"With Strength”

A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Hilary J. Barrett for Advent 2

Preached at Pleasantville United Church of Christ, December 7, 2008

Isaiah 40:1-11 & Mark 1:1-8

“A voice cries:
In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”
(Isaiah 40:1, RSV)

It begins in the wilderness -- the Bible’s name for that place where rock and sand and heat come together to produce an environment which is inhospitable to human life.  You can survive there, but it isn’t easy.  Every day you will know how vulnerable you are; how easy it would be for you to die out there if you fail to find that one oasis you were counting on. 

All that is good and orderly and wholesome about the created world is in question in the desert.  It may be good and orderly and wholesome if you are a cactus or a lizard, but you are not.  You are a human being; fragile and vulnerable; in desperate need of the water of life and the One who comes to offer it.

It begins in the wilderness; that place where so much transpires for God’s people.  That landscape which is so full of meaning: the place of testing and tempting and trial and sin; the place where chaos and evil reside.  The place where it will soon be found out whether we can be faithful and whether we will know how to follow; and whether we will choose to follow rightly.

It begins in the wilderness -- and in the wilderness a single voice calls out from the midst of all that is dry and hot and dangerous and inhospitable; a single voice calls out of the chaos to speak a word of hope and comfort.

This two thousand year old story that we turn to every year begins in the wilderness.

In a world where this month’s celebrity cover story is old news six months later, we turn again to this timeless tale that begins in the wilderness, in the place that is symbolic of sin and chaos and trouble.

“The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ the Son of God”

That’s how Mark starts the story.  And then he speaks of the prophecy of Isaiah about a voice crying in that wilderness and he tells us the prophecy has been fulfilled.  Mark’s opening word, “beginning,” reminds us of the first beginning when God created the world.  Now Mark implies a new beginning has come and it starts in the wilderness -- which is not a bad place to start if you want to find us, especially this year.

Every year many folk find themselves in the wilderness during this time.  Grieving losses of loved ones or jobs or health, weighed down by guilt, lonely, tired, many feel desperately out of sync with this season when everyone is supposed to be brimming over with ho ho ho’s.  And for many others, even the loudest ho ho ho-ers, there is an emptiness, a piece missing so that the season never quite lives up to the hype -- no matter how many presents we cram under the tree. And in tough economic times when we will not be able to anesthetize ourselves with conspicuous consumption (which is still being in the wilderness but in a really nice tent) those feelings of a missing part will be all that much closer to the surface.

Now the word that God brings to Isaiah in the passage Mark quotes is that Isaiah is to comfort the people in the wilderness, to speak tenderly to them.  John the Baptist doesn’t seem quite the type. When we think of comfort it is of a big guy in a red suit telling us we are going to get everything we want.  But the comfort of Mark and Isaiah is a tougher more profound comfort.  It is a kind of comfort that gets at the true meaning of the word.  For the English word “comfort” is a combination of the Latin words “cum-fortis” or “with strength.”  There is One coming that we must prepare to receive.  There is one coming with strength.  Prepare in the desert a highway for our God.

The Christian faith is often portrayed as a journey, a pilgrim’s progress.  But the profound good news of this season is that this way in the desert is not one we must follow to get to God, but one that is prepared so God can get to us.  God comes to us!  

God comes right smack into the wilderness of our broken lives.  God seeks us out to bring forgiveness to all who repent and believe, to lead us in paths of righteousness, to restore our souls, to heal the afflicted and assure the brokenhearted that we do not mourn as others do who have no hope.

God comes to us in the wilderness of our lost lives and calls us to new purpose and meaning:” I will make you fishers of people.”

God comes to us in our loneliness and guides us into community.  God is so eager, in fact, to get to us, to reach us, to be heard by us that God is willing to be born in human flesh, to accept the vulnerability of our humanness, coming into the wilderness with us not as a king but as a child born to a poor couple in a backwater town.

And why does God do that?

Why go to all that trouble for a bunch of people too stupid and too selfish and too blind and too prideful and too stubborn and too sinful to find their own way out of the wilderness? Why exalt the valleys and bring the way of the hills low, why make straight all the crooked places to build a highway to get to us?  There seems to be only one conclusion I can come to about that as crazy as it sounds. Only one reason why God would go to all that trouble.  Apparently God loves us. God loves us just as he finds us lost in our wildernesses.  God loves us so much he sends his only son, Jesus into the wilderness to show us the way, to comfort His people.

New beginnings.  That is what Advent is all about.  And the beginning of any journey of faith, the beginning of any spiritual growth, the beginning of any new life, the way out of the wilderness starts with letting the truth of that love penetrate to the core of our being.  We are not just to believe that as an article of faith, or as an intellectual proposition.  We are to experience it, be embraced by it, accept it as the truest thing there is about ourselves.  And once we do, everything changes…everything! How we live, what we do, how we treat others!

We are loved!  He will feed his flock like a shepherd and gather the lambs to his breast, in pastures of green he feeds them and gives to the weary rest.[1]