Growing up in Church the Advent wreath was always one of my favorite traditions, if for no other reason than it allowed me to gauge exactly how much time there was until I got presents. We never used the old Advent calendars, which kept a day by day countdown to the birth of Christ, the wreath gauges our progress in weeks. Weeks which, as kids, seem like little eternities and every Sunday a candle was lit meant that we were one less eon away from Jesus’ coming. Or from presents. I’ll leave you to guess which was more exciting to my childhood self.
Regardless of my motivations, the Advent wreath was a countdown to joy, a countdown to those occasions that contain the majority of my most wonderful memories, and yet, on those days in between Sundays, on those days when the wreath sat in that unoccupied sanctuary with its blackened wicks and uneven lengths of wax those little eternities got longer, and joy seemed forever away.
Our texts today invite us into those spaces. They invite us into waiting, into that childlike sense of eternity that our hectic schedules no longer allow us to savor. Our texts today demand that we sigh for the coming of joy again, and if we merely allow ourselves to sit back and enjoy the relative comfort of our pews I fear they will pass us by and the profound movement of the Spirit crying out to us will pass like Christmas lights fading in a rear view mirror.
This takes a remarkably uncomfortable degree of honesty. We have to acknowledge the fact that we are waiting in a broken world. We have to look amongst our community and see that sin still pervades us, that death still claims those who we hold dear. We need to want for joy like a child wanting for Christmas if only so that when we hear the proclamation “Comfort, O Comfort” we know what that longing feels like.
The fact that we’re English speakers doesn’t do us any favors in approaching Isaiah 40. From the translation we might expect that this is some divine proclamation of God bestowing divine comfort through our time of trial. We might think that comfort here is a noun, that it’s a thing that God is bestowing on us in the midst of our tumultuous life, we just have to take it in and be thankful. This, however, is not the case. “Comfort” here, is a verb. It’s something that needs to be done. That being said, it can still seem like the comforting in the passage is something for the prophet to do. Just like it can often seem like comforting is something reserved for the Priests among us. It can seem like God is making a call to good Pastoral care. Again, our language fails us here, because, Y’all, I’m afraid that God is a bit more southern than our Bibles let on.
The Hebrew here is presenting a thought that isn’t easily communicated North of the Mason-Dixon line, or west of the Mississippi. God is addressing the community like my mother raised in may’retta. “Comfort my people, Y’all, Comfort them. Says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem. And tell her she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.” God is speaking to us. She’s speaking to all of us. In the same way a mother’s call booms down the street at suppertime God’s call lifts off of the page and into our reality beckoning us to a place of renewal and divine restoration. Naturally we have to object. Isaiah does. “What shall I cry?” Do you not see that we are grass? That we are sinful and broken and grieving? We are waiting for the word to break into our lives in the birth of our Savior, but until then. This is honesty. This is a frank assessment of our situation as fallen creatures that is as true for Isaiah as it is for us. What then do we do with this call?
We do what John the Baptist does.
Don’t take this to mean that I’m recommending locusts and wild honey and hair shirts. John’s ministry looks an awful lot like the Church on its best days. John proclaims the forgiveness of sins. John offers hope, and calls for a dramatic re-orienting our lives to the reality of God. What’s more John does this in the face of Roman occupation, religious corruption, and civil unrest. John stands tall among the grass that we are. And it is precisely because he stands tall that he is cut short so early. And, even though, his time was brief his message rings out a truth that echoes in eternity, the truth that there is a loving and forgiving God. All that is required is that we turn and face that truth.
This is, on our best days, the message of the church. Like John we’re called to proclaim it and offer the healing waters of baptism to all who feel so called. Like John we’re to stand in the wilderness, at the margins and ring out a truth that stretches beyond us and our condition. Like John we are to be a comfort to so many who believe that they have nothing beyond the waiting, we are to point them to the one who is coming after us whose sandals we are not worthy to untie. There’s work to do in the waiting. And while we can still watch, and hope for, and ready ourselves for that moment which will come like a thief in the night we can not ignore those words that ring out past the pages of scripture: 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 shall be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”
A voice in the wilderness , “Cry Out!”
That voice is us, y’all.
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