Atom“The Road Home”
Mark 1:1-8 - “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight…”
They were a lost people, these Israelites. Not that they didn’t know where they were. They knew precisely. They were in Babylon, the place where they had been hauled to when the powerful Babylonian army overran their country. And as places of captivity go Babylon wasn’t all that bad a place to live. The Babylonians didn’t brutalize their captives. They just separated them from people and places they knew, mixed them up with other races and religions so that they couldn’t organize themselves into any kind of resistance or revolt. As captives, they had decent housing and most of the opportunities that the advanced Babylonian culture could offer them. Even so, they were still lost, separated from home and family, from the places and values they treasured, even – they feared –fro the presence and promise of their God. For them, Babylon was a wilderness – a civilized wilderness (which can be a temptation in and of itself) but a wilderness – a place of darkness and loneliness. And a place where they did not belong.
Last Sunday the lesson from Isaiah mouthed the cry of this people in exile, a people so lost, so orphaned, that they could cry to God, “Thou has hidden thy face from us.” And recognizing that they themselves were to blame, as Isaiah had told them, they confessed, “We sinned…we became like one unclean…we all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities – our sins – like the wind take us away.” (64:5ff). Because they had rebelled against God, because they had gotten comfortable with going their own way and not seeking their Creator, God had allowed the Babylonians to come and take them into exile, into a wilderness far from home and hope. Perhaps you have been there…a place where you have wandered or where you have ended up because you insisted on going your own way and you have felt the loneliness and bewilderment of being disconnected from home and God.
It is into this wilderness lostness the prophet Isaiah speaks here in chapter 40: “’Comfort, O Comfort my people,’ says your God…”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 made low.’”
Here is the announcement of a divine highway construction project through the wilderness, from the lostness, from Babylonian exile to home. And note that it is a straight road. This is significant. Ordinarily, the way from Babylon to Israel followed the fertile crescent, up and along the Mediterranean Sea and going out of its way to avoid the desert wilderness. But this road is “straight through the desert.” And, note that it is the Lord who will be traveling this road, leading Israel homeward. “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord. Make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”
I do not doubt that Isaiah means for us to think of Israel at another time in its history, and another exodus through the wilderness. You remember. Getting free from Pharaoh in Egypt was just the beginning of Israel’s difficulties. Between Egyptian slavery and the freedom of the Promised Land lay wilderness. And please, when you hear the word, “wilderness,” do not think “back to nature folks in a cozy prefab cabin in the woods. Nor are we talking of hiking in the Rocky Mountains on summer vacation. “Wilderness” for the people of Israel was a place of wild beasts, temptation, sin, and bewildered wandering with no star to guide. Remember, it took Israel forty years of wandering in this wilderness to finally find their way home.
It sometimes takes us a long time as well. I read a story recently of a man who spent forty years in the wilderness before coming home. Dan Wakefield, in his book Returning, describes how he wandered away from God, how his life as an adult became chaotic, confused. Then…he says, “I cannot pinpoint any particular time when I suddenly believed in God again. I only know that such belief came to seem as natural as [it had seemed unnatural during the intervening 25 years.] I realized this while looking at fish.
“’I had gone with my girlfriend,’ he says, ‘To the New England aquarium, and as we gazed at the astonishingly brilliant colors of some of the small tropical fish – reds and yellows and oranges – and watched the amazing lights of the flashlight fish that blinked on like the beacons of some creature of a sci-fi epic, I wondered how anyone cold think that all this was the result of some chain of accidental explosions! Yet…trying to convince me of that five years before would have been hopeless. Was this what they called ‘conversion?’”
He goes on. “The term [conversion] bothered me because it suggested being ‘born again’ and, like many of my [friends] I had been put off by the melodramatic nature of the label, as well as with the current political beliefs that seemed to go along with it. Besides, I didn’t feel ‘reborn.’ No voice came out of the sky, [nor did a lightening bolt strike me]…so I was relieved when our minister explained that the literal translation of ‘conversion’…is not ‘rebirth,’ but ‘turning.’ That is what my own experience felt like – as if I’d been walking in one direction, and then, in response to some inner pull, I turned.”
“Ah,” says Isaiah, “Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength…say to the cities of Judah, “Here is your God!” Here is a place of turning…of re-turning.
So, wilderness in the Bible is lostness, exile, homelessness. It is into this lostness, then, that John the Baptist appears in the gospel, quoting Isaiah, “Prepare the way of the Lord; make his paths straight.” Mark says it here in the first chapter, first verse, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus…” The beginning of good news is: “a voice crying in the wilderness – your wilderness, our wilderness – : Prepare the way of the Lord; make his highway straight!”
Again note that this is God’s highway. God travels this road. God brings homeless people back home. And this is not what our culture or society expects. If you were to go to any bookstore during this holiday season and look in the religion or spirituality section, you would no doubt find any number of books to help you get in touch with your own spirituality, to help you on the road to a meaningful life, to help you in your search for God.
But this word from God is not about us searching for God. This word instead tells us that God is searching. It tells us what God will do, where God is going, how God will drag Israel down the straight road home. God makes a road. And God makes it through John. No one asked for John the Baptist to show up. God sent him. The way out of the wilderness is a way initiated by God. So the question of the season may not be, “What am I looking for?” or, “What would it take for me to find my way back home?” The question is, “What road is God building toward me? To bring me home from my wilderness?” And remember, wilderness is that place, which is no place, where we lose our way, wander from the path, get lost. Exile is that time when we become enslaved to false Gods, serve an alien empire, sell out, and forget. And God comes to get us.
Which means that Advent is God’s invitation to come home – and it could not come at a better time. As we move deeper into December, Pastor Dave and I begin to notice many coming home: the familiar faces of young people coming home from college, of wise relatives visiting from the East and bearing gifts, and always, I think, the faces of “exiles” come back to church. We may be tempted, those of us who spend too much time in this building, to speak of “lost sheep” who wander in from the cold every year about Christmas time and then return once more about Easter. We can easily be cynical about such homecomings.
But why not? Why not come home now? God is calling. Have you been in exile – away, separated from things and people you love, in darkness and confusion? And what voice, what recently smoothed way has beckoned you back?
Think. That road is God building toward you today? Perhaps words spoken not to you, to someone else, but you heard them as spoken just for you… a face from the past…a vaguely felt, but gnawing sense of yearning…a memory pricked when you heard a Christmas carol from your childhood…a coincidence that might not have been coincidence at all, but rather God making a road into your wilderness.
Fred Craddock, teacher and pastor, remembers a little girl from one of the congregations he served early in his ministry. Her parents sent her to church, never came wither. They would pull in the Church’s circular drive, the little girl would hop out of the car and they would go out for Sunday breakfast. The father was an executive for a chemical company, upwardly mobile and ambitious.
The whole town knew of their Saturday night parties, parties given not for entertainment, but rather as part of their whole upwardly mobile program. That determined who was invited. And the whole town knew of the wild, vulgar things that went on at those parties.
But every Sunday, there was the little girl.
One Sunday, Craddock says he looked out over his congregation and thought, “There she is with a couple of adult friends.” Later he realized she was there with Mom and Dad. At the end of the service they came forward and expressed their intention to join the church.
“What brought this on?” asked the young pastor.
“Do you know about our parties?” they asked.
“Yeah, I heard of your parties.” Craddock said
“Well, we had one last night again. It got a bit loud, a little rough; there was too much drinking. And it woke up our daughter, and she came downstairs and she was on about the third step. And she saw the eating and drinking and she said, “Oh, can I do the blessing? God is great, God is good, let us thank God for our food. Good night everybody!” She went back upstairsl.
People began to say, “its getting late, we really must be going,” and ‘Thanks for a great evening.” ”And thanks for a good…” within two minutes, the room was empty.”
Mom and Dad picked up the crumpled napkins and spilled peanuts and half sandwiches and took empty glasses on trays into the kitchen. And they looked at each other, and he said what they both were thinking, “Where do we think we are really going? So here we are.” God had come out for them in the voice of a little girl. And there was remembrance and homecoming.
A voice, a song, a prayer, a college roommate, a grandchild’s Christmas program, a helping hand from an unexpected direction? What road is God building toward you today? If you have been in the wilderness, if you have been in exile, know this: God has been searching for you. Advent and Christmas is about the God who comes to find us, wherever we may have wandered, however screwed-up our life may be, and who says to us, “Come on home. This is where you belong – with me!”
“In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,” says Isaiah. “Make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” it’s Isaiah’s word; it’s John’s word, it’s God’s Word. Let’s pra
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