Will you pray with me before we begin?
Holy God,
help us to level all that divides us from You and each other,
and help us to smooth the rough edges of our love.
Lead us to the wild places,
where we can hear You above the noise of the world,
and the din of division.
Amen.
Today is the second Sunday of Advent. In Luke's gospel, we hear the prophet Isaiah's words:
"A voice cries out: 'In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.'"
Luke tells us this voice crying out is that of John the Baptist, calling the Israelites to prepare for God's presence. John’s instructions are this:
Go to the wilderness. Venture into uncomfortable, marginal, and liminal spaces within and without.
And
Let God increase as you decrease. Transform your mind, heart, and ways toward God.
These are the wild instructions given to us by the Bible’s ultimate wild man.
And they are challenging directives, especially out of the comfort of our daily lives. Because I don’t know about you, but I will readily admit I like my creature comforts. I like my privileges. It feels good to be inside this morning, in a heated sanctuary, with a belly full of hot coffee and fellowship table treats. So, I feel just a little resistance when I hear John telling us we must go out into the wilderness to get ready for God.
Yet, Scripture tells us that the wilderness is consistently a place of divine encounter and transformation: Moses flees to the wilderness and encounters God in a burning bush.
Moses’ time in the wilderness transforms him into the one who would lead the Israelites out of slavery.
Elijah flees to the wilderness and encounters God after a little bit of a journey.
This is perhaps my favorite wilderness story, as it involves Elijah first having a dramatic moment under a tree where he thinks he would be better off dead.
Then God sends an angel who delivers cake and a drink and suggests he take a nap. Elijah’s time in the wilderness transforms him into one who can finally see that God is not in all the drama, but is rather the still, small voice that speaks in the silence. I could spend my entire sermon time up here regaling you with wilderness anecdotes from scripture, but you get the idea. Over and over again, God meets people there. And transforms them toward God’s purpose. Sometimes with cake and naps.
The Hebrew word for wilderness, miḏbār, also means "an organ of speech." It's in and through the wilderness that God speaks to us — through burning bushes, pillars of fire, parted seas, strange meat delivered by birds. You get the idea.
So, here we find ourselves today, on the second Sunday of Advent, in our beloved annual cycle of preparing for the coming of Christ, and the lectionary gives us this gospel passage where John the Baptist is calling people into the wilderness. And it is in that wilderness where John will go on to baptize Jesus, and where God will speak to identify Jesus as God’s own beloved child.
God did not declare this revelation in the temple in Jerusalem.
God did not proclaim it in the courts of Pontius Pilate.
God spoke it in the wilderness, as a dove descended over a river.
Which was probably what John, as he was running around in his camel hair coat, snacking on bugs and honey, was trying to tell people.
Come on out here.
Get ready.
God is going to show up.
With us.
In the wilderness, not in your comfy bed or under your snuggly winter blanket.
As some of you know, my career prior to ministry was with The Nature Conservancy.
For some of my years with TNC, I was their Alabama Coastal Program Director. Now, many of you are squinting a little right now trying to recall a map of the United States, thinking - does Alabama have a coastline? It does, and it is spectacular.
The Mobile-Tensaw River Delta is one of the world’s most diverse aquatic environments. It holds the greatest diversity of turtles, mussels, aquatic snails and crawfish in the world. But it is not a comfortable or even welcoming place for people. Alligators abound. Snakes are known to drop from trees into your boat.
If you have ever wondered how many different types of biting insects God created, it is a great place to find out. My time studying, restoring, and working to protect that wilderness revealed many things to me about our God and did a fantastic job preparing me for ministry.
During seasons of congregational transition, I have watched the proverbial flood waters rise within a community and thought, “I want to be the delta.” I want my ministry to be the soft, flexible thing that slows it all down enough that we can let the heavy things settle out.
Like the marshes, let me be a filter for the high emotions flowing into this place. When metaphorical storms threaten the congregations I love and serve, I want to be an oyster reef. I want to protect them from the worst of the waves. My time in the wilderness taught me that God is most at work loving and creating and nurturing and protecting in the margins and the in-between places. Even if those are also the places where I am most likely to be bitten and itchy.
So, what do we do with this wilderness passage, today?
Maybe we can hear it as a calling out of the spaces in our lives where we have gotten a little too comfortable… into our own wilderness spaces where we are asked to be at work in making the world little more full of God-like love and creativity and nurture and protection. Into the cocreation of what the prophet Isaiah called the highway for our God.
John the Baptist wants us to stop making all the eggnog and Christmas cookies (unless of course you are bringing them here) and instead make metanoia.
That’s the Greek word that Luke used, which I think is translated rather weakly in our passage today as repentance. As in, “He went into all the region around Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins…”
Metanoia means so much more than what we tend to think of as repentance. Metanoia is God’s beautiful invitation to transform our ways into God’s ways. To step outside of the comfortable spaces in our lives and into the places where the darkness of broken relationships and systems can be more clearly seen. Into the places where people are waiting for God’s love to show up, maybe through you and me.
What if, this Advent we went to a wilderness where we feel out of our comfort zone?
For some of us that might be the hard path of making our way into healthier relationships with people with whom we are in conflict. To, as the prophet Isaiah said, smooth our rough ways. And listen, we ALL have rough ways. I, for example, hold grudges.
This is a rather classic adaptation of someone who grew up acting as a peacekeeper, because we swallow things we don’t like in the name of conflict aversion. But, then we can end up holding them real close, in our hearts, apparently, as my brother pointed out, forever.
My brother was the one who pointed out this rough edge of mine…and I’m still holding a grudge about that. I’m mostly kidding, but I am grateful he is in my life as someone who makes me smooth my rough ways, because it makes space inside me for forgiveness.
Here, we have a community behavioral covenant to guide us in the ways of loving each other well even (and especially when) we disagree. It’s like institutional sand paper for our rough edges.
What if we went to the wilderness of our own liminal spaces?
For some of us, the wilderness is where we feel uncertain about the future of some aspect of our lives.
Even though, for this warm moment in time, we are all gathered here together, I know some of us feel alone in personal chapters of uncertainty. The holidays are common liminal spaces for many of us, filled with mountains of grief and crooked roads of regret.
Maybe the call in this sort of wilderness space is, as the prophet Isaiah said, to make the mountains low by seeking help and support. Not all of our hurts are as visible as the one that required me to wear a sling to a couple of services here last month, but doing so taught me a beautiful thing about this community: God may not drop manna from heaven much these days, but there are a lot of people here - including Jackie, Nicole and your Caring Ministers and me - who are ready and willing to support you and remind you that you are not alone.
And, finally, what if, perhaps most literally, we went to the wilderness where the marginalized have pitched their tents right here in this community?
For some of us, that might look like training to go out with the group that is now gathering monthly to distribute sandwiches and supplies to our unhoused neighbors. For others it might be coming here Tuesday to stuff socks with candy and toiletries to be distributed. To, as the prophet Isaiah said, help to fill the valleys of need that we can more clearly see when we step outside of our own comforts.
At my church in Austin, we were part of a ministry that hosted unhoused families over the holidays - to give them a break from life in shelters and to surround them with a warm community. Each night, a different member of the church would sign up to bring the family dinner and play board games with their kids so the parents could have a little break, receive some support from the clergy, etc. I signed up my family to bring a meal one night. And my kids, who were very little then, were nervous about it. On the way there they asked questions like:
Mom, do we even know these kids? What if they don’t want to play games with us? What if we don’t have anything to talk about?
And, we got there, within sixty seconds their kid was kicking a ball around with my kid and my other kid was sharing craft supplies with the other. My kids had gone to their own little wilderness and, out there beyond the warm lighting of our comfy, suburban home they could suddenly see different needs.
On the drive home, the questions were completely different:
Mom, when are they going to get their own home to go home to? Mom, how will Santa Claus know where to bring their gifts? Mom, do you think we should bring more dessert next time?
One Wednesday evening in that wilderness taught them all that about God’s love. So, if we don’t know where to begin - if we feel frozen by this landscape of enormous need, John the Baptist gets real specific just a few verses beyond our passage today.
He says if you have two coats, give one to someone who doesn’t have one. If you have food, share it with someone who does not. Be content with having enough. Then, let God increase and yourself decrease.
In the words of our second reading from today, John’s invitation to the wilderness might be an invitation to a place where we need to do some crumbling of ego or grudge, or to a place where it is hard to hide the hurts that we might usually allow to separate us from others. Or to a place where it is unwise to rely on our own devices - where the answer is interdependence, not independence.
From my own experience, it is an invitation to the places where your greatest blessings and learnings will find you.
So, may you hear in today’s age-old passage, which quotes an even older prophecy, a steady invitation from God to this transformation of the wild edges of ourselves and our of world into something a little more full of God’s love.
When have you felt transformed or deeply moved in an “uncomfortable” or unexpected place?
What is one small “rough edge” in your life that you could smooth out to bring more love and connection to others?
As we leave this space, may we carry the call to smooth the rough edges of our lives, to make the mountains low for others and to fill the valleys of need in our wider community.
Together, let’s prepare the way for God’s love to shine through us in ever brightening ways this Advent and beyond.
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