Comin' Round the Mountain

But the leader responded, “Yes, I think it is fine. It involves a mountain, and it has the spirit of excited anticipation; yes, this is part of Advent.”

And they sang the folk-song with gusto.

So today the image for us is mountains and Advent.

In preparing to walk the Camino Santiago, everyone reads in the guidebooks about La Cruz de Ferro, the Iron Cross that is erected on one of the mountains about ¾ of the way to Santiago.

Everyone thinks about it, talks about it, and from home brings a small stone or other object representing a change they hope to make in their life.

Every day, one comes across the little stone as the backpack is prepared for another day of walking.

Every day, one asks why it is that I am carrying this stone.

For some, it becomes and extremely emotional moment when the mountain is finally climbed and the stone added to the huge pile that has accumulated over the generations, surrounding that iron cross.

Anticipation, expectation, longing, perhaps life-changing...are words that may describe the approach to the mountain.

The prophet Isaiah talks about “mountain”.

To what does the prophet want to point in using this image of mountains?

First of all, he is talking about a specific mountain, “the mountain of the Lord.”

“It shall be raised above the hills,” he says, “it shall be established as the highest of the mountains.”

We have three different ways of thinking about this verse.

I. It is Mount Zion, the hill on which the Temple was built.

In nature, it was not particularly grand.

There are many other peaks much higher than it.

It is not especially large.

In fact, when in Jesus' day King Herod wanted to expand the Temple area he had to fill in several valleys around Mt. Zion in order to make enough level area to gather much of a crowd.

In the end, though, it shall be the highest mountain, the prophet says, not because it is such a grand and impressive mountain, but because of what God does in this place.

Here God will draw together all nations, the prophet says.

This is the world's chief place, to which all the nations will flow.

What a vision!

We might assume that it comes from a time when the nation was strong and proud, and thus this is just national boasting,

That is not the case, however.

Israel in the days of the prophet Isaiah was anything by strong.

It was quite weak, and prone to rule by outside nations.

So it may have sounded outrageously silly.

why would anyone want to come to this place in the middle of a third-rate city in the hills of Judah?

What is here that could be so important?

There are a few Jews today who would answer that the important thing is the temple itself.

A few people would like to see the Temple rebuilt and animal sacrifices resumed on Mt. Zion as they were until the Temple was destroyed in AD 70.

Some are supposedly researching family trees to try to determine who might be of the tribe of Aaron and thus able to serve as priest.

Most Jews, however, view all of that as needless and dangerous, not least of which is the fact that the site of the temple is currently exactly the same place as the Muslim shrine of the Dome of the Rock.

Dismantling it and replacing it was a new Temple would undoubtedly provoke the most violent of responses.

Many point to a passage such as Psalm 51 which says The sacrifice of God is a broken and contrite heart.

In spite of that there are a few Christians who would applaud a new temple, saying that this would be a sign that the end of the world is soon.

Of what should we as Christians think when we hear the prophet?

--All nations coming to a restored Temple, complete with animal sacrifice?

--It sounds neither likely nor desirable.

Leaving the Temple out of our thoughts for a moment, there is still something powerfully right about the prophet's vision.

The thing powerfully right is all the nations gathering around the worship of God.

That must tower above all else.

God will never take 2^nd place to any other kind of allegiance.

Lots of folks would like to keep their options open so that they can fill their time with other things that come first in their lives: things such as pleasure, popularity, money, or security.

As we have just passed Black Friday, the slogan might be Lift high...the credit card.

A rich investor observed: “I discovered a long time ago that money is king, and the man who has it, too.”

So he might say, “Lift high the ...money.”

Whenever and wherever these kinds of attitudes are heard, the Lord God is treated as a foothill, and something else is the great mountain at the center of that person's life.

Remember the commandment:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and soul.

II. This is one way for us as Christians to appropriately use the vision of Isaiah , but there are more.

There is another mountain in the city of Jerusalem, originally a garbage heap outside the city walls, a hill on which God and man have interacted in the most powerful way.

That hill is called Golgotha, the place of the skull, the place of execution.

The great and final sacrifice took place not in the Temple, but on that hill, the sacrifice of Christ's death on the cross.

Thus this hill should be lifted up above all the other mountains of the earth.

Indeed, all should gather around this cross and this hill because of God's demonstration in that place of his love and care.

God could have made us and then forgotten us, but he did not.

No other thing or creature in all creation has been honored

as God has honored humans,

or has been loved as God has loved humans.

God can ask us to make him first in our lives by far because he has made us first in his love, by far.

God has lifted the hill of the cross above every hill and mountain, because it was on that cross that he gave himself in a blazing sacrifice of love for the salvation of the world through Christ. [Robert Stakel, Rescue in the Desert, p. 3]

III. And this leads us to a third way to think about “mountain”.

We remember the word of Christ according to the Gospel of John: And I, when I am lifted up, will draw all to myself. [John 12:32]

It is his intention to bring about Isaiah's vision, but now not centered on a thing or a place, but focused on his person.

We remember Paul's words in Corinthians: I am resolved to know nothing among you except Christ and him crucified. [1 Cor 2:2]

We remember also his words in Colossians that we heard last week:

Everything is made through him and for him, and in him all things hold together. [Col.1:16-17]

The crucified and risen Lord Jesus us the center of all that is, in heaven and on earth.

The mountain of God is in the final analysis not a place, but a person.

Today begins Advent, the preparation time, the in-between time, time that today we could call traveling time.

We are God's people on out way to God's holy mountain, on our way to the Lord Jesus.

How is it that we are traveling?

lazily? Complacently?

Do we claim that we can study Jesus from afar without getting involved?

We know that when we are dealing with a mountain that distances are deceiving.

We don't know the length of our journey or all of the dangers enroute.

Our Gospel passage today urges us to be prepared.

What we do know is that the goal of our journeying is secure.

As we saw last Sunday's lessons, the Resurrection of our Lord has sealed God's promise to us in that regard.

We are not permitted to remain complacent.

The challenge has been made:

now each of us is invited to respond.

--Whom have we invited to walk with us this week?

--Whom do we plan to invite today? Tomorrow?

There is a whole world around us;

there is a whole community close at hand.

Our job is to invite;

God provides the goal, the provisions, the companions along the way.

Ours is to make sure that the invitation to join the trip is known by everyone.

One of my happy memories of walking in western Spain was observing the little springs that joined and joined and joined together until at the foot of the mountain they became a full tumbling stream.

At length, in God's good time, our journey will be complete.

God's intention is that it not be a solitary trip, but one that ever increases in companions and interactions, even as that mountain stream.

May our life together as the people of God be that kind of lively bubbling stream of people, until we arrive at the feet of the third mountain, which is Jesus himself.

Then and only then will there be the peace which Isaiah's vision proclaims.

We are on the way to the mountain of God.

The first mountain was the Temple's Mt. Zion, one point of contact between heaven and earth.

The second mountain is Golgotha, where the sacrifice of Jesus death took place.

But even more important than then other two is the third mountain, the person of Jesus Christ himself.

The scouts, the watchers on the heights, are announcing the One who has come, is come, and is coming to us even as we are moving through life.

Hear the call;

Join the dance;

Invite companions;

Sing, as we did in our Entrance Hymn today!

Zion hears the watchmen singing,

And in her heart new joy is springing.

She wakes, she rises from her gloom,

For her Lord comes down all glorious,

The strong in grace, in truth victorious,

Her star is ris'n; her light is come.

We go until the halls we view

Where you have bid us dine with you.

[LBW 31.2] 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.