The Second Sunday of Advent, rcl yr c,
December 8, 2024
MALACHI 3:1-4; LUKE 1:68-79; PHILIPPIANS 1:3-11; LUKE 3:1-6
Prepare the way of the Lord…
and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.
Luke 3:4b, 6
When Paula and I moved to Kitchener in the late 1970s, there was an abundance of rolling countryside surrounding the city. It wasn’t all hills and dales, but both to the west along Highway 7-8 towards New Hamburg and the area west of Erbsville Road, there was no possibility that my prairie-born uncle could have quipped “flat land is no problem”. Without question, the land was not flat.
When the four-lane highway 7-8 was put through to New Hamburg, when the Clair Hills subdivision went in, and later when the land was cleared where the Waterloo Costco now sits, I marvelled at both the engineering and the gigantic earth-moving equipment that over a period of what seemed like just a few months filled the valleys, levelled the hills, and made the rough places plain. The highway to New Hamburg these days is mostly straight and flat where once it had its ups, downs, and curvy bits. Clair Hills has hundreds of homes on land that rises ever so gently, almost imperceptibly, to the plateau lands where Costco was built and where new housing will soon spring up in what I like to call Metallicland, the subdivision that will be reachable from Platinum Drive and Titanium and Copper Streets.
When I think of my uncle’s quip about flat land being no problem, I realize that he was not just referring to his memory of the vast prairies of Saskatchewan where he grew up or to that amazingly flat part of Ontario, Kent and Essex counties, where he and his family settled in the 1940s. He grew up on one of those wheat farms in Saskatchewan, and even though he moved east and became a city slicker, he knew that for anyone farming, or building, or travelling, flat land is for the most part the preferred topography. Flat land is no problem.
The passage from Isaiah that John the Baptist quotes in today’s Gospel comes from a time when it was only a willful act of the imagination that could envision straight paths, filled valleys, levelled hills, and rough places made plain. If you wanted to travel from place to place in biblical times, if you wanted to return to Israel from Babylon and other points of the dispersion, the journey Isaiah had in mind, you would become intimately acquainted with the intervening geography. You would walk, lead or ride on an animal, or perhaps ride in a cart being drawn by an animal. Your journey was slow and often made difficult by hills and other impediments. Impassable land meant that roads from here to there rarely represented the shortest distance between two points.
The Baptist’s metaphor of a straight and level highway in today’s Gospel is not so much about road-building, though, as it is about removing the obstacles you and I and others so easily erect that prevent the conversion of heart that Jesus will, at length, ask of us. The straight and level highway is “prepared” (to use Isaiah’s word) not only by faith and understanding, but also by the humility and singlemindedness that gives faith in God and understanding of God’s just ways priority in our lives.
This is that time of year when we, who know the ending of God’s story in Jesus Christ, marvel at the beginning of that story, the miracle of incarnation, the miracle of the Incarnation, and the miracle of God’s love for humanity giving birth to the grace of God, Jesus Christ, in order to redeem our fallen world.
If John the Baptist were here today, he would say to us that for Christ to make a difference in our life, in our church, in our world, we must make room for him and the good news he will proclaim. John calls us to do as the Bethlehem innkeeper and his wife did for Mary and Joseph. Rather than showing us ways to protect ourselves from the radical call of the gospel and agreeing with us that, yes, all our rooms are full, John calls us to that willful act of the imagination wherein we find the room he calls for: we create a place of openness and prayer, a place of risk and vulnerability, a place rich with the capacity for blessing, and most importantly a place for the indwelling of the Holy Spirit who will call us into serving as Jesus served, and into loving as Jesus loved.
Welcoming Christ into our life, into our church, into our world requires preparation, the conversion of heart represented in today’s Gospel by the images of filling in valleys, levelling hills, and making the rough places plain. Advent is a wonderful annual reminder for us of the need to prepare ourselves for Christ’s coming.