Sermon — December 6, 2020
The Rev. Greg Johnston
For two years, my cell phone used to drop every phone call I made on a certain stretch of my commute. Without fail, just as I drove past Walden Pond on the border between Lincoln and Concord and passed the famous cabin site where Henry David Thoreau had retreated to the woods, my cell service would cut out, as if the ghost of Thoreau himself was reaching out to block my call: a little moment of victory for the wilderness in the heart of suburbia.
Thoreau wrote in his book Walden, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” It’s easy to make fun of Thoreau’s gravity about his time in the wilderness. Thoreau’s tiny home in the woods wasn’t a remote cabin somewhere deep in northern Maine. The cabin site just a twenty-minute walk from downtown Concord, a walk his mother famously took from time to time to pick up his laundry and bring him some lunch. It wasn’t exactly the Oregon Trail out there.
John the Baptist, too, turned to the wilderness to discover what was most essential. When John wanted to lead the people toward a life of repentance and holiness, he didn’t go to the Temple, where major sacrifices were offered twice daily amid a constant hum of smaller prayers and offering; he didn’t go to the synagogue, where the people prayed together every day and studied on the Sabbath. He went out into the wilderness. But John’s wilderness was not much further from civilization than Thoreau’s was; not even thirty miles outside Jerusalem, an easy day’s travel for the crowds who came to see him preach and to be baptized in the Jordan. And in fact, if his wilderness had been more remote, his ministry would have failed. The crowds couldn’t come to hear John’s message if he’d been too far away for them to find.
Both Henry David Thoreau and John the Baptist recognized that it’s not a place’s distance from civilization or its terrain or its vegetation that makes a place a wilderness; it is, in a sense, its strangeness, its distinction from ordinary life. And so, Thoreau leaves bustling nineteenth-century Concord for a one-room cabin by a nearby pond, and John dresses himself in camel’s-hair and lives off the land, and they straddle the border of society: one foot out in the wilderness to give a new perspective on their ordinary lives, and one foot staying in contact with the world to share what they’ve learned.
It’s in this sense that we are living in the wilderness now. When I look back over family photos and memories from these months, I’m struck by the wild juxtaposition of the ordinary and the unbelievable: a selfie with Murray sitting on my top of me, playing with a dandelion, while I lie on the grass, masked in the midst of an eerily-empty park on a warm spring day; a photo of Alice and I both “working from home” in the car, she in the front seat and I in the back; the cheery music still playing loudly in the grocery store as cashiers and customers shout at each other to be heard across six feet of plexiglass and surgical masks. It’s this uncanny resemblance to the ordinary that really gets me. It’s not as though we’re living in the apocalypse our movies imagine, the aftermath of nuclear war or an asteroid strike. It’s just like ordinary life in the status quo ante, but twisted and blurred at the edges into something that’s just close enough to the normal to feel bizarre.
But it’s in this strangeness that God comes to dwell.
Isaiah 40 marks a new moment in the history of the people of Israel. The first thirty-nine chapters of the book tell the story of Isaiah’s ministry and prophecies in the city of Jerusalem, as it faces multiple invasions and the threat of destruction. The city escapes once, and the people become over-confident. In Isaiah 39, the prophet predicts the city’s fall, and then the story seems to leap in time. When chapter 40 begin, it’s clear that the prophesied destruction has come. The war has been lost, the holy city has been destroyed, and the people have been carried off into exile. Their homes are gone, their lives are uprooted; they’ve been taken to live as hostages in a strange land. They’re living in the wilderness if anyone ever has.
And yet the prophet opens on a reassuring note: “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.” (Isaiah 40:1) “Get 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.” (40:9) There’s good news to be shared with the people, and the whole city should be shouting it from the mountaintops. And what is this good news? What are these glad tidings? Simply this: “Here is your God!” (40:9)
“Here is your God.” Your God is here. Not back in Jerusalem, living in the ruined sanctuary of the holy Temple. Not back in all the cities of Judah from which you came, the familiar lives you’ve had to leave behind. But here with you in the wilderness.
And it’s here in the wilderness that you must prepare God’s way.
There’s a funny thing about the Bible that I’ve always loved: it has no punctuation. Commas and periods and quotation marks weren’t invented for thousands of years after the Biblical texts were first written down; the ones you see printed are just modern interpretations, placed there by the translators to make the Bible easier to read. And so, there are these two slightly different ways to read a single quote in two of our readings today. The Gospel of Mark quotes Isaiah to help us understand the ministry of John the Baptist, and it quotes the verse like this: “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’” (Mark 1:3) John is, after all, someone crying out in the wilderness; so it makes perfect sense. But the quote from Isaiah itself seems more like it reads: “A voice cries out: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord…’” (Isaiah 40:3) “A voice crying out in the wilderness—‘Prepare the way of the Lord.’” “A voice crying out—‘In the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord.’” Do you see the difference? In Mark, John goes out to the wilderness, and the people flock to see him there, and he tells them: “Prepare the way of the Lord.” And they go back home, to their ordinary, civilized lives, and some of them take his teaching to heart. But in Isaiah, the people are stuck in the wilderness. They can’t simply take a day trip out to see John’s strange life. They’re living their own strange lives. And the prophet’s voice cries out to them nonetheless: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord.”
In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord. In the midst of this strangeness, make God’s paths straight. In this time of Advent, in this time of waiting, look into your hearts and out into your lives; smooth out the rough places that keep you from loving God and your family and your neighbor, and straighten out the crooked paths that lead you away from God’s love. Don’t wait to be restored to ordinary life. Don’t wait for things to be “normal” again. Because God doesn’t dwell in the holy city, God doesn’t dwell in The Way Things Were, God doesn’t dwell in this or any temple. “Get you up to a high mountain…lift up your voice with strength…do not fear…[for] here is your God.” (Isaiah 40:9)
It can be hard to feel God’s presence while we’re here in the wilderness. If it were easy, we wouldn’t have to talk about it. If the people already felt comforted, Isaiah wouldn’t have to shout “Comfort, comfort ye my people!” We can’t force that spiritual comfort on ourselves. We can’t push away our anxiety or our despair, our exhaustion, anger, or fear. We can’t force God to come to us “with might,” to feed us “like a shepherd,” to “gather” us like “lambs in his arms.” (Isaiah 40:10–11) Because the work of building a highway through our spiritual desert is ultimately God’s, not ours. The story of our salvation, of Christ’s birth, life, death, and resurrection, is God’s not ours.
But we can do our small part to prepare the way for God to come in. We can make straight the crooked paths that turn us away from God. We can chip away at our rough places, and trust the Holy Spirit to smooth them out in time. So, as our offertory hymn goes,
Make ye straight what long was crooked,
make the rougher places plain;
let your hearts be true and humble,
as befits his holy reign.For the glory of the Lord
now o’er earth is shed abroad;
and all flesh shall see the token
that his word is never broken.
Amen.