Year C
 Malachi 3:1-4
 Canticle 16 (Luke 1:68-79)
 Philippians 1:3-11
 Luke 3:1-6

May the words of my mouth O God…  speak your truth…

When Dwight D. Eisenhower was President of the United States… and John Patterson the governor of Alabama… when J. Edgar Hoover served as the omnipotent autocrat of the FBI… and Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale were the high priests of middle America… the word of God came to Martin Luther King, Jr. …  in the wilderness of America…

This updated cast of characters comes to us from William Lamar…  pastor of the Metropolitan AME Church in Washington, D.C…  and helps us see that the truth that was true in Jesus’ time…  is true for us now…  a truth that helps us understand that the Word of God comes to us smack dab in the center of every unfolding moment in time…  in the centers of political… social…  cultural…  religious…   economic…   military…  and world history…that the resurrected life that Jesus offers…  comes to us in every moment…  and helps us look past the invisible water in which we swim…  God’s Word helps us see whether our corporate behaviors… and the systems which support them…  are more in line with…  or are less in line with…  the actions we need to take…  to fully embody God’s kingdom…  it’s similar to how doctors or therapists need to look past…   what’s called the presenting symptoms… and name and begin to heal those underlying dis-eases which cause or contribute to the symptoms… and sometimes it’s complicated…  there may be two or more medical issues going on… and when you treat one the other worsens… or vice-versa… or there may be something like a combination of PTSD and bi-polar disease… each of which have their own treatment regimes…

All of our histories are a complex and seamless series of interconnected events…  some of which happen to us…  and some of which we plan…  and even when we plan…  life happens…  many of us begin to get ready for an event…   before the event itself happens…  and generally…  we don’t wait until the last minute to do what needs to be done…  for example…  many babies come home to fully outfitted and fully functional nurseries…  Joel and I started shopping for and preparing for and cooking our Thanksgiving meal many days before we were ready to sit down and eat…  most of us make Christmas lists and buy ribbons and bows and gift tags and gifts well before Christmas Eve…  and there’s a saying…  well begun is half done…

John offers the baptism of repentance as a ritual of preparation to ready the people for the advent of the Messiah…  but Preparing the Way…  as the prophet Isaiah foretold…  is a lot like road construction…  the signs go up months before letting you know that inconvenience is coming…  detours may be necessary… we may even have to go on an entirely different route to get where we need to be…  it may smell like hot tar…  it may be as dusty as a wind storm in the desert cutting down our visibility…  there will be men or women holding up signs telling us to stop or to proceed slowly…   and there may be some hazards…   there will almost certainly be some hazards…  but Jesus comes…  and restores the world to the way God intends it to be…  fully turning it upside down for some of us…

And God’s intent may be delayed…  by those who Stop when the sign says Go… by those who switch lanes when the sign says…  stay in your own lane…  or who pass on the shoulder…  by those whose reckless driving forces workers off the road…  or who fail to abide by whatever guidelines God provides for us…  but I know from my own experience…  that while I may curse the inconvenience of the road work while it’s being done…  I’m so thankful for the new roadway when it’s finished…  when I can travel on recently smoothed roadways that are increasingly leveled and straight…   but a sad truth…  is that some people resist God’s comprehensive highway improvement program…  and want to leave things just the way they are…  or worse…  move them back to how they were in the past…  people who don’t or can’t change…  until it hurts more not to… 

In a recent email…  Pastor Martin Billmeier wrote… that in Philippians…  itinerant preacher Paul is giving thanks for the members of one of his faith communities… but we know that…   maybe because of human nature…  there are those who complain about members of their faith community…  more than give thanks for them…  even pastors have been known to complain…  but Christ appeared to overcome that part of human nature…  and created a new one…  the new creature gives thanks…  so we participate in the old and the new…  complainers and givers of thanks…  though Christ invites us to grow more and more from one…  and into the other…

In the last part of today’s Gospel… the Preparing the Way part from Isaiah… when the Israelites are returning from the Babylonian Exile… when the valleys are being filled in… and the mountains are being made low… when the crooked ways are being made straight…  and the rough ways are smoothed down…  when all of this is being done…  I hope we realize…  that it’s not to make it easier for God to get to us…   but all of this is being done to make it easier for us to get to God… God is ever present as the Truth below the surface…  so it’s not prepare the way for God… but to prepare the way OF God for us…  prepare God’s way in our hearts… in our minds… and giving our consent for the Spirit to fill us…  because if we don’t know where we are…  we can’t know how to get where we want to be…  we have to be able to set our spiritual GPS with an accurate assessment of where we are…  so we can navigate to God…  we can only receive the healing we need…  if we’re able to name the brokenness from which we suffer… 

And as Pastor Isaac Villegas writes…  we are like John… as a collective body…  the church incarnates an announcement of the gospel…  congregations exist as communal proclamations of Christ’s advent…  we bear witness to Jesus’ arrival in the world… as we read our scriptures and sing our hymns…  we pray for each other and preach the good news…  all our worship is a cry in our modern wilderness…  to make a way for the mysteries of God among us…  it’s all part of how we bring another prophet’s words into reality…  Jeremiah…  who said that God would write God’s law on our hearts… no more teaching… so we would know how to respond to far more than the 613 laws which were written down…  and we would know this effortlessly…  seamlessly…  and intuitively… and when we finally begin to perceive the truth below the surface… we will begin to understand it as God’s truth… and we will embody and radiate more of God’s justice…