The First United Methodist Church of Napa, CA
December 7, 2008
The Second Sunday of Advent
Scripture Readings:

Hebrew Scriptures – Isaiah 40: 1-11¹

Comfort, 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.

Gospel Lesson – Mark 1: 1-8² (An Adapted and Inclusive Text)

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

As it is written in the book of the prophet Isaiah, “Look out, I’m going to send my messenger before you, who will prepare your way. A voice cries in the wilderness: “Make ready a way for God, clear a straight path.” And so it was that John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. All Judaea and all the people of Jerusalem made their way to John, and as they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, they confessed their sins. John dressed in animal skins, and ate Kosher locusts, which he washed down with gulps of wild honey. In the course of his preaching he said, “Someone is following me, someone who’s even more powerful than I am, and I am not fit to kneel down and undo the strap of his sandals. I’ve baptized you with water, but the One to come will baptize you with the very Breath of God.”

“What Are You Waiting For?”

“Road Work Ahead!” I get a sinking feeling whenever I see that, or a long line of orange cones and flashing lights ahead of me – four lanes of traffic merging into one or maybe two (if we’re lucky!) while driving along the freeway. It’s the great slowdown. And you know what that means: you’re not going to make it in time – wherever you were going. I want to just sail along in my car; all of this stuff is just going to slow me down! And yet most of our roads are in a sad state of disrepair – they need upgrading; they need work.

As I’ve suggested earlier (to the “child in each of us”) the same thing can be true of our spiritual lives. We want to just go, without needing to do anything or to think too much about it. We may get a bit frustrated – even feel something like “road rage” – when we’re asked to do the work, the repair, the repaving. We don’t want to be slowed down, delayed, or have to take some alternate route!

What are we waiting for? It’s a good question to ask ourselves here in our yearly journey through Advent. There’s only one road to Christmas; and it always goes by that “big dipper,” John the Baptist, waving his arms like some traffic-control flagman in the wilderness and saying to each of us, “You better watch which way you’re going. You’re about to be drenched in the Holy Spirit by somebody who knows a whole lot more about it than I do!”

There’s no way around this guy, John. He seems like a pretty intimidating figure – calling us to deeply examine our lives, to turn around if it’s clear that we’re going in the wrong direction, to do the road work. The more that we want to just sail through life, to rush around not paying any attention to the breath of God blowing in our faces and whispering in our ears, the more we hear that cry: “Slow down!” The more that we focus on schedules and destinations, the more orange cones are put in our way. The more we become possessed by the frenzy of December, the more we come across the almost intimidating figure of the big baptizer, John, who stands there right in the middle of the road and says to us, “Prepare the way of the Lord.”

And sometimes it does mean make a U-turn, change direction (That’s simply and quite literally what “repent” means.). Under the heat of John’s gaze, if you do become aware that you’re going the wrong way, then turn around. Take a new path. Open your eyes to both the beauty and the need for compassion in your life. Look for the presence of God. Open your arms and your heart to the true harmony and well-being of Advent.

There are those who find this season to be a trying time – to be particularly stressful, painful, even lonely. It can be a holiday road full of pot holes. As one person said, “Once Thanksgiving’s over I just want to get to New Year’s Day and be done with it!” But this Advent road is meant to take us on a different journey. It’s not just about preparing, yet again, for December 25^th, but presenting a path for us that leads to a life of integrity, purpose and shalom.

One of my favorite poems reads like this:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.³

Today we take our second step of the journey into the season of Advent. In spite of all its ancient cosmology and seeming irrelevance, we have started – yet again – on a journey of watching and waiting, of turning around and preparing, and finally of seeing and understanding. Oddly enough, though, this season didn’t start with a celebration of something that actually happened – like stories of a birth or a resurrection. Instead it started with a strange ordinariness – even emptiness. Last week also saw how the designers of the Lectionary delved way into the collection of stories by that storyteller we call Mark; and there they found, and grabbed, a certain kind of story. A story often regarded by many interpreters as an apocalyptic warning about the end times. And then they dropped this so-called “end-times” story, also right at the beginning of the season. “Stay awake!  Keep alert!” Why? Otherwise we may miss what actually is already here. We may miss the signs of the fullness and wonder of an incognito God in the midst of ordinary events – or if we want to follow Mark’s line of thought: you will miss the importance of the ending of my story, so get the beginning clues locked into your brain! Here come a couple of the storyteller’s early clues: it’s about a human messiah and a wild-eyed charismatic named John.

Another favorite poet and prophet of mine is Annie Dillard. In her stunning book, For the Time Being, she opens our eyes to the Mystery of the present moment. Her words might serve as an antidote, too, to our tendency to over-sentimentalize this season. I’d even go so far as to say that her book ought to be required reading for anybody trying to understand postmodern Christianity:

There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation…. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never less…. There is no less holiness at this time – as you are reading this – than there was the day the Red Sea parted…. There is no whit less might in heaven or on earth than there was the day Jesus said, “Maid, arise” to the centurion’s daughter…or the night Mohammed flew to heaven on a horse. In any instant the sacred may wipe you with its finger…. In any instant you may avail yourself of the power to love your enemies; to accept failure, slander, or the grief of loss, or to endure torture…. 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.”⁴

So what does all of this say to us, in “the year of our Lord” 2008? Look for the clues of this behind-the scenes, mystery-producing, incognito, and yet community-building God all around you. Stay awake!  Be alert! Slow down! Advent is a time to be surprised by the ordinary and empowered by the symbolic as, together, we re-imagine the world. And Advent is a time to discover the God-given moments in our ordinary daily events: in the blaze of color and rustle of autumn leaves swirling in the wind...in the realization that rain isn’t a singular thing but made up of billions of individual drops of water, each with its own destination and timing...in the flares of a friend’s passion to shape justice with a new vision of what “community” means.... These are Advent moments.  These are sacred moments: sensing the presence of the holy in the symbolic and the ordinary.

We are one with the Mystery and Source and Sustainer of all that exists. May we rejoice in our simple human capacity to wait and to watch, and in our waiting and watching to experience moments of real wonder and awe, to appreciate, to rejoice, and to give thanks.

But look out. Clear the road! Somebody’s coming.

* * *