The Second Sunday of Advent: Hastening the day of God (2 Peter 3:12)

“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…”

--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.