This
is a season of preparation. There is so much to anticipate. There are
gatherings of family and friends. There are all the logistics involved in
figuring out who will be where and when. What will we eat? What presents will
we buy? How will we get there? It’s no wonder we think so little of the journey
of Mary and Joseph to Jerusalem. All they had to do was find a place to sleep.
How
will we get there? Do you use online services like Kayak or Expedia? Airplane
tickets become evermore mysterious in how they are priced. If you drive, GPS
sometimes doesn’t work when it’s cloudy or you find yourself in a tunnel or
under forests – and the cell phone cuts out when there are no cell towers.
I
hope you don’t have to drive through Waterbury – and they have just begun
construction. We can see the hope in the words of the prophets to make the
highway straight and level all that is uneven. It’s easy to write poetry. It’s
a much more difficult things to carve through rock and build bridges over
rivers. Sometimes that’s how it seems when we make our way to God. All we see
are obstacles that are difficult to navigate.
This
is the promise of Advent. God doesn’t promise peace and quiet and an easy road.
God finds us along the hard ways and offers a new way. Maybe that’s our
trouble. We don’t take God’s short cut because we’re convinced we know the way.
We plod through the obstacles because it’s the hard way we know.
Baruch
is the secretary of Jeremiah (who was probably a hard man to work for.) Baruch
writes down a vision of a highway of return. One day all the children of God
will find their way back to Jerusalem. They will be restored and renewed.
Jerusalem will have joy instead of sorrow. The highway is for the return trip.
It’s
not that the people of God didn’t know how to have a relationship with God.
They already knew about God and they had faith – and they also failed to live
up to what they believed. They were living in exile because they couldn’t live
with God. Baruch holds out hope that God would find a way to welcome them back.
Zechariah
was a priest in temple when an angel promised that he would have a son. Like
many other older persons who were promised children, Zechariah couldn’t believe
the news – so the angel made him speechless until it came true.
When
John is born, and he gets his voice back, Zechariah sings his own song of hope
and promise. The first half of the canticle praises God for God’s faithfulness
and the many ways that God has saved the people in the past. Then Zechariah
sings about how John will prepare the people for salvation in a new way.
John
grows up and begins his work. He preaches in the wilderness – the desert
really. He prepares the way of the Lord in the arid and God-forsaken wilderness
of Judea. Perhaps John is showing people that there is no place that you can go
that God isn’t already there. Perhaps John is showing that God meets us in our
own wilderness places. Just when we think we are lost and too far gone, we hear
the voice of one crying in the wilderness, “Prepare the way of the Lord!”
In
all of our preparations, we are offered a new way. We already think we know the
way, even though we often get lost and confused following the path we think we
know. John urges us to repent – to change our minds – to think differently. God
offers a new way, where the rough is made smooth and the crooked straight.
I
know we have the route all planned out. We got our trip-ticks from AAA. We
mapped it out on MapQuest. God wants us to set our itinerary aside and look for
the salvation from our God.
It’s
a new way. To find it we have to forget what we think we know and listen and
look for what God is showing us now. It doesn’t look like what we remember. God
is making a new way, a new path. God is making a straight and wide highway in
the wilderness for us to find our salvation.
The
hardest thing we have to give up is our certainty that we know the way (I hear
some men are like that.) It will take us places we haven’t been. It will take
us by different path – a shortcut to home.
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