Scripture Isaiah 40: 3-5
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 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.”
Rev. Debra McKnight's Reflection:
The second Sunday of Advent invites us to explore peace not only by lighting a candle, but within our own searching, seeking, work and world. This passage from Isaiah, this second part of Isaiah (the middle of the Isaiah trilogy) is spoken to people in distress. It is spoken to a community in the midst of their deep grief and great sadness, absolute uncertainty. And it begins, “Comfort, O comfort my people.” The prophet places those words in the mouth of the Divine, “Comfort, O comfort my people.”
On this year we gather, I think, seeking that same comfort, perhaps more than ever before in recent memory. We gather, acknowledging a global pandemic that has laid bare the shortcomings and the brokenness of our structures, we come together acknowledging our exhaustion, and we come together aware, more than ever before, how we are touched by this global pandemic. At this point most of us know someone who has experience Covid-19, even if we ourselves have not, and we likely know someone who has died or experienced the loss of an aunt or uncle, a grandparent, a sibling, a friend. Beloved people of our community are perishing, our medical professionals are weary and we all wish the world was different. We are witnessing days when more Americans die of Covid-19 than in the attacks of 9/11 or Pearl Harbor. It is a gruesome, exhausting, grief-filled time and so we gather, to hear these words, “Comfort, O comfort my people.”
This language is spoken to the people of Israel when they are in Babylon. They are in captivity following a forced march and utter destruction. And they know the trauma, so the prophetic books of Isaiah don’t rehash it. The first part of Isaiah is written as the regional political tension is brewing, the likelihood of a Babylonian invasion is a real and present danger. The descendants of David cannot seem to muster a response to meet the challenge of the day. Perhaps the Babylonians just had so much power, capital, and might there is no other way forward. But the prophets keep saying, “justice,” they refuse to give up and they say the path is justice, justice for the widow and the orphan, the poor, justice for the whole community … this is the path they proclaim as the way forward.
Isaiah 40 starts with, “Comfort,” it doesn’t rehash the trauma. There is no need. They still remember the sheer violence of the Babylonian empire, they lived it or they heard the stories of the ones who did. They know the Psalms of lament and weeping by the river, they know the temple, God’s very home was leveled. They live, some of them in captivity and some of them dwell in the land that has been devastated. True masters at violence and terror, the Babylonians waited until Passover when the city was teeming with people and the temple treasury was full for the plundering and then they rained down complete and utter destruction. The land still remembers the destruction, archaeologists dig deep into the land and they find a charred layer of Jerusalem. This is the setting into which Second Isaiah speaks, “Comfort.”
“Comfort, O comfort my people,” the Divine speaks to a deviated people. A voice at the table of God 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, every mountain shall be made low, the uneven ground will become level, the rough places made plain.” This passage is about the wilderness, but the people will not wonder for 40 years. God is meeting them, guiding them, regrading the mountains, smoothing out the rough spots. God shows up in the wilderness, and there is no obstacle - it is not a stony road, it is not uphill both ways, it is smooth and easy and the Divine meets them there.
The prophet continues, placing the voices of our mortality and God’s loving presence on these sacred lips, gathering to listen to God’s call. God’s comfort and love is to be proclaimed and not just from anywhere, but from the highest hill on the mountain top, so her voice can be heard everywhere. People in despair hear the message and are reminded that God is strong and that that strength is used in restraint. The poetry does not continue to say, “God is really strong and he’s gonna get those mean Babylonians.” It says, “The Lord comes with might, his arms rule for him, his reward is with him, he will feed his flock like a shepherd, he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom and gently lead the mother sheep.” God’s power and might is displayed in this intimate tenderness of sweeping up, drawing close the most tender and vulnerable. We can imagine the shepherdess holding the lambs, carrying them across the uneven ground, protecting them from all manner of predator or elements or struggle. We can imagine the shepherd with rod and staff to help right the sheep when they fall down. “Comfort, O comfort my people,” that is the message of tenderness and love, strength that does not wound, but builds up and guides through the wilderness to dwell with God.
I invite us to lean into them today. We look at the world around us, the struggle around us, the brokenness around us, the death and destruction around us and we cry out for this comfort. As the numbers of folks who experienced Covid-19 and even perished by it rise, we are in conflict with the most dangerous enemy, our own inhumanity. The solutions that could save lives are not actually difficult. There are technical solutions that buy us time to for the adaptive solutions. There are small steps that would make us all safer. The solutions are not technically hard except they seem impossible. We grow weary of being asked to stay home and wearing a mask has been branded not only as a sign of fear, but as a form of oppression, somehow worthy of protests. This moment calls us to the attentiveness of who we are and how we are in the world. Where are the values we proclaim to hold? Our values of equity and justice, our values of community and our love of neighbors that makes Nebraska the Good Life? This moment lays bare this kind of dichotomy within our reality, which is, as we might explore this verse in Isaiah from the point of the folks seeking comfort, oppressed in Israel, we must also acknowledge our reality as the Babylonians, too. We resemble them too, even if we wish we didn’t. We have our fair share of might and power and capacity and capital and courage. And we have used this for good, there have been times in our history where we have mustered our utmost and rallied them for a greater good. We have reshaped the social framework. We have invested in one another in the great depression and after WWII. We have never done it perfectly, but there have been moments when we have made social investments that lifted the very bottom and lifted us all. There have been moments when we have rallied our values to stop the spread of Nazi Germany and Fascism in Europe. There have been moments where we show up and bend the arc of justice and move to an evermore equitable country and world.
But we have probably not had our fair share of reckoning and we are reluctant to see how much we resemble Babylon. Our sins as a nation have not been laid bare on the international stage. There have been no international trials about our interactions with the first peoples of this land. We have yet to make reparations for the folks enslaved in southern plantations and beyond. We have so much work to do. We’re in this season that feels overwhelming and the choices before us are large. Will we rise to meet the challenges of our day with our values or will we continue to flounder while our neighbors perish?
It feels like the wilderness and I lean into this invitation from God to join us there. The wilderness can feel nerve-racking. It is not a place that all of us are used to being and, frankly, we don’t spend much time there. This pandemic reminds us that other epidemics have touched us ever so lightly, if at all. It reminds us that we have so much work to do for healthcare access, education, and a sustainable economy. And so here we are in the wilderness.
The Womanist Theologian, Delores Williams, invites us to open our eyes to the wilderness, that maybe folks with a lot of privilege who are used to streets laid out in a grid and are relatively at peace with the status quo, find the wilderness scary. But the wilderness hasn’t always been scary for everyone. For those enslaved or those oppressed, wilderness has been a place of safety, a place of freedom from the watchful eyes of the oppressed, and a place to love your being. The wilderness has been this space of liberation, this journey out of the impossible.
The wilderness in our biblical tradition is a space of transformation. The people of Israel journeyed through the wilderness not just after the Babylonian captivity, but after slavery in Egypt. Through 40 years they emerged a people seeking a new promise. Jesus spent time in the wilderness between his baptism and the launch of his ministry and so we gather in the wilderness, too. This Advent season I think that the mirror for us, the most powerful reflection in the story of Advent, might just be the three kings - those wisemen, the magi. See, they take this wilderness journey and while they technically don’t come into the lectionary until after Christmas, I wanted to invite us to hear them now because they probably challenge us the most. We may not have much in common with the shepherds or even Mary, but we probably have a lot in common with these Three Kings. And you may be saying to yourself, “well, Debra, I’m not a king.” And I say, “well, neither were they.” That’s probably just poor translating paid for by a Christian king… who wouldn’t mind at least one decent king in the opening chapters of Matthew. I realize magi isn’t really in our vernacular and no one has it as a job title these days, but if we unpack it a bit, it helps us get closer to understanding their identity. I’ve said this before and I’ll probably say it every year, we might do well to imagine them as research scientists. They’re folks who study and learn. There is some privilege in their role, even if they are not the king. They know the sky and the history and when they see something new on the horizon, they know they have to follow it.
For ancient folks, powerful leaders have their birth proclaimed in the heavens, which is why Matthew made sure we explored this story. But for us this really isn’t about a bright star, but rather the illuminating discipleship and faithfulness of three magi/research scientists. They pack it up, they go, maybe they had projects and grants to tend to or a sabbatical coming up, but they go. And while wealth affords a certain amount of ease, these journeys could be anything but easy or safe and, at the very least, it might have messed with their allergies. They journey through the wilderness to meet the horizon before them - hopeful, uncertain, and determined. And like good research scientists, they know to show up at the palace in Jerusalem with gifts fit for a king (not for a baby).
This is where they really enter the wilderness because they have baby presents for the newborn king, but there hasn’t been a baby shower at the palace and no one is rocking a bassinet. King Herod, who is notoriously ego-driven, concerned primarily about his self- image and notoriously volatile (I know that’s really hard to imagine in a leader) responds with fear.
He invites his wisemen, his scribes, his priests, his learned folks, his magi, and they say, “oh yeah, there is that prophecy about Bethlehem.” It will always astonish me that none of these men follow-up, ask more questions or think maybe we should go meet this baby. They do nothing and they keep the little bit of peace they think they have. So Herod tells the three wisemen where they can find the baby and, with all of the sincerity of the Grinch to Cindy Lou Who, he says, “And when you’re done, come back and let me know so I can go pay homage.”
They go and they encounter Jesus, this powerless, peasant family in the middle of nowhere, and they experience awe and joy. Joy that is hard to contain and overwhelms. They respond with generosity, these extravagant gifts fit for a king and for building strategic alliances (totally useless for a baby) and the experience moves them to act. Their response to Jesus is an act of civil disobedience. They don’t go back to Herod, even if it risks their mission of connecting kingdoms and building relationships, even if it risks their life and even their work. They go home a different direction. Maybe they know what a tyrant looks like, maybe they caught the vibes in the palace or maybe they didn’t and so the Divine made a neon billboard/dream that said out right, “GO HOME A DIFFERENT WAY!”
Jesus will survive to become a refugee in Egypt, other children will parish and the gifts, I like to imagine, help pay for the trip to Egypt. We are asked to this life of faith, just like the magi, with our degrees of privilege and preparation, how will we respond to Christmas? They don’t change everything, Herod is still King and Caesar is still on the coins, but they make a difference in whatever way they can. The risk is no match for the draw of the new horizon. They experience Jesus and they are the first to follow him into the wilderness and into the work of justice, compassion and peace. Where they are planted, they are blooming with a different kind of peace, a peace that surpasses all understanding, a peace that invites us to travel a new path. May we have the courage to lean into God’s presence, to seek God’s comfort, to offer it to one another and to do what it asks of us even if the journey is hard. May it be so. Amen.
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