Isaiah 40:3-6; Mark 1:1-3.

The road to here, the road to there

In the film “Wild” which is about to open in theaters,  a young woman driven by her past walks along the length of the Pacific Crest Trail.  By moving ahead the trail she tries to leave the road before behind.  At one point she has an epiphany and says:” What if I went back in time and I would not do a single thing differently?  What if all the things I did were the things that got me here?” Friends, before us are the Advent passage that bring out images similar to the ones evoked by the movie trailer.  They are poetic, beautiful words about crying in the wilderness, about making road and paths straight, about people being like grass, blending into a landscape that will finally swallow them up.  The American West is blessed with these images and landscapes.  The more time you will spend in it, the more it will surprise you.  Last July Daniel I made a circle through part of the West, through the Wild Owyhee River Country. One of the stops was the town of Owyhee, on the Duck Valley Indian Reservation on the Idaho-Nevada border.  It was the first place I served after I was ordained.  The Owyhee river continues northwest into Idaho and into southeastern Oregon.  This is region is one of the most unspoiled regions in the United States.  Driving across the Idaho border into Oregon I had expected dry land and ranches, but this was my surprise.  Between the Idaho border and Bend in Oregon there was pretty much nothing. It was as if people just went around it or over in at night so that they didn’t notice this land of stark, arid beauty.  It is the kind of land that you could easily get lost in and never be found.   

The Bible texts for today really bring home that vision of wild land that needs to be tamed.  High places need to be flattened out and roads need to be straightened.  This is what often we have done in the US, put a straight interstate down and blown holes in mountains just to make them disappear, great feats of engineering. We have even allowed oil and car companies to destroy the train and tram culture of the great American cities in the first half of the twentieth century so that there could be more highways,  in the process separating us from our neighbors. But it’s the meandering and curving back roads that may be treacherous, but also more beautiful.  Of course we understand that text is using these images as a metaphor for the political and spiritual life of the people.  Isaiah and John the Baptist know that the hilly, craggy, rocky desert country of Eastern Judea will not ever be leveled nor will there be straight roads.  The words are about straightening out the human soul.  It seems that the film “Wild” has an understanding of that.  It appears to be more about how the land reflects the soul of the person walking.  This is the message: that we need to straighten out what is crooked and shifty in the church, in our society and in our soul.  Doing that is what we need to do to face the Messiah as a child.  That is how we wait and anticipate.  In the movie trailer for “Wild” a man who gives the main character a ride, says he has left behind a lot things in his life just as she is trying to do and she asks him:”do you regret any of it.”  He answers:” I didn’t have any choice, there was never a fork in the road for me.”  Of course that’s whole other discussion: how much we control our destiny, how many choices we truly have. The American in us says we control our destiny, the Asian in us says we don’t, the mature and realistic Christian in us blends them and says: you are responsible for your choices, but there is also God’s mysterious grace at work in our lives. Amen.

But, friends, in the final account, do we want the road in our lives to be straight or do we want it to be crooked?  In some of that we have a choice, in others we don’t.  I have talked about the things that need to be made straight already, like racism in American society that bubbles up in Ferguson or Staten Island or attacks on the Presidential daughters, exposing the racism and classism and sexism and agism and arrogance in all of us.  In other words, we must level the playing field for all people.  We have talked about the evil and violence and endless wars. We have talked about how we must give our earth’s atmosphere and its rivers and oceans a break, how we must flow with nature more than subdue it.  This also means flattening out the obstacles in ourselves to compassion and straighten out our ego and wipe out the destructive side of our competitiveness.

Yet there is also the crooked road of life. No matter how old we are, we can look back and see something that’s a lot more like mountain paths than it is like flat , straight highway 80, say,in Eastern Nebraska.  As much as we all want to be on cruise control, none of our lives follows a clear, straight, flat path.  We get blown off course, to mix the metaphors.  The future will not be any different.  Life is a series of twists and turns that we try hard to manage, but never completely have a handle on. So to summarize in a bringing the two roads together: God’s grace meets us on the twisting road of life and in response we level the playing field so peace and justice can one day reign. May God bless our journey.