Based on Isaiah 40:1-11;
Preached at Tualatin Presbyterian Church on December 8, 2024
This time of year is interesting … lovely and challenging …
paradoxical in the way life often is.
In our day to day lives, this season is a time in which parties,
gift buying, decorating, preparing and sending Christmas cards,
can have us spinning so fast that we can hardly catch up with ourselves.
The notion of sitting around waiting,
which is what the Church invites us to do during the season of Advent,
seems utterly absurd.
In the church, however, we do wait.
There is of course great anticipation in this season
that leads up to the birth of the Christ child,
and yet really the focus in these weeks of December
is to be attentive to our experience of waiting.
Franciscan friar and author Richard Rohr says that
“All Christian history lives out a deliberate emptiness.
Perfect fullness is always yet to come.
“Come, Lord Jesus” is your Advent prayer.
Living in this way, with an understanding that we await fulfillment,
leaves the field of life wide open
and especially open to grace and a future created by God
rather than by us.”
So, what does a future created by God look like?
Isaiah proclaims that we are to be comforted.
That punishment for our sins has ended.
Now is a time of restoration and renewal.
God promises to speak tenderly to us.
Our shortcomings will be forgiven, and we will be repaired two-fold.
The prophet Isaiah tells us that God will feed his flock like a shepherd,
God will gather us, like little lambs and cradle us,
gently leading us home.
Waiting with the assurance that God is active in our lives,
and capable and desiring of setting all things right in our world
can make waiting easier.
And yet waiting in this way does not mean
we are invited to take a passive,
“Oh, God will take care of it all,” stance.
God is holding us and all of our lives, to be sure,
but we have an important, engaged role to play.
Isaiah tells us that our part in all this is to prepare the way,
to make straight the path for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up
and every mountain and hill be made low …
we are invited to make a smooth highway
for God to come straight away.
The call here is for some major road construction.
We’re not talking minor repairs,
like filling in the potholes and repairing curbs,
but rather a serious personal transformation of the landscape of our lives.
This is not always a joyful, easy experience.
I came across a story
about the evangelist Billy Graham and his wife Ruth
being on a long road trip in which they encountered
a good deal of major road construction –
one lane roads, major detours, and long waits.
Probably this is foreign to most of you.
At the end of it all they saw a road sign, which read:
“End of construction. Thanks for your patience.”
Ruth apparently quipped,
“That’s what I’d like written on my tombstone!
… end of construction … thanks for your patience!”
Besides her humor, there’s a lot of grace in that statement.
I don’t know about you, but I am seldom patient
when it comes to enduring major construction on the roads,
and even less so when the construction is on me personally.
If readying ourselves for God to move in and through us easily
means filling in our valleys and flattening our high places,
then clearly, we are in for a lifetime of work.
This being the case, we might take heed of a quote a ran across
attributed to an Arizona physician Dr. Michael McGriffy who said,
“Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape.”
The life waiting for us is not necessarily the life that we see ahead of us.
Sometimes what comes by surprise is a huge blessing …
so amazing we could never have imagined it.
Other times the surprise is anything but gift-worthy,
making us question how God could allow this thing to happen.
Either way, as Joseph Campbell says,
“we must be willing to get rid of the life we planned,
so as to have the life waiting for us.”
A little story from my own life to illuminate this.
When I was 25 years old, I had the opportunity to move from Columbus, Ohio to Seattle, Washington.
I would be joining a small insurance brokerage firm
where I would be the apprentice to a man with a lifetime of experience
helping companies of all sizes select and acquire
the best benefit plans for their employees.
Excited with this opportunity,
… well probably more with a new life in a new city …
but anyway, I packed all my worldly possessions and headed west.
Concurrent with this trip,
I decided to make another big transition in my life.
I decided to return to Church,
after nearly a decade of having walked away from ‘organized religion.’
You see, I was an extremely idealistic teen
and as such was deeply turned off by the dichotomy I found
in churches … the sometimes vast difference between
what people said they believed and what they did instead.
On the first Sunday in town, I went to Queen Anne Presbyterian,
a small neighborhood church in the part of town where I had landed.
As you good church people would expect,
I met some very nice people there and
had a sweet first experience back into the fold.
Which was a huge blessing to me, not just for that one Sunday,
But because it introduced me to people that helped me through
yet another big transition in my life.
Later that first month in Seattle, my boss,
the man I had moved across country to go work for and learn from,
informed me that he was leaving our small firm
to be the Director of Human Resources for our largest client.
This left me without a job.
Stunned and feeling quite alone in this new city,
I surprised myself by calling the pastor at QAPC.
Over the course of several weeks and multiple conversations,
Jeff and I discussed what God might be calling me to do at this juncture.
After getting to know me a bit, he asked me a question
that hit me like a two-by-four:
“Lisa, have you ever thought about going into the ministry?”
I laughed in his face.
Hard.
Because, No! I had never considered that.
Remember, I had left the church for a decade.
Once we got over this kerfuffle,
I asked him what prompted such an outlandish suggestion.
He said, “well, you seem to have a heart for helping people, Lisa.
I notice that you’re very attentive in your interactions with others,
and you clearly have faith …
I mean you moved across the country all by yourself,
knowing no one here ahead of time.”
Now this was a very kind assessment,
but if Jeff had been a social worker or a therapist or a doctor,
it’s quite possible that I wouldn’t be standing before you today …
I would have become some other type of professional, maybe?
God certainly does move in mysterious ways.
Maybe it’s just me, but making my way through life
sometimes feels like driving at night in the fog.
We can only see as far as our headlights reach,
but as you’ve undoubtedly heard and experienced,
we CAN make the whole trip that way.”
I wonder if we can find peace in this?
If I can stay present in the moment
and trust that God is laying out the whole trip,
a deep abiding peace comes over me.
This usually catches me completely off guard.
This kind of peace is never manufactured by me,
but only received through God’s grace.
These moments may be few and far between,
but we can encourage our capacity for experiencing peace.
And this does not mean that we must permanently step outside
the hustle and bustle of this time of year.
Experiencing peace does not require us to be in a place
with no noise, trouble, or hard work.
True peace is to be amid these things and still be calm in your heart.
And Isaiah, in this passage that starts with
“Comfort, O Comfort, my people”
is inviting us to trust in the One who can do this for us.
This Sunday, we celebrate the coming
of the birth of the Prince of Peace.
If we had lived before this event,
the life waiting for us would have been unimaginable.
How could the Prince of Peace, the Almighty King
be born as a vulnerable infant in a lowly manger?
If we didn’t know the story,
would we have stopped to recognize God’s gift?
God doesn’t sky write (at least not typically in my experience),
but God does set a blazing star alight.
As in the one that shone brightly over the place
where our savior was born.
Are we calm enough, attentive enough to notice it
and then follow the stirrings in our hearts?
Similarly, can we trust these words of Isaiah,
that God sends us comfort, peace, a nurturing presence,
constancy of Word …
even as we do not see clear evidence of this playing out in our world?
I came across a quote I like (attributed to Edward Hays),
“Advent is a winter training camp for those who desire peace.”
A winter-time training camp would seem to be notorious
for hard conditions and thus require a tremendous commitment
to doing the work.
In the midst of all this,
can we remain open to the life waiting for us,
trusting the Prince of Peace who has come and will come again?
May it be so …
Amen.