Advent IIB

4 December 2011 ['preached' on the internet]

Of the many, many propers through which we cycle in a three-year period, I think this week’s set ranks among my favourite. Maybe it is because of Isaiah’s strong words of consolation or the proclamation of Psalm 85 of a new way of being when God’s mercy and peace finally are established (which echos last week’s psalm which stated clearly, ‘God is faithful’) or even the opening scene of the Gospel according to Mark, but for whatever reason, I love all the readings for today and wish I could preach on each one. And even though this is my sixth go-round in Year B, I still have not teased out enough from these marvellous texts.

From where I look today, the passage from Isaiah speaks the mostly loudly to a global, church-wide and even a personal context.

Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. 
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem….

נַחֲמ֥וּ נַחֲמ֖וּ עַמִּ֑י יֹאמַ֖ר אֱלֹהֵיכֶֽם׃
דַּבְּר֞וּ עַל־לֵ֤ב יְרֽוּשָׁלִַ֙םוְקִרְא֣וּ אֵלֶ֔יהָ֙
Nahamo, nahamo ‘ammi y’omar elohechem, 
 daveru ‘al lev yerushalam viqr’u eleha…

The sheer poetry of these well-known verses of Isaiah stops us… it stops us partly because we hear too well the famous music with all its cascading sixteenth notes from Handel’s Messiah. It stops us because the rhythm of the poetry is so close to that of the words in Hebrew. It stops us because it is a prayer of consolation on the part of Isaiah for his people of Israel. This is poetry to be sung, as it probably was by the Hebrews. We approach that song when we sing hymn 67 (one of my Advent favourites).

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In the desert, Isaiah sings his song.

A voice cries out: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every 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.’

Isaiah’s words are a cry to return. A plea of God that God’s people might remember the Covenant, the promise of God and the people to be faithful to one another, live with integrity, justice and compassion. In the calling and in the reminding, the poet remembers the wilderness, the desert experience of the Hebrews. The wilderness is the place where it will happen again, this renewal of trust and love between God and the people.

The wilderness in the Hebrew Scriptures is a remarkable place, rich and varied. In some places, the wilderness is seen as a place cut off from life, a dark place of chaos and waste. But the wilderness is also the place where Israel lived between the Exodus and the conquest of Canaan. Forty years—a whole generation—lived in the wilderness coming to terms with a new freedom yet discovered.

The wilderness is the place of encounter with God. The place of learning the hard and gentle lessons of faithfulness to God. The place of nurturing, reformation, a place for the need of absolute trust.

The wilderness is seen also as a place of passage, of testing which leads one to new life and a changed future. Sometimes it is seen as the ideal time, the pure time of Israel’s life. The prophet Hosea figuratively invites the Hebrew people back to the wilderness to fall in love again, make a new beginning, and know only the protection of a loving a faithful God.

The wilderness is a place transformed… water abundant, flowers blooming, rugged, impassable places made straight and smooth. A waste land turned into a garden again.
So Isaiah sings. He sings a song of comfort to a confused and scattered people. He speaks with tenderness to a people who have endured too much—double grief for their sins, known and unknown. The impossible journey is made possible. The terrifying wasteland that separates them from their future is leveled and made gentle.

‘All flesh is grass.’ They know that all too well. But God is not transitory like flesh and grass. God’s word will stand for ever. God speaks with old memories of former times, and recalls the loveliness of Jerusalem with power and intimacy. Perhaps, after all, the Covenant, the bond is still there. Perhaps God has remembered us after all.

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John the Baptist called the people out into the desert, out into the places of confrontation with the brokenness and unfaithfulness of their lives. He called them into the wilderness not to terrify them, but to bring them to a place of cleansing and renewal, a place to encounter the faithful God directly, without illusions. For John, the desert was a place to be stripped of all the occupations and accumulations of life so as to come face to face with God. Our desert times, too, whether chosen or laid on us, are times to come near the God who searches us out, binds our wounds, carries us, renews us, restores and heals us.

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It is said that in the Middle Eastern desert is a highway where once the Hebrew Nation wandered forty years. It is no superhighway, not wide, but it appears well-built with a good blacktopped surface. A strange phenomenon travellers report is how the road seems to end suddenly just ahead only to resume a hundred feet later, and then disappear for some distance once again. The constant wind that blows sand over the surface hides and reveals the black path ahead.

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What shape does the wilderness take in our lives, in the life of the church, in the lives of the nations to-day? How do we give names to the dry and fearful wastelands, the times and places of chaos?

This fall we have seen the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement. People of all ages and ethnic groups have started to claim their voice and speak out against the gross inequities of the financial system across the world. They have camped out in public areas until dispersed by force. The image of Officer Pike pepper-spraying the silent dozen students in Davis, CA reminds many of Kent State in 1970. The use of such force certainly speaks of a nervousness in the system and push-back against the voices crying out for equity. Is this the chaos or desert to which we want to return?

The church as we have known it for the past fifty years is no longer what it was. We are no longer living in the era of Christendom when to be considered a ‘good citizen’ one merely had to show up in church on Sundays, when the practise of religion was civic. No longer does the institutional church command the same level of authority as it used to. Many congregations look for the ‘silver bullet’ that will fix the dropping attendence, the rise in age of the congregation: is it getting more people in the door? is it getting someone young to lead the congregation? is it getting more income? is it creating some special sort of program? The institutional church, too, is wandering in its own desert these days, trying to hang onto glory days that sometimes were more a case of being in the right place at the right time or, in other cases, never really were as people remember them to have been.

For those of us who find ourselves unemployed during this Advent, the desert has a whole new meaning for us as we seek to fill our days with a regular schedule, trying to maintain some semblance of ordinariness even as our office hides packed up in boxes that sit on the living room floor. How do we find our way forward when the highway appears, disappears and reappears? How do we find structure when there is none, hope in a more secure future when it seems awfully vague? How do we not enter into the desert of despair?

Those of us in the north also cope with the nine-hour days, when we spend half our waking hours in the dark. That preponderance of night brings its own sort of chaos and desert-like experience.

Yet, as hard as these places are — the struggle against the status quo in political and economic world, the church and one’s own vocation — there is always hope. Hope is not to be confused with optimism. Henri J.M. Nouwen writes, ‘Hope prevents us from clinging to what we have and frees us to move away from the safe place and enter unknown and fearful territory.’

Paradoxically, willingly going into the desert, that unknown and fearful territory, will also bring us closer to God. We just have to trust that God is there, waiting for us, ready to bind our wounds, carry us, restore us and heal us.

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In the days to come this Advent, let us pay attention to the wilderness: pay attention by being present to the many whose lives these next weeks are the hardest days of their year for whatever losses they carry with them, helping them to find not a wasteland but find in the desert a place of compassion and hope… pay attention by taking time, finding solitude, entering our own places of desert to see and hear what God is trying to say to us… go where God is leading us, forgiving us, renewing us, strengthening us…pay attention by asking God to show us in new and deeper ways God’s love and presence in the unbidden wilderness experiences of our lives, in our helping one another to find a straight path, clarity and light in the midst of what we cannot manage or understand.

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In the midst of the desert experience Isaiah sang his song — Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God—a song of hope in the wilderness. May we this day hear this song and other songs of hope in our hearts, and in hearing them, sing them for others.


END NOTE
Mikkel Thompson, Second Sunday of Advent, Cycle B, Homilies for Christian People (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 182, 184.