In the Desert of Life

Third Sunday of Advent - December 16, 2007

To the east, a gentle rise covered with black rocks.

To the south, the remaining foundations of a village, and beyond that a hilly field of black rocks large and small.

To the north, the foundations of a 4^th century synagogue, with just enough carved stones left to figure out what it was and how it may have looked, and beyond that, black rocks.

To the west, a rather steep hillside that they claimed once harbored an olive grove, but now is only rocks, black rocks down that slope and up the other side.

And this is in northern Israel, on the Golan heights, not in the south where the sandy deserts are.

Life in that village must have been hard under the best circumstances. The water cistern must have been tended very carefully indeed to survive in those harsh circumstances.

But now it is only a place for those with archaeological interests to visit, and see there -- as in so many many places--

turn-your-ankle pebbles to walk around it boulders, stones and more stones.

The modern road to that place twists up and down through the hills. In ancient times it would have been even more difficult.

Damascus Syria is less than 60 miles away.

Perhaps the exiles who had been dragged off to Babylon would have passed nearby, knowing tremendous hardship as they struggled over the stony and barren hills.

And the prophet is talking about how different things will be.

We know well the passage from Isaiah 40:

“... make straight the way of the Lord...”

Even with modern equipment, that is not going to happen.

And the passage we heard from Isaiah 35 a few moments ago: streams in the desert, the desert shall blossom, thirsty ground become a pool, barrenness become abundance...no way, we say.

No matter how clever an engineer we hire, the problem is too vast, its scale too large to even consider..

Of course the prophet is not just talking about geography, is he?

It is not only that the wilderness over there in Israel, there is the dryness within us, a barrenness that is just as deadly as sand and stone and wind.

There is dessication of the spirit, when hope dries up and is blown away by the troubles of life.

We may look around and see only stones large and small, the troubles that give us an annoying twist of an ankle or even inflict a complete-stop with a broken bone.

One person described a full load of life troubles this week, and summarized by saying “life has had a way of slapping me around.”

Yes, we know about the wilderness within,

as well as the geographic kind.

The prophet has a vision of something different:

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom...the eyes of the blind shall be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. There shall be streams in the desert....The ransomed of the Lord shall return to Zion with singing....

You heard how the prophet uses geography as a way of talking about what is going on inside each person.

Your address may be 234 Maple Street, but your real address may be “the wilderness”.

Things may be dry for you.

A stony desert. A dead end.

It may be just in one spot, or it may be overwhelmingly complete.

Hear the hope in what the prophet says.

It is not hope in ourselves, but in a faithful God who makes a way when we thought that there was no way.

Remember God's faithfulness in the past, and take heart for the future.

God can make a world out of chaos.

he can deliver slaves to freedom,

he can bring exiles home,

and he can make our inner desert bloom.

This is the hope to which we cling,

this is the reality which we celebrate in the Holy Communion each week,

this is what we anticipate in the fullness of heaven, too.

The illnesses of body, mind, or spirit shall not win.

The harshness of troubles between and among us shall not twist our ankle or break the leg of our activity in life.

We have hymns of anticipation this morning,

and carols of the fulfillment to sing this afternoon.

We have something worthwhile to say to the one who comes to us in the blackness of despair.

The wilderness shall bloom, in ways that we cannot yet understand and never control.

C.S. Lewis has another way of getting at this truth.

He asks us to imagine that we have in our hands a manuscript of a symphony.

It is OK, but something just isn't quite right.

A person comes to us saying, “Look! here is a new page of manuscript that I found.

See how it brings everything together all the themes in the music, how it makes sense of all of those other pages, how it is the point of the whole symphony.”

What would you do?

You could ignore this news, and continue to play the not-quite-satisfactory piece since it is comfortable and familiar.

But the better thing would be to put the new page in its rightful place in the score,

and then note how it helped to illuminate the things that had not quite fit before; you would come to know the truth of the whole piece.

C.S. Lewis observes that this is what is going on with the coming of Christ among us.

We join with John the Baptizer in asking,

“Are you the one who is to come, or do we look for another?”

Where Jesus makes his promise known, The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom...with joy and singing.

We look at the wilderness in our lives and cannot see beyond it.

But with the promise of Jesus ringing in our ears and tasting it in our mouths, we can hold on until we find some sense in the whole situation.

As we play out our lives, the promises of Jesus are the page that had been missing from our manuscript, that, once put in place, interprets and makes understandable all of the rest.

It is the theme that is woven into the difficult passages that we have to practice over and over; it is the motif that makes the melody soaring and memorable.

Without that missing page, life is just one thing after another, without apparent reason.

Let's not ignore that page!

We'll try to get at the point one more way.

Last fall, three of us went climbing up and down the cliffs of Arbel, to the northwest of the sea of Galilee.

They are baked by unrelenting sun in the summer, and they are raked by fierce winds that rush down the wadi toward the sea.

The day that we climbed there was just two days after the first of the winter rains had fallen.

After months of sun, heat, and barren dryness, the crocus were blooming, the narcissus had sprung up that quickly, responding to the rain.

They had to wait until the right time to show that there could be life in the most inhospitable rugged locations.

Those who have been in various Bible studies or been a part of the Way know that whenever we hear about water, there is going to be a baptismal reference popping up shortly. I won't disappoint you.

That baptismal water enables us to bloom in the sometimes harsh places that we are planted.

The baptismal promise makes possible what we cannot do on our own.

One person told me this week: “There is nothing that I can do on my own power. I have to hand it over to the Lord, and let him do what he thinks is best. When my faith is weak, I go back to my simple faith as a child and sing 'Jesus loves me'....” .

And then this person can continue the struggle.

We've thought about geography of the wilderness as a metaphor for the hard times of life.

We've borrowed C.S. Lewis' idea of the missing page of the manuscript as being the key to understanding the whole work.

We've pictured the harshness of the cliffs of Arbel softened by the rain and allowing the flowers to bloom even up there.

They are Advent images,

images of hope and anticipation,

images that express trust

that God will do more than we know, better than we demand,

and far in excess of what we can accomplish on our own.

They all point to the good news:

the desert shall rejoice.

We do not look for another Messiah;

strengthen your hearts,

for the coming of the Lord is near.

Come, Lord Jesus, quickly come,
now and finally. Amen

Please note: The preceding sermon is provided as a resource for the thought, prayer, and meditation of the members and friends of St. Mark's. It is the residue of a verbal event, and thus it does not have academic footnotes and other details that would be expected in a written document. The writer gladly acknowledges the prior thought and work of many Christians before him.