Sermons

Dec 4 - The Rev. Brian C. Taylor

The season of Advent calls us to wake up, to be alert, to await the coming of the Lord with hope and expectation. There is an urgency to this call. The scriptures bring to mind the end of the world, the coming day of the Lord, the breaking-in of the kingdom: be ready, the scriptures tell us, don’t be caught sleeping.

Do you feel any spiritual urgency? We can’t live in a state of constant expectancy and hope all the time, but I wonder if you ever feel urgent about the state of your soul, about who you are and who you want to become. How many more years do you think you will live? 20? 40? 10? One more year? Whatever it is, it isn’t long.

The poet Mary Oliver considered this fact, and wrote the following poem:
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

As the reading from Isaiah today reminds us, we are like grass; soon we shall wither and fade away. The letter from Peter this morning speaks of all earthly things coming to an end, that they will dissolve, and to consider therefore what sort of people we should be, living in holiness and peace.

Do you feel any urgency? Do you want to wake up, to take the world into your arms, to not end up simply visiting this world? Do you get tired of yourself sometimes, like I do? Do you sometimes long to be freer, lighter, more loving, more trusting, more real, more engaged, peaceful, and alive?

In Advent, many different figures of speech tell us how to respond to God with urgency. One of them is the metaphor from Isaiah today, so familiar to us. It appears in Handel’s Messiah, and the gospel of Mark begins by quoting it in the story of John the Baptist:

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.

First of all, the wilderness. What an apt metaphor for our lives! We may wish that our lives would be like a civilized little neighborhood, where people come and go in predictable routines, every lawn is trimmed, and all our needs and wishes are satisfied by the little shops that surround us. But in fact, life’s a wilderness.

We can’t control our emotions and our reactions to others; we can’t prevent calamity; we can’t just decide to be wise and holy and make it so. Instead, we find ourselves victims of old habits, surprised by twists and turns, disappointed by our own human weakness, uncertain of what lies around the next bend, and sometimes overwhelmed by the storms of adversity. We live in a wilderness. It is our natural habitat as humans.

But it is in this wilderness that we are to prepare the way of the Lord: not in some neat little neighborhood of the soul. God is sought when we’re slammed by some unforeseen difficulty, when we come to the end of our rope, when we face our all-too-familiar limitations again for the umpteenth time. That’s the time and the place where we find God.

Therefore perhaps it is more realistic to think about the wilderness of your weaknesses, failures and adversities the way St. Paul always did: as opportunities for God’s grace to abound. Every time you face your limitations, every time life throws you a curve ball and you don’t know how to respond, this is an opportunity to look up from the wilderness and ask for help to find your way forward.

Then Isaiah says that we are to make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Notice that the highway is for God’s travel, not for ours: it is a highway for our God. This is the great theme of Advent and Christmas – not that we climb our way to heaven, but that God comes to us . But God can’t come to us if we haven’t opened up a way, a path for him to travel towards us.

It may not matter so much what that highway consists of. It’s not as if there’s only one sort of road that God can use to get to us. For some, it’s a 12-step group. For others, it’s a lot of church activities or daily prayer. Some find spiritual growth in groups, some in solitude, some in self-reflection, or reading, or therapy, or among intimate friends. Many of us come here with open hearts and devotion in the Eucharist.

And so if you have any sense of urgency, if you think from time to time about how you want your life to be in the years you have left, provide some sort of pathway to you heart that God can use. But remember that this is not so that you can find your way to heaven. It’s there for God to find you. God will journey into your heart using the pathway that you yourself have provided for him, and he will then cause you to grow in grace.

Finally, the passage from Isaiah talks about this highway being straight and level, that valleys must be raised up and hills brought low, that rough places must be smoothed out.
I never really like this part. When I travel, I like the mountains and curvy roads and steep valleys. A straight, level road bores me. Same thing with life. I don’t want to become my life to be leveled out, with no extremes; that’s not human to me.

But then I remember what Isaiah is talking about. When I was a kid, my father, a mining engineer, would take me on trips to places in the West where they were building highways. They dynamited through mountains, cut out sections of hills, and filled in low spots. They didn’t remove the mountains and the valleys. They just worked to make it possible for a road to continue through those areas.

As God journeys into our heart to transform us, there will be obstacles on the way: high hills, deep valleys, and rough places, places we won’t allow God to continue traveling into our heart. These will need to be worked with so that God can continue to travel through those areas. This is the spiritual work that lies ahead of us in the years we have remaining in life.

We all have resistance to change. We may say that we want to be more holy, more loving and free, but in order to be so, we’ve got to deal with our obstacles. Those high hills and deep valleys and rough places might be our lack of trust and need for control; they might be our resentment that life hasn’t gone the way we want it to; they might be our fear of losing comforting but deadening habits; they might be our perfectionism or our shame; they even might be fear of our own goodness. The hills and valleys and rough places of resistance can block the Spirit from going any further at all.

When we recognize those obstacles, and if we want God to be able to get through them, we ask for the Spirit to work with them. Over time we discover that the highway for God becomes smoother, easier for the Spirit to travel along. We become less resistant, more familiar with how to open our hearts, more awake so that we can spot our obstacles more quickly. It may still be a wilderness, but over time, God can reach us more quickly, more effectively.

We shall soon wither and fade like the grass. So now is the time to live as we are called to live. Now is the coming of the Lord. In your wilderness, prepare a path for God to travel into your heart. Make yourself available to the work of the Spirit on your obstacles to grace. God will come to you and birth his Son in you again, and you will be made new.