Every year during this time, on this particular Sunday, we lift God’s peace as a longing in our lives, a desperate plea on behalf of a hurting world seeking the peace of God to be present where pain and suffering have stayed too long. I close my eyes and remember the simple yet profound truth of the incarnation my son, Sage, shared with our church when he was four.
He stood up like Dan did earlier and shared God’s peace with the congregation, but instead of the words “may THE peace of God be with you, Sage said, may “A piece of God be with you.”
As we come together on this 2nd Sunday of Advent, let us remember that not only is God’s peace with us but that a piece of God rests with and within us in the light, in the dark, always. Let us pray.
These two biblical texts on this 2nd Sunday of Advent, from 2nd Isaiah and the gospel of Mark, speak to the location of the one preparing the way for God’s anointed one, described in the introduction to Mark’s Gospel as Jesus Christ, the son of God.”
“Location, Location, Location…” Real estate agents use this headline often to get a buyer’s attention. I know this because until recently, I’ve been scanning Zillow every day like it’s my job.
“Won’t Last: You don’t want to miss this one,” it reads: “Five bedrooms, two car garage, tiny stairway leading to the luxurious primary bedroom that only a kindergartner can access.” Or this one: “4 bedrooms, finished attic, huge yard, zero closets.” You can’t make this stuff up.
Location, Location, Location!!
We all know what it means: the house is a dump, but rest assured, you don’t have to spend much time in it… you can walk to the bar when things get really bad.
While the location is almost always crucial in the biblical narrative, sometimes only to serve the purpose of historical accuracy, Mark’s inclusion here of John the Baptist’s location, as described in Isaiah (as the voice of one crying out in the wilderness) is significant and has more to do with geography then aesthetics.
Wilderness is a motif across the life of God’s people, the prophets, the coming Messiah, and our lives.
The wilderness is where Miriam and Moses led God’s people out of slavery, wandering for days, so hot and desolate that they nearly abandoned their God for a flashy golden calf, handing out cheap umbrellas to beat the heat. Jesus, too, was tempted in the wilderness to flash his golden wand, like a three-wish genie without a bottle desperate for water and food. In the wilderness, his humanity was laid bare; bone dry, the darkness of the wild lent him no grace.
The “delicious Paradise” of John Milton’s Eden was surrounded by “a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides /Access denied” to all who sought entry.” Will Cronon adds, “When Adam and Eve were driven from that garden, the world they entered was a wilderness that only their labor and pain could redeem. Wilderness, in short, was a place to which one came only against one’s will and always in fear and trembling. Whatever value it might have arisen solely from the possibility that it might be “reclaimed” and turned toward human ends—planted as a garden, say, or a city upon a hill. (7) In its raw state, it had little or nothing to offer civilized men and women.[1]
To this place, this wilderness, a place of terror, this prophet journeyed to speak a message of HOPE. Amid the most raw and useless “wasteland,” the prophet stood and addressed all who would come, proclaiming God’s coming peace, “prepare the way of the Lord. Make straight a highway for our God.”
As late as the eighteenth century, the most common usage of the word “wilderness” from the English Oxford dictionary was to be “deserted,” “savage,” “desolate,” or “barren”—in short, a “waste,” the word’s nearest synonym. Its connotations were anything but positive, and the emotion one most likely felt in its presence was “bewilderment” or terror.[2]
Wilderness is paradoxical as it can be described as the valley of death or the world’s many wonders. At some point in the 19th century, we redefined the wilderness from wasteland to lands of awe & wonder, necessitating preservation.
Be it Henry David Thoreau, in 1862, who famously declared, “In Wildness is the preservation of the World,”[3] or later in 1869, when John Muir arrived in the Sierra Nevada and declared, “No description of Heaven that I have ever heard or read of seems half so fine.”[4]
We all have wilderness stories that speak to the paradoxical nature of its definition. Wilderness is our loneliest season, when our soul goes on vacation and forgets to bring us along. The wildness of these days can haunt us, like Jesus on that desert mountain in conversation with the adversary, inviting us to sell our souls for cheap solutions under the headlines: “location, location, location,” offering instant gratification in exchange for certain enduring suffering.
Our Wilderness experiences can also be highly spiritual or life-defining moments for many of us. Challenging adventures in the wild, such as Outward Bound and backpacking through God’s country, where exploring wild lands invites us to the inner exploration of the wild self, prove transformative. The wilderness offers us insight into the depths of the human experience, metaphorically and physically, providing clarity on our place in the universe.
We hear this call to preparation for God’s coming peace in a season full of paradox (“It is the night of the dear Savior’s birth! rings a favorite hymn, while “Long lay the world in sin and error pining.” The Christmas celebration wherein the Christ child is born to free the world from desolation and despair is planted neatly within the Western holiday most credited with reinforcing our hyper-capitalist addictions insistent on trapping us within said despair- location as a wilderness- wasteland. The paradox of location, then, invites us to consider our own positions related to this anticipated good news. The prophets’ words are addressed to Israel during their Babylonian exile around 550-540 BC. These writings reflect a God hungry to forgive and ready to reunite with God’s people. “She served her term, her penalty is paid.”
The gospel writer in Mark, written sometime between 35-40 years after Jesus’ death, captures these Hebrew words first to position Jesus as the prophesied Messiah (which is the point of Mark’s gospel) and second to canonize Jesus’ sovereignty and esteemed place in the hierarchy. Mark wants to be sure the world knows who this Jesus is and his relationship with all that has gone before. To do so, I think Mark intentionally created the backdrop for this unfolding story, a location that will not only solidify the pecking order of these prophets for future readers but will clue us into the context out of which they are preaching and teaching and eventually killed, and to whom they are crying out.
In Mark’s Story Discipleship, Ched Meyers explains, “The experience of wilderness is common to the vast majority of people in the world. Their reality is at the margins of almost everything that is defined by the modern Western world as ‘the good life.’ This wilderness has not been created by accident. It is the result of a system stacked against many people and their communities, whose lives and resources are exploited to benefit a very small minority at the centers of power and privilege. It is created by lifestyles that deplete and pollute natural resources. It is created by the forced labor of impoverished farmers who strip steep mountainsides in order to eke out an existence from infertile terrain while the most arable land produces a profit for a few families. Wilderness is the residue of war and greed and injustice . . .One of the first steps of hope for people in such wilderness places is to understand that their situation reflects social and political forces, not the divine will . . .”[5]
John fled to the desert, to the fringe places, to proclaim God’s peace & coming reign— “Make a highway for God,” he cried out. If we know anything about modern transportation— post railroads, it’s that highways are the most streamlined modes of transport for civilians that run East/West and North/South across the country. Highways provide us access in all directions, on and off ramps, at every stop, supporting our entries and exits across the breadth of a vast wilderness.
“While the margin, writes Myers, has a primarily negative political connotation as a place of disenfranchisement, Mark ascribes a primarily positive theological value to it. It is the place where the sovereignty of God is made manifest, where the story of liberation is renewed, where God’s intervention in history occurs.”[6]
At the margins.
This Advent text reminds us of the place and position, the location of God’s ever-present, in-breaking love. It’s not about our ugly Christmas sweaters or even our spiked eggnog; it’s about liberating the least of these, on the margins of life, from the sins of most of us, living at the center of life. “On the night of our dear savior’s birth, long lay the world in sin and error pining.” Along the banks of the Jordan River, in the dark wilderness of Mary’s womb, on the voting ballot behind the curtain— God seeks to intervene with an enduring peace, liberating us from the vicious cycle of life experienced in the wastelands of wilderness.
It is to those on the margins that God sends a messenger, proclaiming peace, building a highway to ensure ever-present access to God’s radical, inclusive, healing love.
It is to those on the margins, to our beloved Transgender children, unprotected under the law and denied medical care and access to the inalienable rights we claim in our nation’s highest law of the land. God’s love makes a b-line to those babies, “make straight the path.”
It is to those on the Margins, to women, whose bodies are ambiguously debated as property again and cut off from access to life-saving healthcare procedures, killing at least 68,000 women/year.
It is to those on the margins, right under our noses, for over a decade, thousands of young black children in Rutherford County, TN, as young as seven years old, were being arrested and jailed for days for crimes that did not even exist. It is to those babies that this highway is made plain.
To those on the margins, in the wilderness, God sent a liberating word of hope, a highway to liberate and deliver from pain to peace. This highway in the desert isn’t a one-way depot affording the most wealthy among us a golden ticket or first flight to the shiny gates. It’s also not a gateway for the most marginalized of society offering a 1-way ticket out of hell— that’s not the abiding promise of Emmanuel, God with us. The incarnation for which we labor in Advent, awaiting a liberating birth from despair, promises “presence” amid pain, not its avoidance.
If asked to describe our relationship with the wilderness or life on the margins, we probably have very different responses to share. Some of us have lived wilderness experiences so desolate and humbling that words cannot describe them. Others can only speak of wilderness as in the mountaintop experiences we cherish, hiking through the world’s most life-giving beautiful hills and forests.
No matter what your wilderness has looked like, life in the cheap seats, buying your happiness, a life of adventure and joy, of wastelands or wonder, the gospel of hope, the promise of peace within, God’s relentless game of seek-and-find, is a reminder to us that this highway has an infinite number of on and off ramps. Each time we choose to get on, we will find God’s arms open wide, ready to fully forgive, wholly embrace, and love us unconditionally, just as we are. In this Advent season, let us remember as we wait: It is the same God who liberates and frees, who also calls us as messengers of peace to join in the liberating work of the gospel: proclaiming Good News to those on the margins. May it be so.
Friends, May the peace of God be with you. Amen.
[1] Cronon, W. (n.d.). The trouble with wilderness; or, getting back to the wrong natureC. William Cronon – Homepage. https://www.williamcronon.net/writing/Trouble_with_Wilderness_Main.html
[2] Historical thesaurus of the OED – oxford english dictionary. (n.d.). https://www.oed.com/information/about-the-oed/historical-thesaurus-of-the-oed/
[3] Cole, K. (2019, March 14). Thoreau’s great insight for the anthropocene: Wildness is an attitude, not a place. UConn Today. https://today.uconn.edu/2019/03/thoreaus-great-insight-anthropocene-wildness-attitude-not-place-3/
[4] Muir, J. (n.d.). My First summer in – project gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/32540/32540-h/32540-h.htm
[5] Montgomery, H. (2023, December 7). Advent and change from the margins, part 2. Social Jesus. https://www.patheos.com/blogs/socialjesus/2023/12/advent-change-margins-part2/
[6] ibid.