Scripture Text: Isaiah 40: 1-11 (Advent 2B)

Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. ²Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.  ³A voice cries out: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. ⁴Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. ⁵Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.” ⁶A voice says, “Cry out!” And I said, “What shall I cry?” All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. ⁷The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely the people are grass. ⁸The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever.  ⁹Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah, “Here is your God!” ¹⁰See, the Lord God comes with might, and his arm rules for him; his reward is with him, and his recompense before him. ¹¹He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.

Yes, I know this Advent seems to have started in the dark and drear but hang with me.  There’s a reason.  Think about it.  Most of what God does starts in the dark—Creation, Mt. Sinai, Deliverance, even Resurrection.  It makes us pay attention; it makes us alert; it makes us awake to what God is doing.  So, again, we find ourselves in the wilderness.  We’ve been here before.  We don’t necessarily like it but we’ve seen it before.

And here the people find themselves in the wilderness, desperately looking for a highway, a way out, something that will show them the way.  They yearn for comfort, for deliverance.  They yearn for God to save them.  We’re no different.  When we find ourself in the wilderness, the main thing we want is OUT.  Wouldn’t life be grand if it came with some sort of map or internal GPS to help us with that?  But it doesn’t.  So we wander and we wait and we yearn for answers.

OK, another dog story…I’ve had several Labrador Retrievers.  They are smart.  Some of them are sort of scary smart.  They actually use logic and reason things out, which some people say only humans can do.  I will tell you that is not true.  I’m thinking, first, of Magellan.  He was really smart.  Magellan could open anything—gates, doors, kitchen cabinets.  It just seemed normal to him.  Magellan competed in hunt tests.  He achieved his Junior Hunter title and I still have the ribbon and the official change on his title (Maggie’s Prince Magellan JH).  But in the midst of competing in the series of tests for Senior Hunter, Magellan had other ideas.  He began to “figure things out”.  One day during a water test, he took off when he was told and swam toward the mark.  Then I saw it.  I saw that look in his eyes and a change in his demeanor.  I saw him turn around and look at where he was supposed to go and then turn back around.  He was almost to the bank on the other side.  He started to turn around and come back (which means he would have passed) but NO…Magellan saw the closer bank, the more efficient way to get back, and so got out and ran full speed around the lake with the duck in his mouth, returning with a look that asked, “didn’t I do well?  And I found a better way!”  I was told that Magellan was too smart, too logical, for his own good so we went home and lived our lives.  Then came Maynard.  I was prepared for a dog that couldn’t possibly be as smart as Magellan but Maynard was just as smart and just as logical.  But Maynard had something else.  He was street smart.  Where Magellan just ran through life as if the world belonged to him, Maynard paid attention.  Maynard would stop at streets and look both ways even before I would pull the leash, already having figured out that an altercation with a car would not end well for him.  The difference between them?  Maynard was a Rescue.  He had been found on the streets of downtown Houston, emaciated, flea-ridden, and heartworm-positive and trying to eat out of a garbage can.  Maynard had been in the wilderness. 

Wildernesses are always a part of our life.  Some are physical—deserts, forests, rainforests, caves, or, well, just getting lost.  Some are mental or emotional.  Some have to do with changes in our lives that just don’t feel like our lives.  And some are spiritual.  To reiterate, wildernesses are part of life.  There is no map.  There is seldom a road.  The winds may shift the sands in the path and rain may blind our way.  But sometimes the only way to get to the place we need to be is through the wilderness.  (Sorry, Magellan!) 

So, maybe God wants us to be a little street smart.  I looked up the meaning of that and found words like “awake”, “alert”, and “adaptable”.  Well, that sounds pretty much like our Advent journey to me.  Wildernesses are hard.  But there has to be a reason why there are so many in the Scriptures.  The wildernesses are not merely impediments that God has constructed for us.  I personally don’t think that’s what God does.  This is not a test.  A wilderness is a Way.  It is the way to a place to which we could not go alone.  It is a way to our awakening, to our paying attention, to our honing our faith muscles that we might trust in God and not just ourselves.  Perhaps the wilderness is the Way itself, the way we must walk toward where God is calling us to go.  Oh, don’t get me wrong.  I think God does provide comfort along the way and, sometimes, even a highway.  But maybe even the comfort that God provides is showing us that the wilderness is home. 

The promised land lies on the other side of a wilderness. (Havelock Ellis)

Grace and Peace,

Shelli