Preparing a way in the wilderness (or having it prepared for you)

 ‘…that you may be able to stand before the Son of Man.’ (Luke 21:36)

Luke 3:1-6 (Year C: Advent 2)

Psalm 141 (or 142 depending on which version you use) opens up with the following lines:

‘ With all my voice I cry to the Lord, with all my voice I entreat the Lord.  I pour out my trouble before him; I tell him all my distress’

The evangelist, Luke, announces the beginning of the ministry of John the Baptist ‘in the wilderness’. He quotes directly from the prophet 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.’

In our own wildernesses we, too, cry out except that we may not be consciously aware that we are crying out. Even more so, we don’t even know who we are crying out to and why.

The reality about John, a cousin of Jesus, is that he lived wildly and recklessly. He didn’t conform. Yet, people sought him out in the wilderness. Eventually one day his cousin showed up and nothing was ever the same again. John the Baptist continued to do what he did but, now, everything was different. Someone else ‘greater’ than he had arrived on the scene and the task was now to provide signs towards that other.

And so it is at this time of year and whatever time of life you, the reader, find yourself in.  Our pathways should lead to joy, from joy and through joy. Yet, joy often seems lacking in this ‘vale of tears’. As a consequence, we seek comfort in this or that and find little or no joy in ‘this or that’. We may even seek comfort in ‘religion’ which becomes our blanket and prop. Without realising it, Karl Marx was not entirely wrong when he wrote: ‘Religion is the opium of the masses’. Rather, true religion is about something that goes beyond comfort blankets and stories before bed time. It is about costly grace, costly choices and costly lives as Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood discipleship to mean in an increasingly ‘religionless’ world.

‘All flesh shall see the salvation of God’. This is important because the gospel of Luke was, apparently, written for pagans in Greece (that’s us, so to speak).  All flesh – all races, all genders, left and right, straight and gay, ‘religious’ and ‘non-religious’, high-church and low-church, broad church and narrow church, liberal church and conservative-traditional church, all peoples – are called today ‘to see the salvation of God’. The writers of the Biblical books were hung up on the idea of ‘all’.  All are called to salvation. Inspired by John Wesley, many Christians attach special importance to four cornerstones and four great ‘Alls’ of our belonging to Christ:

All people need to be saved.
All people can be saved.
All people can know they are saved.
All people can be saved to the uttermost

Are we up to the challenge? Are we ready? Do we care? We can only start with ourselves.  Even if we feel or think that we are not up to the challenge; are not ready and do not care there is a power and a love bigger than each one of us that is preparing a way through our hearts to joy and a peace and a freedom in the midst of this personal and social wilderness.

‘By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.’ (Luke 1:78-79)

Watch out! We have been warned!