Scripture: Mark 1:1-8
I made a last minute substitution in the scripture reading for this morning. The lectionary scripture for today is the one listed in your bulletin: Luke 3:1-6. However, it dawned on me after listing that scripture that it is one of those passages people worry about when I approach them about reading scripture just as they are finding their seat on a Sunday morning. And they will say, “Well, OK, as long as it doesn’t have too many of those long Biblical names.” And in this case I would have had to say, “Well, actually…how many is too many?” The Luke reading begins: “In the fifteenth year of the reign of the Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea and Herod was the ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip the ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas…” I decided to switch to Mark, which has a similar passage, but which begins quite simply, as you heard: “The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ. As it is written in the prophet Isaiah: ‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord…”
This is one of those passages I’ve read a hundred times before—at least. It comes up for sure every second Sunday in Advent. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all have a version of this same reading, and one of those versions is always the lectionary gospel reading for the second Sunday in Advent. So I almost always read it and after many years of preaching on the lectionary scriptures, these days when I read that passage I almost always react the same way: Yeah, yeah. Voice crying in the wilderness. John the Baptist. Angry. Repent. Sinners. Prepare. All the key words and preaching themes. Been there; done that. Struggled with all that. Move on. So what else is there to preach on?
I was about to move on to something else when something made me not…move on. The passage says, “As it is written in the prophet Isaiah…” Something made me check what is written in the book of the prophet Isaiah. I looked it up. It’s in the 40th chapter, a passage that’s read often in Advent and that, among other things forms part of the text for Handel’s Messiah. In any case it reads: “A voice cries out: ‘in the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”
I don’t know if it’s immediately apparent to you, but there’s a slight difference between what I just read from Isaiah and what Matthew, Mark, and Luke all quote Isaiah as saying. They say Isaiah said, “The voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord’.” They say that because they see John the Baptist as a fulfillment of that prophecy, this strange, wild man who seems to have just appeared out of the desert with his urgent words about one who is coming after him. He is “the voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord.’” But Isaiah says, “A voice cries: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord.’” It is not that a voice cries in the wilderness; it is that we are to prepare the way of the Lord in the wilderness.” It is not John the Baptist who is in the wilderness. It is…well…it is we who are in the wilderness—you and me.
The point I’m concerned with here is not whether the gospel writers misquoted Isaiah or what the correct reading of the text is. I don’t know enough to make a judgment on such things, nor do I care to. It’s probably a small matter of punctuation and since I believe I’m correct in saying that Hebrew didn’t have punctuation, the text could probably be read either way. It’s not important. What I do care about is that we not focus so much on John the Baptist, as interesting and significant a character as he might be in the story, and that we focus more on ourselves, that we take these words about being in the wilderness personally.
Specifically, I’m thinking of wilderness as a place where human beings feel lost. There are other ways to think of it; I’m thinking of it today as a place of lostness. A wilderness is uncharted territory. There are no roadmaps telling us how to get where we want to go. For that matter there are no roads that will at least get us someplace. A wilderness is a place where we don’t know which way to turn. It is at the very least a place of confusion, a place of bewilderment, a place of not knowing, a place where you’re not in charge, a place of vulnerability. And I guess what I am thinking today is that finding ourselves in the wilderness, recognizing ourselves to be in the wilderness, even intentionally seeking out the wilderness is, spiritually speaking, not such a bad thing. It can even be a good thing. It is, after all, where we need to be in order to prepare the way of the Lord. “In the wilderness,” Isaiah says, “prepare the way of the Lord.”
So I’m wanting to say a few words this morning on behalf of the spiritual wilderness experiences we all have or at least that we all need to recognize in ourselves. In a way this seems like an appropriate follow-up to last week when I decided to offer some words of praise for passivity, Mary’s passivity, but also certain kinds of passive qualities in ourselves. This week I’m offering some words of appreciation for being lost. I say that’s an appropriate follow-up because both things are counter cultural, passivity not being a generally admired trait in our culture and lostness also not being something we generally look on as a good thing. We are not supposed to be lost. We’re supposed to know where we’ve come from, where we are, where we’re heading, and how we’re going to get there. At the organizational level strategic planning—good thing. At the personal level, having your act together, your life arranged, your goals established, your plans in place—all good things. But there must be something about the way our culture goes about observing the Christmas season that makes me want to be counter cultural. That’s too large a topic for today. But I do want to say just a few words, positive words, on the themes of wilderness and lostness.
I sometimes say that at Sojourners we make things up as we go along—different things about our church life—I don’t have a good example I remember at my finger tips, but it could be all sorts of things from how we arrange our seating, to how we receive the offering, to how we do the Advent wreath, to how we do communion, to how we receive new members and how we think about membership and how we do confirmation, to how we express our commitments to social justice, to how we respond when one of our members decides to go to seminary. On these or any number of other issues I might say and have been known to say that we make things up as we go along.
Of course when I say this, I don’t mean to be taken literally or entirely seriously. Of course we don’t really make things up as we go along—not most things. We don’t make up the hymns we sing, and when we sing words different from what the hymnal has, it’s usually because we want to sing the words we have had passed down to us from somewhere else. We don’t make up the seasons of the church year. We don’t make up the scriptures that have been handed down to us. We may quarrel with them, but we don’t make them up. The choir doesn’t make up the music it sings as it goes along, except for the music that Beverly has composed, we could say that was made up as we went along.
My point is that even in a congregation that is as unconstrained by tradition as Sojourners is, we owe much to the past. We have inherited a large part of who we are. It would be foolish and arrogant and almost oxymoronic to say that we are making up our own special version of Christianity as we go along. If we are Christian at all we are part of a two thousand year tradition which shapes us for good and for ill and we owe who we are to countless Christians who have gone before us. We have learned from them both what it can mean to be a Christian and what it ought not to mean to be a Christian. And even when we think we are making things up as we go along, it’s not as though we are coming up with ideas that are so unique that no one has ever thought of them before or is not trying to do the same thing in some other place. We are not just casually making things up as we go along, as though we were all alone in this effort to be a Christian community. Trying to be a Christian community in some new way is nothing new for Christians. So when I say we make things up as we go along, I don’t mean to be taken too seriously, and I certainly want to be careful not to take myself too seriously.
Still…nevertheless…if we think we got this Christian thing down just because we’ve been doing it for two thousand years more or less, we need to think again. If we don’t think that trying to be a Christian community puts us in some very real senses in uncharted territory, if we don’t feel more than a tad uncertain about trying to be a safe place when so many Christian communities have not been safe places, and uncertain at the same time trying to be at least somewhat brave in standing for justice when so many Christian communities have been timid, if we do not know how to admit to God and to ourselves that we are just a bit bewildered by all the different things there are to do if we were good Christians while knowing that we can’t begin to do them all, if we were not just a bit unclear about how we go about being a Christian community in the culture in which we live, we would probably not be trying very hard. If we want to be a real Christian community, not just a copy of one, a replica, we need to have a sense that we live in a wilderness. It is by no means a given how one goes about doing this. To say that we are figuring it out, or making it up, as we go along, with all the uncertainty and tentativeness and not knowing that implies is not such a bad thing. It is in fact a good and necessary thing. “In the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord.”
What I’m saying about the uncertain venture of trying to be a Christian community without being tied to any blueprint of what that will mean for us, this people in this time in this place, what I’m saying about this being a wilderness kind of experience no matter how much we may honor and learn from the way others have gone about it or are now going about it, what I’m saying about our need not to be afraid of feelings of uncertainty and bewilderment and lostness, that they may all be good signs that we’re where we need to be spiritually, what I’m saying about all of this can apply to us as individuals as well.
It’s not that we are clueless, any of us who sincerely want to be a Christian. We have our ideas about what it means to be Christian. More than any ideas we have, we have notions of what being a Christian is all about that we have learned from others who have taught us by their example, including of course our sisters and brothers here at Sojourners. We may not be able to define exactly what being a Christian means but we have known it when we have seen it.
Still, like trying to be a Christian community, being a Christian person is an uncertain venture. We hold our ideas about it lightly. What we admire in others may not fit for ourselves. We never really know exactly what we are doing. We pray without being able to explain prayer. We seek social justice as a witness, different from a social program that anticipates the results of certain actions, a testimony to what we believe, not a judgment about what will work. We set out in a certain direction, but we never know where God will lead us really and we remain open to God’s spirit, trusting God’s sustaining presence as we, each of us, make up as we go along, what it will mean specifically for us to be a Christian. For those of us who have chosen that path, and in this Christian community we don’t insist that people think of themselves in those terms, but for those of us who see ourselves not so much as already Christian but on the road to becoming Christian, it is an uncertain journey. It is a bit of a wilderness, but it may be where we are meant to be, where God calls us to be. “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord.” Amen.
Jim Bundy
December 6, 2009