“In the desert prepare the way of the LORD!
Make straight in the wasteland a highway for our God!
Every valley shall be filled in,
every mountain and hill shall be made low;
the rugged land shall be made a plain,
the rough country, a broad valley.
Then the glory of the LORD shall be revealed…”
Make straight in the wasteland a highway for our God!
Every valley shall be filled in,
every mountain and hill shall be made low;
the rugged land shall be made a plain,
the rough country, a broad valley.
Then the glory of the LORD shall be revealed…”
--Isaiah 40:1-5
In last Sunday's reading from 2nd Peter, the apostle tells us that because we do not know the hour or day the
Lord will come, we should be living “a life of holiness and devotion, waiting
for and hastening the coming of the day of God.” And writing some 600+ years earlier the
prophet Isaiah gives us a sense of how we might do that. He tells us to make a straight path, to clear
the way and build a highway for our God.
And the evangelist Mark, even cites this passage from Isaiah as he
introduces his life of Jesus by directing our attention to the humble voice of
one crying in the wilderness, aka John the Baptist.
As a boy,
when I would hear this reading, I would often think of how glorious it would be
to go out into the wilderness and dress in camel’s hair and feed on locusts and
honey. And I always thought: if we are
serious about our faith, this is how we really make straight the way of the Lord.
This is how we build a super-highway for God in the wasteland! Like John, we need to give up all earthly
possession, wander out into the wilderness and begin crying out: Prepare the way of the Lord! In my childhood reverie, the clouds would
part and the music would swell and Julie Andrews would look down from the Alps
and start running the other direction! But it would be glorious with glistening
sand and shimmering rocks and a picturesque body of water always nearby. I even imagined a kind of vast cinemascope
scene; half George Stevens and half a Hal B. Wallis remake of Godspell! I also often wondered what would happen if
thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of people suddenly gave up their daily
lives and professions and obligations and wandered off in search of God! Sometimes
I would sigh --What a day that would be! And other times I would gasp and
ponder: what a day that would be… Half Cecil B. DeMille and half George Romero,
perhaps…
And yet, as
I meditate upon these readings now I am struck (in old age) by a couple of
smaller things. First, the call of John
isn’t to disappear into the wilderness. He isn’t calling the people of
Jerusalem to abandon their lives and become hermits with him in the desert. He
is calling them to repent. To
acknowledge their sins, and repent! That
seems to be the path he proposes for them, the highway he helps them
construct. And it makes me wonder about
that highway. I had always heard this as
a highway we were building so we could travel it –so we could get to God. But that doesn’t seem to be what Isaiah is
saying. Isaiah seems to be saying that we
are making a “highway for our God,” not for us. That God will travel this
highway to get to us. And that leads me
to the second thing I keep going back to: those valleys that we are to fill in
and those mountains that we are to make low.
What does that mean to me? In my
youth of course it was a grand earth moving project from the WPA. Lots of
explosions and collapsing piles of rocks and steam shovels and bulldozers and
Mike Mulligan –all that.
But now I
hear these words and immediately think of idols and emptiness. The mountains
make me think of the mountains I make out of my sin. I make false idols from my
sin and they become so important to me, that I build “holy mountains” for them
to sit on. And for me sometimes it seems
like there are so many of these holy mountains: one for my pride, one for my righteous
indignation, one for my gossiping tongue, one for my sensuality, one for my
laziness and an especially high one made entirely out of potato chips with a
large bowl of onion dip and a six-pack of root-beer on the top! There are times
when I look out across the wasteland and see so many of these mountains I feel
lost. And beside each mountain is a vast
valley of emptiness and longing out of which I have shoveled and dug the dirt
and the rock and the delusions and denials for the mountains I’m building –even
still. The valleys are the emptiness
inside me. The longing for success, and for happiness and for peace. And they just grow vaster and vaster as I
shovel more out of them to make new mountains to what the ancient Hebrews would
have called my “personal gods.”
But the
prophet says: fill in those valleys, make low those mountains. The Lord is coming. Get rid of those mountains
you have made. Let go of the pride you have taken in their construction. Tear
them down and fill in those valleys that make you feel so empty. That is how you will build your highway for
our God. Tear down your mountains, and
fill your valleys and that is when God’s highway will appear. And what is one of the best ways to tear down
our mountain? Repentance. Confession. Don’t cling to your sins, confess them.
Those mountains will begin to crumble. And then, make time for prayer, for
scripture, for adoration or meditation, and you will feel those valleys begin
to fill. Remember, this highway isn’t
for God. God doesn’t need it. No, it’s for us. We need a highway for our God, because
we need to make it easier for us to receive Him. The wasteland is within us. It
is in our misguided, broken and anxious hearts.
Isn’t that where we find these valleys of loneliness and emptiness? Isn’t
that where we really build these mountains for our sins? So, open your heart. Tear down the mountains
and fill the valleys. God is coming. Prepare the way –Hasten His coming! Not for
His sake. No, my dear friend, not for His sake, but for your own. The highway
is for us. It makes it easier for us to receive the grace that God is trying to
give us every day, every moment of every day.
Open your heart. Let it become an 18-lane superhighway (if you can). Receive
the triumphal convoy of 18 wheelers filled with grace! And Mercy and Forgiveness
and Love. God is coming. Repent. Change your ways. Straighten out your path, because you don’t want to wander off and miss this.
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