Luke 3:1-6
(Singing, Godspell version) “Prepare ye the way of the Lord, Prepare the way of the Lord.” That is one of my favorite songs in the musical Godspell. I love the way that it starts with one voice – the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, the voice announcing the word of God. The song grows to eventually gather the community together in preparation.
We each prepare in different ways. A friend of mine was six months pregnant and had her prenatal check-up. My friend is a very small, very thin woman and her doctor was somewhat concerned at how little weight she had gained so far in her pregnancy. She was planning to leave on a family vacation and hoped that the doctor would still let her go. She explained her situation and the vacation plans she hoped to follow. When he heard her plans, he laughed and said he’d give her doctor’s orders for the trip. It turned out that her preparation was quite joyful. You see, her family vacation was a one-week cruise and she had doctor’s orders to gain at least 10 pounds!
Sometimes preparation can be difficult. In the gospel lesson we just read, the preparation we read about was quite a bit different than preparing for childbirth by eating for a week on a cruise.
Using ancient words from the prophet Isaiah, John the Baptist called the people to repent, to straighten up. John called the people to make radical transformations in their lives, just as he described filling the valleys and making low the mountains and hills. The people were called to make the paths straight, not for themselves, but for the Lord. Prepare for the entry of the Lord Jesus Christ!
Sometimes when people hear a call to repent or a call to prepare to meet the Lord, it strikes them with guilt or shame or another painful response. Often we avoid repentance, we avoid going straight to the Lord in the same way we avoid going to the dentist when our teeth hurt. Do you remember the movie “Marathon Man?” Dustin Hoffman gets mixed up with a bunch of bad guys that strap him down to a dentist chair and torture him by digging into his teeth with sharp objects and a dentist drill. People avoid going to the dentist to treat a cavity as if the dentist was going to torture them. Yes, the preparation prior to getting a new filling can be painful. I don’t know anyone that enjoys that kind of preparation – the poking, the shots of Novocain and the drilling. Yet without that preparation, the dentist cannot replace the decay and the pain with a clean, solid filling. And so people continue to experience the pain of a hurt tooth rather than go to the dentist to have it taken care of. All to avoid that painful preparation that comes before getting a new filling.
Now reading about filling valleys and making the paths straight is not intended to make you think of a divine dentist or an omnipotent orthodontist. And no, this is not really a sales pitch for 1-800-DENTIST.
But lets not ignore the preparation because of pain. All of us are living today with disorder in our lives, journeying on paths that are not straight and smooth. Our lives are full of twists and turns, ups and downs. In that disorder, we may be experiencing pain in our lives. Some of that pain may have been there for a long time. That pain comes not from toothaches, but from heartaches.
In Advent, we are called to prepare. How do we deal with the heartaches in this time of preparation? Sometimes when the preparation touches heartache, we are likely to look for ways to skip the preparation completely. We try to bury the heartache, we hide the pain, and we put on a happy face and just tough it out. But sweeping something under the rug just puts a bump in the middle of the room or in the middle of the road to trip us up.
Look at Isaiah and John the Baptist. They both “cry out.” Cry out is used over and over in the Old and New Testament. It means to cry out in need of God. If Isaiah and John the Baptist and thousands of others cry out to God in pain, cry out to God with their needs, why don’t we?
We may be trying to protect our pride. We may want to maintain our belief in our own self-reliance. We may be experiencing the grief of loss, the loss of change, the loss of a loved one and it is just hard to get close to the pain to let it go. It can be hard to cry out.
God hears our cry. God promises an answer. God sent Jesus in flesh and blood to bring the good news of God’s love into our world. Jesus came to reveal love and forgiveness and healing, living a life of healing ministry. Jesus put it this way in Luke 6:21, “blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.” We read in Luke 3:6 that “all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” This is a universal promise that covers us all. It is a promise of love and mercy from God. Best of all, I think, it is a promise that God brings salvation to us now, while we are still in the flesh. God makes promises for eternal life, but God’s eternal salvation starts now, in the flesh, just as it did when God sent Jesus in the flesh. Don’t hold onto the heartache that God is willing to take. Don’t hold onto the emptiness that Jesus can fill, right here in this community of faith.
When Jesus came on the earth, he brought salvation in a form that many did not expect and did not recognize. As we prepare now for Christmas joy, let us make the paths straight for God’s love to enter the hurting parts of this world, one heartache at a time. Let the preparation begin with us, in our hearts. Let us turn our hearts and our heartaches over to God, trusting that we are included in the promise that “all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” Let’s not miss the way that God comes into our lives with Christmas joy, in ways that surprise us.
Let our prayer of preparation this Advent be the words we sang just a few minutes ago:
Then cleansed be every life from sin;
Make straight the way for God within,
And let us all our hearts prepare
For Christ to come and enter there. (from On Jordan’s Banks the Baptist’s
Cry)
Prepare ye the way of the Lord. Amen.
(Comments to Jeff at jeff@thiemannventures.com.)
Intern Pastor, Saint Matthew Lutheran Church