Sermon for Year C, Advent 2: Journey's End

Preached on Sunday, December 6, 2009 at Christ & Saint Stephen's Church in New York City. The Scripture readings this sermon is based on can be found by clicking here.

You know that game of telephone, don’t you? You probably played it as a kid. You sit in a circle and one person whispers a phrase in the next person’s ear, and so it goes around the circle until the last person has to say what she has heard. Usually, the whispered phrase comes out as gibberish, but if not, it if comes out as understandable words at all, chances are it will bear very little resemblance to the original phrase.

Such was the game of telephone in a simpler era. Nowadays, you can just forward our text or the email around the circle and an exact copy of your message, smiley faces misspellings intact, is sent out to all the world in an instant. That era of just a decade or two ago, when the telephone was the height of instantaneous communication, has more in common with the biblical world than our own texting, emailing, wireless access world -- at least in one particular respect. Verbal communication, the spoken word, with all its flaws and possibilities for miscommunication, was the way in which most information was spread for a good part of human history.

This was certainly true in Jesus’ day, and it was certainly true of how most of the disciples and the evangelists would have most often encountered the Hebrew Scriptures. Synagogue worship for the average Judean or Galilean would have involved listening to the text of the scrolls of the bible read aloud, first in Hebrew, then often in Aramaic translation, or in Greek translation. There were no service bulletins in antiquity. No inserts or handouts with today’s readings printed out for you. So it’s not too surprising that there was on occasion some discrepancy between what is actually written in Scripture and what is heard when that Scripture is read aloud.

Something like that has happened with our reading from the gospel of Luke this morning. Luke is giving a very careful account of the initial appearance of John the Baptist on the 1st century Palestinian scene. Luke goes to great pains to give us imperial and ecclesiastical dates for the events he is about to recount in his narrative. It is the 15th year of the reign of the emperor Tiberius, during the governorship of Pilate when Herod and Philip were tetrachs in the region. That’s the secular context and timing, but Luke also tells us that what he is about to describe takes place during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas. That’s an interesting bit of additional information. Luke is telling us that what he is about to relate is of significance in political and religious terms. Something is about to happen that will affect the imperial and ecclesiastical structures in his time and place. So, some very careful dating is done, but then, poor Luke flubs the Scripture quotation. Luke writes, “As it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah, ‘The voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord!’”

Well, that’s not exactly what is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah. Oh, it’s pretty close, mind you. It’s not far off, and when it comes down to it -- the slight misquotation may not amount to a hill of beans… But what is really written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah is more like, “A voice cries out, ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord.’” You hear the difference, don’t you? For Luke, the prophet doing all the crying out was himself in the wilderness. For Isaiah, the prophet was calling us to prepare the way of the Lord in and through the wilderness itself. Presumably, if we’re being told to make a highway through the wilderness, then we are in that wilderness ourselves.

So, is the prophet of God to be found in the wilderness, or are we in the wilderness? Or both? And what is God calling us to? Where is it we should go?

From what we know about John the Baptist from the gospels, he preached and prophesied and baptized the repentant in the wilderness of Judea, outside the settled towns and outside the gleaming marble walls of Herod’s refurbished Jerusalem. John was a wild man, an outsider, a man of the wilderness. He wore animal skins and ate locusts and wild honey. He seems to have consciously modeled himself on the Hebrew prophets of old, particularly Elijah. And he preached where they did, in the wild and barren places, and he preached what they did, he preached against the powers centered at places like Jerusalem that Jerusalem and indeed all Israel must repent and prepare for God’s will to be made manifest. And people streamed out of the villages and towns and out of Jerusalem itself to hear John crying out in the wilderness, they came to repent and to be baptized in

the river Jordan.

Luke is quoting from Isaiah chapter 40 and the context of this section of Isaiah is one of captivity and homelessness. Isaiah’s prophet is crying out for a way to be made in the wilderness for the return of the people of Israel led by their God. We read the entire passage that Luke is quoting from last night at our service of Lessons & Carols. In it, Isaiah tells us that God is ready to comfort the people of Israel. The children of Israel have been taken into captivity in Babylon by King Nebuchadnezzar and now God has decided that Israel has served her term and has paid her penalty.

Our reading from Baruch tells us the same story -- the children of Israel have been marched on foot across the desert, led away by their enemies. But now that time of exile is to come to an end. And led by their God through the wilderness, the children of Israel will come home to Jerusalem again -- gathered from the east and from the west and brought home. And after their long trek through the wilderness, upon their return, Jerusalem will take off her garment of sorrow and put on again the beauty of the glory from God.

It might be useful to think of the voice of the prophet as having different locations -- or perhaps we can say that the prophet calls to us from both ends of a prophetic spectrum. One voice crying for us to come out of our homes, our places of comfort into the wilderness and another voice calling to return from our exile in the wilderness to come back through the wilderness, to come home.

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In this season of Advent, as we prepare for the coming of our Lord and Savior, I would like you to ask yourself a question -- which voice do you here from which end of the prophetic spectrum is God calling out to you?

Is it the voice of John the Baptist far outside the city, deep in the wilderness, calling you to come away from gleaming city, to come away for the political and religious concerns, come out of Jerusalem to the wild place where it’s not about shopping or shipping and handling, or about office parties or airports and trains, not about the carols and concerts and glorious church services. Maybe the voice that is calling to you is calling you to leave behind the temptations, the sinfulness of the city and society for a bit and go to where the wind howls in the night, and the dry air is chilly and

quiet and the night is dark. Where there is not any of the busy-ness of this season, but a stillness and a solitude where you can be small and quiet and contemplate the immenseness that is the Almighty God. Where you can pull away from the cacophony of the commercialism of this time of year and hear the wind howl in the night, and maybe too hear the howling in your own heart.

Or is that voice calling to you from another place, calling to you who are in the wilderness to get ready to travel, to get ready to return to Jerusalem, to your home. Maybe you have been in captivity yourself. Maybe these past few weeks or months have been a wilderness time for you -- maybe the voice crying out for a path in the wilderness is your voice, crying out for a way home, crying out for God to help you return to the city and the fellowship of the church, perhaps you’re longing for comfort and companionship and perhaps you’re longing to leave the lonely, desolate places behind. Maybe you’ve felt a bit lost, and now seek to be found and to find your way back. And now it is time for you to return home, to heed the call of the prophet to level the hills and fill up the deep valleys and march home. You who have gone out weeping and are weeping still in the wilderness, maybe it’s time for you to come home again with joy, shouldering your sheaves.

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Each of these Advent journeys has their tribulations and their rewards. Just try and get away from it all this season -- it’s hard to do, who’s invitation will you turn down, which friends and family will you disappoint if you pull away for some peace and quiet? But the journey back into the bosom of family and society and church is arduous as well.

I have a friend who works as a counselor to people suffering from addictions and he often describes his clients as people who have wandered into the wilderness and become lost. And his job is to help them find the way home. But he’s quick to remind them, if you’re wandering has taken you many miles into the wilderness, once you have sited the way home, once you have discovered the direction you must now go, you still have to journey many miles out of the wilderness to arrive at your destination. Knowing the way out of the wilderness is not the same thing as being out of the wilderness; the journey must be made, step by step by step.

We talk about Advent as a time of preparation, a time of waiting. But I think that it is too a time of travel, of journey, of return. A time for us to return to God. To return to what the prophets have long told us was the right path, the path of level hills and valleys.

Maybe you need to return to the wilderness or maybe you need to return from the wilderness. Whichever is the case for you, think of this Advent season as a time set aside to make your journey, a time to hear and heed the call of God’s prophet. That voice is calling you to rejoice, because, as Baruch assures us, God has remembered us, has never forgotten us. So, lay down your sorrows’ load and know that your sins are covered. God’s word is never broken, and whatever may be your Advent journey, God’s peace awaits you along the road and at your journey’s end. Amen+

© The Rev. Mark R. Collins