is still being
kept alive today.).
[4] Isaiah
40: 3b.
[5] Chet
Raymo, The Soul of Night: An Astronomical
Pilgrimage (
[6] W.S. Merwin,
"Lemuel's Blessing," The New
Yorker Book of Poems (New York: Viking Press, 1969).
[7] I've retained this quote as it is, but am not quite sure who Dillard is referring to as "the centurion's daughter." It may be that "leader" referred to in Matthew 9: 18 (the Greek doesn't say he was a leader "of the synagogue") whose daughter (later in that brief story with two plots) Jesus takes by the hand and raises from a coma-like "sleep" (v. 25).
[8] Annie
Dillard, For the Time Being (