Cat Goodrich First Presbyterian Church, Birmingham, AL December 6, 2015 PREPARE! Luke 3:1-6

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1 1 Cat Goodrich First Presbyterian Church, Birmingham, AL December 6, 2015 PREPARE! Luke 3:1-6 What roads did you travel to get here this morning? If you live in Birmingham, it was probably an easy drive down city streets with a beautiful arc of a bridge to carry you over the railroad tracks. If you live a bit further out, perhaps you hopped on the miracle of (highway?) 31 or 280 to make your way over the mountain, down here into Jones Valley. If you live west in Hueytown, or east in Talladega, you glided over on I-20, just a hop, skip, and a jump really. What were the roads like? Were they asphalt or concrete, smooth and newly laid or bumpy and in need of repair? On road trips as a kid, I always knew we d crossed over into Louisiana and were close to home when I could hear the thumps in the highway a regular dadump, dathump, dadump bumping. Lousiana s 18 year-old drinking age meant it didn t qualify for money from the federal government for infrastructure upkeep, so the roads took on a degenerative character all their own like a Southern gothic novel. To be honest, I don t think much about roads at least not until I m travelling somewhere the roads are treacherous or hard to come by. Mostly that s in developing countries, like Haiti and Guatemala. Guatemala actually has an excellent highway system the government invested in roads because it needed to move soldiers quickly from one place to another during the civil war but beyond that, people make do with what they have. In the cities most streets are a patchwork of rough cobblestones. In the countryside and rural places, travel is on rocky, hard-packed dirt roads, riddled with bone-shaking, tire eating potholes that force drivers to swerve all over the road to avoid them. Men wielding shovels and pickaxes become a highway crew, digging dirt from ditches beside the road and using it to fill in the holes and smooth out the ruts to make travel easier.

2 2 The most rural place I ve ever been was a village carved out of an ecological reserve in the Peten, in the northeastern part of the country. Nestled into steaming jungle were a handful of wooden huts with thatched roofs. The villagers eked out a living by growing cardamom, which they would carry out in huge burlap sacks on their backs because there was no road into the village, only a footpath. The path was really really hot and long, like hours walking before you reach any sign of civilization long. The church delegation intended to work with the villagers to plant fruit trees bananas, coconuts, and oranges and to build small gardens to help with food security, as malnutrition was a real problem there. But there was no road. We couldn t get them the supplies they needed without a truck, and it was unlikely the North Americans one of whom had a sprained ankle would walk for several hours each way, for five days, to get to the village. So in the months prior to our trip, the villagers and church banded together and built a road. They hacked through the jungle with machetes, cut down trees and dug out stumps, hauled away stones and leveled a path to make a way for us to travel in two halting, lurching, bumping, bruising pickups through the wilderness to visit them. In the wilderness, they made a way. Roads matter. One of the biggest obstacles in the fight against Ebola in West Africa was the lack of highway infrastructure there simply wasn t a way to get medicines, personnel, and equipment to infected towns fast enough. So people died. But for even more mundane reasons than that, roads matter. They make life easier. Travel is faster on a good road, more enjoyable. Ancient Rome had an excellent highway system, for much the same reason Guatemala did it s hard to run an empire without being able to move soldiers quickly from one territory to another. And yet here, at the beginning of Luke s gospel, we hear John calling us to build a road not just any old Roman road will do. Those roads don t lead where God wants to go. God needs a new path, a superhighway through the desert, through and to the places where no other road will dare to go. This tells us something about what God is doing in Christ. Jesus isn t coming to take a stroll down the Via Appia to marvel at the wonders of the ancient world. He s not coming to march beside the legions to dominate the empire. He doesn t come

3 3 with political or religious power. That s why the word is revealed not to Tiberius or Pilate, not to Annas or Ciaphas, but to John a nobody, a sweaty toothed madman in the middle of nowhere, preaching to a crowd of peasants. The Word of God comes to a locust loving prophet, living in the wilderness. If that s who God chooses to speak to, we d better listen up, because there might be hope for us yet. God s doing something we don t expect, and we need to get ready for it. We need to prepare the way. In talking about valleys lifted and mountains brought low, John the Baptist is quoting Isaiah. Isaiah was a prophet while the tribes of Israel were living in exile. Through Isaiah, God is promising to make straight paths through the wilderness to end their exile this is a prophecy of comfort and hope. God is pledging to make a way where there is no way to swiftly return the people to their homeland. 1 When John quotes this promise, though, it s more of a command to the people calling them to get ready, because God is coming. 2 They need to be paying attention, preparing a way for God to arrive, by providing an easy path to travel on. How do they do that? For that matter, this advent, how do we prepare for God? How do we make God s way clear? Advent is a time to repent and reflect, to watch and expect God s coming among us. These days call for an excellent navigator someone who can read a map and won t let us miss a turn. If only Siri could tell us when and where God is going to show up, right? John is calling us to be on the lookout for signs that might be hard to see. What do we do if it feels like we re lost, or on the wrong road completely? What do we do if the road we re on goes somewhere we don t want to go if a relationship fails, or cancer relapses, or work is meaningless and painful. Where do we look for salvation when it feels like we ve missed a turn but there s no place to turn around so we re stuck on the highway going the wrong way, fast? There have been 355 mass shootings this year, more than one a day. Terrorism is on the rise, yet a man on the no-fly list can still buy a gun, no questions asked. I have to sign my life away to buy Sudafed, yet our country still can t act regulate who has access to guns, what 1 Jacobson, Karl. Commentary on Luke 3:1-6, Preaching this Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 12/3/15. 2 Ibid.

4 4 kind, and how many. This cannot be the road that leads to peace. How can we turn this crisis around? How does God make a way where there is no way? Luke tells us that John is proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Scholars think this meant some kind of ritual washing as a rite of purification bathing in a river as an outward sign of an inner change. To be baptized by John meant someone had turned back to God, and was trying to make more space in their life for the holy. And later in the passage he tells them how to do that. If you have two coats, he says, give one to someone else who needs it. Be generous and compassionate. And, if you re a tax collector, don t take more than what s due. Be fair. Somehow, generosity, compassion, justice, and love mix together into something concrete they make a smooth road for God to travel on, to come alongside us and surprise us with joy when we least expect it. When we give freely of ourselves to others; When we respond with compassion, when we offer encouragement and hope; When we speak up for justice; When we hold on to love instead of harboring hate, we make space for God s holy work and point towards Christ s presence among us. John wasn t the Christ, he wasn t the promised savior. He pointed the people toward God, helping them get ready for Christ s arrival. Preparing the people to build a road was not an easy task. It cost John his life. And it demands all of ours. We are busy, our to-do lists are way too long. The path of each day is riddled with bumps and roadblocks to keep us from living faithfully. If we re not careful, we get stuck in the ruts of routine and forget to pay attention and look for the holy even in this Advent season. It may be time to get out our shovels and pickaxes to dig up dirt and fill the potholes that threaten to trip us up or will make us swerve and miss God completely. We may have to use some machetes to hack through the dense jungle of excuses and pry out the stones of apathy that weigh us down and prevent us from looking for or even expecting the coming of Christ among us. We may even have to find a way around mountains of greed and overcome valleys of doubt to be able to build our road. After all, the road isn t through the middle of town. God s road is through the wilderness, the

5 desperate, desolate places of our lives and our world. God s road is in Syria, and through the refugee camps in Lebanon, Turkey, and Greece. It runs right through Colorado Springs and San Bernadino, right through the dark night of our souls. Straight through the valley of the shadow of death and right on out the other side. And God s road leads not to Pennsylvania Avenue, not to Wall Street, not even to Witherspoon Street. It ends not where we might expect, in the halls of power or the cathedrals of our church, but in a stable. With a teenage mother and an overwhelmed carpenter and a dirty band of shepherds and a baby, asleep on a bed of hay. Somehow, somehow, God makes a way. Thanks be to God. 5