Year B
Isaiah 40:1-11 & Mark 1:1-8
The Rev. Denise Vaughn
Turn Around to God
In the first Sunday of Advent, we were greeted not with a note of joy as we might expect for this season but with end time despair. We were given a warning or a wake-up call to the fact that at some point the scriptures tell us Jesus will return and we need to be ready and awake to God in this world. Awake because a way needs to be made in the desert of this world until Christ returns and the way commanded is already a way known by God’s people: it is a way through the wilderness. It is a voice of one crying out in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” It is the voice of each person of God crying out prepare for that day…get ready. For the Lord our God commands that a way be made in the desert of this world. So, today the scriptures plunge us right in setting the stage through the prophets John and Isaiah to bring about a way in the desert of this world.
For the most part on this the Second Sunday of Advent, the note of despair is missing and instead there is assurance that God’s mercy is made evident in new ways, in the not so cuddly John the Baptist for example who calls us to make a way and prepare by repenting. Can you guess what Winnie the Pooh and John the Baptist have in common? They both have the same middle name. Where Winnie the Pooh is the toy we cuddle, we don’t find John very cuddly mainly because he insists that we repent. He is the prophet who sees our brokenness and knows we need to bring our brokenness to God and allow God to heal our lives so we can be the voice preparing the way. I agree John’s message doesn’t sound much like “Good News.” Yet, after hearing the text today from Isaiah we can’t help but feel God is more cuddly and merciful than John lets on. “We hear God say, Comfort, O comfort my people.”
God wills comfort and consolation to those in the very depths of despair and depends upon his people to bring that message, to become bearers of the divine message of comfort and consolation that God offers. Isaiah’s words sought to bring comfort to his people who lived under a shroud of death for decades. In the beginning of the sixth century BCE, Babylon invaded Judah, destroying much of Jerusalem, interrupting the economy and deporting leading citizens to Babylon. Babylon occupied the land for fifty years. This song of the anonymous prophet known as Second Isaiah emerges in the decades after the invasion like a healing balm, for Isaiah imagines a nation restored, a city rebuilt, and a people reunited in Zion. For his grieving, futureless people their sin did not explain the disaster.
The suffering seemed out of proportion to Second Isaiah and his message is one of good news about God’s mercy, God’s comfort and God’s promise of redemption, forgiveness, for a people who had lived in exile for many years. For those who live in exile, economic uncertainty, those who suffer, there can be no true hope except in God. It’s futile to hope in individuals or even the things of this world because we are mortal and the things here today are gone tomorrow. The comfort promised, sometimes does not come without waiting and wandering in desert places. Like the people of Israel, we are looking for God’s mighty arm to remove our suffering.
Yet, the message of our Christ centered hope is a hope that calls us to wander in the wilderness to prepare the way and when we look at our world, we can see how preposterous the message we carry may sound. It does indeed seem that the God of Israel and of Jesus Christ has very little power compared to the other “gods’ of this world. This season speaks well of these other ‘gods.” Consumerism, along with our lust for oil, war that takes precious lives; how can we speak of a God whose strength appears in the power of gentleness, in a tender and caring presence, in an intimacy such as a shepherd when gathering up the wounded, scattered flock, in a God who dies on a cross for sin….this is our hope.
This is what the lost of our world need to hear that God cares and is with us and it is good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. It is a voice crying out “See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” The Lord wants his people to prepare the way, to be voices crying out in the wilderness making his path straight. It was a wilderness man named John, who came from the desert to the Jordon and in that river preached a baptism, a way of forgiveness of sins to the hundreds of people longing to hear that God cared about them and that God was with them.
In John’s day, centuries after the time of Second Isaiah, the world was in turmoil similar to Second Isaiah’s day. Instead of challenging the turmoil, John calls the people to consider for a time what it might mean to prepare for the one who is to come. He proclaimed that preparation involved repentance, asking for forgiveness, and confession. It doesn’t sound much like “good news” and not something we want to do this time of year, but for Mark, John is the voice that announces “comfort” and hope to the people through repentance. Just as Isaiah declared God’s coming to deliver, comforting those who wanted to be saved, so too Mark speaks to those in the first century who are concerned about the delay of Jesus’ return.
As Mark ties the words of Isaiah to his own setting, so too God’s word speaks to us today because we are still waiting. This text filled with Advent themes of anticipation and preparation has John speaking to the future generations of Christians calling us to consider what it means to prepare for the one who is to come. How do we prepare? By opening our eyes and hearts to Christ, by repenting and letting ourselves be transformed. Advent waiting is hard and humbling because we are to embrace John’s call to repentance, which means change, literally turning around and going in a new direction. It means turning back to God when we are going the way of the world. It is crying out in the wilderness of this world.
We are like the crowds who came to listen to John, seeking a new direction for the future and we hear the not so cuddly John point us to Jesus and tell us to prepare to be able to let in how much God loves us. To prepare to open our hearts to receive the gift of love this Christmas that is the Christ child and we may be shocked someday when Christ comes again in all God’s glory and shows us who we really are before God. Jesus is good at that, so our hope is to join with John and Isaiah in turning around and turning our lives back to God. We want to be ready, prepared and looking for the coming of the one who is our hope, our comfort and our savior. Come, Lord Jesus, Come.