Caution: Road Work Ahead

First Congregational Church – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
First Sunday in Advent – November 27, 2005
Rev. Samuel Schaal
[Texts: Isaiah 40:1-11/Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13]

If you’ve tried to go downtown or to the eastside recently – and some of you do this on a daily basis – you’ve encountered the road construction on the Marquette Interchange.  Traffic jams and tie-ups are common, and right now you aren’t even able to get from some of the freeways to other of the freeways, at least not directly, with some major arteries shut down.

Once the work is done, they tell us, the roads will have more lanes in places, be more useful and speedier, won’t have any left-hand entrances and exits – all-in-all, it will be vastly improved from what’s it’s been.  Right now that’s hard to believe, because you can barely even get downtown – but I believe it, for I have lived through other major freeway expansions in other cities and, indeed, it’s often better than before.

While the Marquette Interchange is the renovation and expansion of an existing network of roads, the kind of highway that Isaiah and Mark are talking about is a bit different.  Here, the image is creating a new pathway, not renovating an existing one.  It’s about creating a path that’s sure, clean and straight – through the thickets and barriers of the wilderness, clearing the debris, it might be said, so that divinity might have a more sure and clear passageway. 

Indeed, if you get through the Marquette Interchange and follow one of the Interstate highways out of the city into the country, you get a sense of what Isaiah is talking about with “every mountain and hill made low, the uneven ground become level, every valley lifted up.”  While traveling around the country on our Interstate highway system, I’ve noticed on some highways how the builders literally blasted through hills and mountains, and at times built long spans of bridges over valleys – so that Interstate highways are level and easy to travel compared to smaller state and county road systems.  On an Interstate highway, you usually can just put on the cruise control and, well, cruise.

In Isaiah’s day, of course, they didn’t cruise so easily on the highways.  They had no automobiles, but they did have a fairly developed system for its day, for trade and travel, but it would look primitive to us.  Travel was accomplished on foot or with donkey, perhaps towing a cart along.

But in using this metaphor of roads, Isaiah is not talking about the actual road used for travel, but is speaking of a people in exile and the divine promise of their return home.  Chapter 40 of Isaiah marks the beginning of the “Second Isaiah,” thought to be someone writing under Isaiah’s name.  Second Isaiah was written probably about two hundred years after First Isaiah (that is, chapters one through 39) and in that time period much of Royal Israel – the middle and upper class royalty, military leaders and craftsmen, had been living in exile in Babylon, their country having been conquered by the Babylonians.  They were living in exile, worshipping other Gods, and perhaps had doubts about their God’s ability to see them back home, and doubts about their own status as God’s favored people.

So in this deepening darkness comes the prophetic call of Second Isaiah.  The prophet’s talk about a highway for God becomes a way of talking about being far from home.

One voice issues an instruction to build a highway across the wilderness on which God will travel in triumph.  This suggests a road running from Babylon and exile, to Jerusalem, so that along with God will come all the exiled faithful in a victorious homecoming.  The God who seemed to be defeated in Babylon will now march in a wondrous show of power.

Just as the exiled Israelites yearned to build a highway across the wilderness to return home, so Mark opens his gospel with the abrupt and stunning imagery of preparing the way of the Lord. (Today marks the beginning of the next liturgical year in our Lectionary

-Year B- and we’ll be reading Mark, with the Gospel of John filling in on some Sundays, through most of the upcoming year.) 

From the beginning, Mark takes a sober view of things.  He opens his gospel not with angels singing in heaven, but with a grim and serious prophet calling for repentance and baptism.  He wears camel’s hair; he eats locusts and wild honey – he doesn’t sound like someone we’d like to invite to a holiday party, for sure.

Mark opens with the familiar words of the prophet Isaiah.  For Isaiah, the voice of God was calling the Jewish people out of exile back to their homeland. For Mark, it was not a highway across geographical distance, but it was a road home nonetheless.  Except this time, the voice of God was calling all people from exile-in-sin back to their birthright as children of God, across the highway of repentance and baptism. John the Baptist was preparing the way for One even greater than he.

Today, we are being called to prepare the way for One who is greater than us.  We sit here in this magnificent sanctuary, freshly decorated for the holidays, the scent of the trees and cuttings lingering in the air.  This is Advent, a season of waiting for the birth of Jesus Christ. 

But it’s not just a season of waiting, it’s a season of preparation for that birth, of actively preparing for his coming.   We think of this season of preparation in terms of getting ready for Christmas:  shopping heads the list no doubt, perhaps cleaning house for company, cooking all the festive foods, perhaps clearing our schedule to find time for all the required social events of the season.  It can seem to be anything but preparing ourselves spiritually for the coming of Christ.

It’s a busy time, for sure.  So maybe we need to do some road work.  Maybe we need to clear the debris of our lives, clearing space for a highway, a thoroughfare, that God might travel, a highway calling us from our own (often self-imposed) exile from life into fuller life with Christ.

What is some of this debris that gets in the way? I’ve mentioned all the rush and hurry of getting ready for Christmas.  Perhaps some of the same old bugaboos that weigh us down throughout the year:  the demands of our careers and vocations, often made more difficult with the demands of the holiday season.  Perhaps even “workaholism,” where we use our vocations compulsively, to fill the gaps in our hearts which should be filled by other kinds of relationships. 

Perhaps even our successes that make us so feel so confident and self-reliant that we begin to diminish our reliance on others and on God.  Perhaps our failures, our inability to conquer our own habits and compulsions, perhaps even our addictions, which cause us harm and which are so powerfully present at the holidays.  Perhaps our griefand our loneliness, also so pronounced during the holidays.  If you’ve had a loss in your life, either in the last year or in years past – a loss through death, divorce, an estranged relationship – Christmas can be a difficult season.  (Perhaps you’ve noticed on the church calendar that on Dec. 18 at 4 p.m. in the chapel we’re having a “Blue Christmas” service for just those situations.)

Maybe it’s these things or maybe it’s something else – it can be whatever is separating you from the fuller life with God and in God.  I’ve said that Mark suggests a highway across the wilderness of sin.  I like Paul Tillich’s definition of sin as separation.  He says that the very word might have the same root as the word “asunder.” He suggests a threefold separation:  separation from self, from others, and from God, or the ground of being or being itself.  Being reunited with God also reunites us to others and self.

Separation can be an exile, so being called out of exile can also become being reunited with what and who God created you to be, in full relationship with self, others and God.

So the road from exile can begin by doing road work: 

—by lifting up the valleys of our despair, our grief and our darkness;

—by making low our pride that can become hardness of heart;

—by making level and smooth our spiritual lives;

—by doing whatever we can to provide a place for the holy to reside.

If we clear the road, in that discipline we might find our hearts more open to the birth of the Holy Infant; we might find ourselves more open to the true joy of the season. 

If we clear the debris in our lives, we prepare for the coming of the Lord, we participate in the Advent of Christ.  It begins wherever we are now, in whatever darkness we inhabit now. It begins in Hope, the first of our Advent candles.

It was hope that led the prophet Isaiah to proclaim this divine straightaway cutting through the generations of oppression, slavery and exile that had been the Jewish people’s experience.  It was hope that led Mark to look back upon that ancient text and proclaim the coming of the Messiah, the Christ, amid the sinful and dark powers of the world.

So often we celebrate Advent like a party – with joy and festivities, looking forward to the coming of a baby who is greeted by an angel chorus, the astonishment of shepherds and the praise of prophets.  Indeed, this is the magic of Christmas.  But let us also look to the spiritual preparation; let us also look at what has been holding us back from fuller life in God, whatever that is for you.  To “make his paths straight” could mean for us to clear our lives, to reorient ourselves, to repent (that is, turn around) and welcome God into our lives.

To do so is to awaken to the new day, to call us from the exile of our darkness into the brightness of the new morn, made manifest with the birth of the Christ child, Immanuel, God With Us, born in the flesh.  It is for this we wait, for this we hope, for this we prepare, beginning today.

Amen.