This morning we are hearing an echo across time. All of Advent is, in a sense, an echo across time – it is the beginning of the liturgical year; it is the gestation of the Christ child; it is the time when the Word that was with God at the beginning is made flesh to dwell among us, a time when the words of the prophets are written, if not on the subway walls, then in the dry sands of the desert, difficult truths spoken by a wild man by the river Jordan. And it is the time of hope, a season of light, when the stars realign in the sky and the wilderness becomes a place of promise, not desolation. The wilderness becomes a place where we find rebirth.
Nearly four years ago, when we were moving through Lent (that other wilderness season) and also through the unexpected wilderness of pandemic, I found myself walking the labyrinth at St. Elizabeth’s in Roanoke after dark. The labyrinth at that time was painted onto the pavement of a parking lot on top of a hill. Since then, they’ve built a labyrinth of stone and brick. It was cold, and the only illumination was a tall streetlamp. I looked at the streets below, toward the high school, other neighborhoods, a gas station, and a restaurant and couldn’t see anyone. An occasional car drove past. It felt like the city had become wilderness, that it had emptied out and become as frightening and seemingly empty as the wilderness we think of in the less inhabited places in the world – the deserts that are scorching hot by day and frigid by night, where only the hardiest plants and animals seem to survive. All of a sudden, the crowded cities had become dangerous and scary, and the seemingly dangerous, empty, open spaces of desert and mountain had become safe. Our perception of wilderness had changed.
And perhaps our perception of wilderness had become truer. For a desert, a wilderness, is not in fact an empty place. It is instead full of biological life. And this wilderness that echoes through scripture is full of spiritual life – this wilderness that God’s people wander through, over and over – Moses leading the Hebrews out of Egypt for forty years, the exile to Babylon a thousand years later when the words we read in Isaiah today were written, Mary and Joseph’s long journeys before and after Jesus’ birth. It is where shepherds, and the Good Shepherd, guide and protect their flocks. Wilderness is where John the Baptist preached and baptized. In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, reads Isaiah. I am sending a messenger, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness. Wilderness is where prophets and saints and hermits go to seek God. It is where Jesus returns, time and time again, to seek silence, to pray, to seek God. Wilderness is where we are invited to prepare the way of the Lord. It is where we are invited to meet God. And while wilderness is not an easy place to dwell – it is not comfortable to spend any amount of time in – it is also a divine and holy place, and a healing place, though we may not always know God’s timetable for that holiness and healing. As the writer of our epistle reading today reminds us, “with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day.”
And while these last nearly three-and-a-half years have sometimes felt like a thousand years, and sometimes felt like a day, we are in many ways not out of the wilderness yet. And that wilderness is different for all of us. Maybe it is the wilderness of grief, the wilderness of cancer treatments or job changes or uprootedness or broken relationships, or perhaps it is the wilderness of war or conflict or poverty or addiction. We, in that wilderness, will always find God. It does not mean that the wilderness is easier to walk through or the wind less cold or the heat less oppressive, but it does mean that in wilderness, we have a companion, we have comfort, we have peace, and we have a promise for a new heaven and earth to come.
Each year, our diocese sends out an Advent meditation once a week, and I’d encourage you to sign up for that if you haven’t already. Each Monday you receive a Zoom link (you can find it on YouTube later if you miss it), and in the evening you can log on for about half an hour for prayer, a poem, music offered by someone in the diocese, and a reflection by one of the curates who have recently graduated from seminary. (I was one of them a year ago.) This past week’s meditation was from Sarah Lusk, who is curate down at Christ Church, Blacksburg. And she described Advent as being a place where (quoting Madeleine L’Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time) “time ends and forever begins.”
Wilderness is like that too, in its vastness and quiet, especially when we are wandering through it and don’t know exactly how much farther we have to go. Wilderness is where time ends and forever begins.
The wilderness of Advent reminds us that we are so often in wilderness, both difficult and hopeful – a wilderness that holds together past, present, and future.
Sarah, in her reflection, also reminded us that there is more to waiting than just quietly sitting and watching. Wilderness requires a journey, requires work on our part. “The when of the not yet isn’t what Jesus wants us to worry about,” Sarah says, “as much as how we will live with this liminality,” with this edge.
And Sarah says, Advent “is not a passive waiting. While we wait, we work.”
The writer of 2 Peter that we listened to today asks, “What sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness?” Yes, we wait for a new heaven and a new earth, “where righteousness is at home,” but what about in the meantime?
Advent is not a passive waiting. What is the work for us to do while we wait?
And John gives us one answer. First, most important and perhaps most difficult – confess and repent. John the Baptist, with his locusts and his camel hair, is one of those old-fashioned prophets – a little more Old Testament than New Testament, kind of right at the hinge. He’s the one who rages on memorably about a brood of vipers. And he tells us, confess our sins. Acknowledge our sins. Repent and do better – work to love one another, to take care of each other, to protect the least of these, to share with those who have not enough, to follow God’s commandments so that the wilderness is a nourishing place for all of us to live in, however challenging it is – a place of love, not fear.
And second, be open to hope, be open to light. Welcome the unexpected. That is also what Advent is about. Who would have thought a strange loud man, eating insects and living in the desert, would be the messenger for the son of God? Who would expect to hear the inspired words of a prophet from his mouth? For that matter, who would expect a carpenter’s son, born in a barn, to be the Messiah? Who would expect the highway of the king, of the Son of God, to be built in wilderness, not in a palace or in a city? Who would expect something beautiful and good and compassionate and forgiving to shine out of the desert? Who expects that voice in the desert to cry not only confession and repentance, but also comfort, tenderness, and hope? Advent is an upside-down season, the beginning and the end, the wilderness where we find sanctuary, the star that leads us to a baby.
And last, in Advent we can recognize that we are all indeed walking through wilderness. That we can be companions and hope for one another. That by walking through wilderness together, we can better understand each other’s journeys, each other’s griefs. And that in walking through wilderness together, we will also together find hope. How can we transform this wilderness together for all of us?
What an amazing season we have in these few weeks before Christmas, when the darkness of night makes the light of birth and rebirth that much brighter; this wilderness welcomes in God’s beloved; this hushed world holds the hope of forever. Amen.
— The Rev. Cara Ellen Modisett, Curate, Trinity Episcopal Church of Staunton
Second Sunday of Advent, December 10, 2023
Readings: Isaiah 40:1-11; Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13; Ephesians 1:15-23; Mark 1:1-8
