Prepare a Highway to your Heart
December 7, 1997

Text: Luke 3:1-6
Rev. James R. Gorman

There is a part of the Church which is always fighting the trends in society. That seems especially evident at this time of year. While the Muzak in the department stores are playing all the wonderful Seasonal music, we are playing Advent hymns and carols. While the stores want to give you the impression that all is merry and bright, we bring this second Sunday in Advent, a message about a deep darkness and a forbidding desert wilderness.

While so much of our culture wants to hear huge choirs singing the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah, we are still listening to scriptural witnesses about lone voices screaming of repentance, of preparing highways, of a God who comes in judgement like a refiner's fire, against those who have neglected the poor, the weak, the widow and the orphan.

It is a great temptation for the Church, and many of us fall prey to it, to preach the Gospel of American culture rather than preach the much more uncompromising and uncomfortable Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is tempting, believe me, to preach the Gospel message, "Joy to the World, the Lord is come." Than to preach today's message, "Repent the Kingdom of God is coming."

This Advent season speaks to us of darkness at just the time in our culture when the stores are putting up the lights. The Church insists on calling this season Advent just when the rest of the culture insists on calling it the Christmas season.

I guess I have always seen John the Baptist as a spoiler of the Christmas season. We all would enjoy things much more if John hadn't come upon the scene. This desert hermit who wears hair shirts and eats locusts and wild honey who speaks a message as pleasant to our ears as nails on a blackboard. The times, he says, are dark and the day of judgment is coming; we are in a wilderness of our own making, therefore repent for the coming of the refiner's fire.

Not only is this message at odds with the season as preached by Mr. Gimbal and Mr. Macy, it is also at odds with the official optimism of the larger American culture, a culture that will not deal squarely with harsh realities. The most difficult of the harsh realities for the people of Jesus day was the political oppression all around them. The lesson for this morning begins: "In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God [mirabile dictu] came to John son of Zachariah in the wilderness."

People of faith do not avoid harsh realities, but face them squarely and then point out, somewhat ungraciously, I think, that these powers and principalities have no real power over their lives.

How easy this is for me to say. I who have suffered so very little in my life. But I am but a messenger. For I have in my 21 years of ministry watch hundreds of people go through valleys of deepest shadows and darkness. And I simply bring you a message from them; and the message is a simple one. Do not avoid the darkness; face it with courage knowing that your God will get you through. Do not whistle in the dark and try to pretend that danger is not near, but rather move through the darkness with your Advent candle of faith.

Diane Komp is Professor of Pediatrics at the Yale University School of Medicine and attending physician at the Yale-New Have Hospital. She tells the following story about a little girl she met in her practice.

Mary Beth was six years old when she was diagnosed with cancer. In deference to her extreme youth and her parents' wishes, her treatment failure was not discussed in her presence. Her favorite nurse brought her a red velvet dress for Christmas, but [Mary Beth] refused to wear it for reasons she firmly declined to discuss.



Her mother told me of a dream the child reported to her. Jesus came to her in that dream with a grandfather who died before [Mary Beth] was born. together, they told her of her impending death and not to be afraid. She woke with the peace and reassurance that she soon would be with Jesus and her grandfather. She died at home on Christmas Eve, dressed in her red velvet dress. . . .⁽¹⁾

It must be said that the darkness of Mary Beth's family was not of their making, and that makes it all the more difficult to face. But darkness is darkness, and all forms of darkness is better faced than avoided.

When I began ministry it was a common practice not to tell patients that they had a terminal disease. I was party to many charades in which we danced around the subject of death. Medical science has since discovered that people live longer and happier lives if they know the true nature of their disease. It is now rare not to tell even the youngest patient when they may have a terminal disease.

Ernest Hemingway in his book Farewell to Arms writes, "The world breaks us all, but some of us grow strong in the broken places." People of faith always grow stronger in the broken places.

Carol Brooks died yesterday at about 3 p.m. Carol was 99 years old and a key figure in the life of Faith Church. She was a professional artist who had a studio in Door County (a resort area in Northeastern Wisconsin). Some years ago, she gave me some papers in the planning for her funeral and among those papers, I discovered this past week, were some poems that she wrote, perhaps 50 years ago. This one is about her own darknesses about which few of us knew much:

God and I met on the hill top

To gaze on the scene below.

I saw just a cold winter landscape.

He showed me the sunshine's glow.



The world had been pressing upon me;

Crushing me down from above;

I was victim of moods that had made me

A stranger to friends that I love.



Now flashed with new life, gold burnished

The world that I had thought so drear,

And my melancholia vanished

For I knew that life was yet dear.



Hope, as the Indian philosopher, Tagore put it, is "The bird that feels the light and sings while it is yet dark." I love that. "The bird who feels the light and sings while it is yet dark."

Light and darkness is often used in definitions of faith. A Wisconsin woman at a workshop on faith said this, "When we walk to the edge of the light and we have to take the first step into the darkness, one of two things will happen, either we will have something solid on which to step or we will be taught how to fly."

Yea, though I walk through the valley of deep darkness, I will not fear, for I will be guided in the way, by your rod and staff; I will be led by still waters; my soul will be restored; my cup will run over with good things; I will have a banquet prepared for me while I am under attack; my head will be anointed with oil and I will dwell securely in God's house all the days of my life.

Faith is a simple trust that all will be well no matter how deep my insecurities, no matter how dark the shadows, no matter how profound the pain.

There is an "even when-ness" about faith and hope.

Faith is a simple-hearted trust that there is an order to the world, even when it seems so fundamentally disordered; that there is a source of light even when there seems to be only the deepest of darknesses; that there is power even when we feel most helpless; that we have a companion even when we feel most deeply alone; that we are loved even when we are sure that we are most undeserving of it.

Out of this fundamental trust in the order of things flows everything else. We love others with the love by which we have been loved. We love others even when they don't deserve to be loved because we were loved even when we least deserved it. As John puts it, "Brothers and sisters, God is Love. Therefore, let us love one another with the love of God."

John the Baptizer's message is a disturbing one. It completely messes up our holiday season. Just when we put up all our lights, We find ourselves raising the tough questions about the darkness that surrounds us. But we find, in that fearful act of faith, the courage to face the darkness with the candlelight. Today, we are working with two Candle-power, and it is enough to overcome the darkness.

The Baptizer's was sent to preach the good news of the coming of God into the wilderness, into the winter of our discontent, in the valley of our most shadowy death, into the broken places of our lives.

It is the responsibility of an Advent faith to accept God's coming with Joy "even when."

That's why we call it Hope.

1. Komp, Diane M., "Hearts untroubled," Theology Today, (Vol. XIV, No. 3, October, 1988), p. 276.