Today, we continue our Advent journey walking in the Light amidst darkness, with a call to “prepare the way of the Lord” and “make straight in the wasteland a highway for our God” as Isaiah says or to “Make ready the way of the Lord, clear a straight path” as Mark says.
Advent is a time of preparing our hearts, minds and our world for the coming of God. We wait in this time of darkness, hoping for the Light. As Sherman spoke of last week, many cultures and many faiths celebrate the hope for Light in the face of darkness during this time—Hannukkah, the Festival of Lights, with its 8 days of candle lighting celebrating how only one day of ritual oil lasted 8 days, thanks to God; Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Light, that celebrates the victory of good over evil, and the Wicca celebration of Yule, with feasting and the annual Yule log symbolizing the warmth and love of home and hearth. We are all huddling in the darkness awaiting the Light while the world around us grows darker and colder until the Winter Solstice.
As Christians, our call is to hear the cry of St. John the Baptist to make ready the way of the Lord. We await the birth of the Christ Church, who to us is the Light coming into the world. But, what is this way we must make ready?
Today’s Psalm 85 said it well, it is where kindness and truth shall meet, where justice and peace shall kiss. Kindness without truth is sentimentality, and truth without kindness is harsh, as is justice without peace. And peace, as we know, without justice won’t last. So, that’s the world we are awaiting, we are hoping for, helping our hearts to be ready to receive, getting ready to welcome back the Light, getting ready to welcome the birth of the Christ child.
So that’s the world we are waiting for, hoping for, working for, but as we huddle in the darkness we know that world is a long way off from that vision. St. John the Baptist speaks to us as do many later prophets of what we must do to get ready—let’s look at former and current prophets. St. John the Baptist, a preacher in the wilderness, crying out for us to “make ready the way of the Lord” subsisting on locusts and honey, jailed and killed proclaiming this prophecy.
A more recent prophet proclaiming this way,Martin Luther King, Jr. said:
“This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate in to the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love.” Martin Luther King, Jr. is mostly known in the mainstream history books as pushing for the black civil rights, and yes he fought the hard nonviolent fight for voter rights, but his prophetic voice critical of war resonates through the ages.
Dorothy Day, New York City Catholic pacifist said in the midst of WWII in her article “We are to blame for New War in Europe” where blame was placed on the shoulders for all for “their materialism, their greed, their idolatrous nationalism…for their ruthless subjection of another country.” Dorothy Day challenged the argument that WWII was a good war because we sought to save the Jews, by pointing out that more tracks to the death camps could have been chosen for destruction, and that the US refused to accept even those Jews who were legal refugees (90% of quotas went unfulfilled) for fear of “overloading the labour market.” She said when asked to write a pacifist manifesto “I can write no other than this unless we use the weapons of the spirit, denying ourselves and taking up our cross and following Jesus, dying with Him and rising with Him, men will go on fighting, and often from the highest motives, believing that they are fighting defensive wars for justice and in self defense against present or future aggressions.” We have only to list the conflicts that we have suffered through as world in the thirty or so years since her death to point to the prophesy coming true. Dorothy Day was a voice, as was Martin Luther King, Jr. of looking to our own hearts first, “preparing the way of the Lord, making straight in the wasteland a highway for our God” and being able to see clearly the legacy of increasing worldwide poverty, increasing terrorism, increasing injustice that have stemmed from all the recent wars and conflicts.
Prophetic voices indeed. Mohandas Gandhi adds his prophetic voice with “I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary, the evil it does is permanent.”
John the Baptist, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day and Mohandas Gandhi. They all point to the way being filled with love and sacrifice, waiting in darkness and yet hoping in the Light, renouncing violence and living lives filled with wisdom, justice and love.
As Peter said in today’s reading, “What we await is a new heaven and a new earth.”
We are living in a time where new prophets are arising, voices asking us to change our ways, repent if you will, and make straight our path in the wilderness. Konrad Steffen, considered by many to be a prophet of climate change due to his work in Greenland, announced to the world his findings of rising temperatures and loss of the polar ice caps. He adds his research and his prophetic voice to the many around the world shouting his warnings from the wilderness for the world to stop, listen, turn around and live differently, live in better harmony with the Earth. He warns that not only will coastlines be affected by rising water due to global warming, the climate of the world will change as the gulf stream will be disrupted.
Locally, our very own Jack Layton, in his tireless championing the cause for the homeless wrote prophetically in his last letter on his deathbed that “Love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.” How’s that for hoping in the darkness and awaiting the Light.
The Occupy Movement across North America is another prophetic voice begging to be heard. The dismantling of the encampments is only the beginning, as people re-group in communities, continuing to educate and teach. I am proud to say that my daughter, Sofia, was part of Toronto Occupy along with several of her friends. One Occupy sign read “We will no longer stand and watch our world be dictated by the whims of the super rich.” It gives me great hope that so many people, mainly young people, gave up their own more comfortable beds and homes to speak truth to power as the Quakers say. One of the hopeful elements to me of the work that went on at Occupy was the way that homeless people were welcomed into the camp. This entailed a lot of work at times if people were struggling with mental health issues. The people’s mic and stories of how accommodating the Occupy protestors were filled me with hope. My own daughter told me of a night where a very angry man began beating on a drum trying to rouse all the sleeping people in the tents with his urgent cry to march and protest right then at 3 AM. My daughter listened to him and helped him calm down. Others had called the police, and he asked my daughter to help him talk with the police. He was able to stay at Occupy and felt heard. I was very proud of Sofia.
So here we are at Holy Trinity Church at the Second Sunday of Advent. We have among us some amazing people, people working on the Christmas Story, people who have been supporting Occupy, people working with Kairos, the Wellesley Institute, and our Refugee Committee about to welcome our Afghan family tomorrow, along with all the many other good works so many of you are involved in, building the new community based on kindness, truth, justice and peace as was listed in Psalm 85. Maybe this is what God meant about clearing a straight path, hoping in the Light in the face of so much darkness.
For me, personally, I am very comfortable in my work with the homeless, (as difficult as it is to help them access the services they need) particularly the programs I run working with the homeless with mental health issues. But I have a son with high functioning autism. As all you know who are parents, it is challenging enough to be a good parent, when you’re a single parent with split custody the challenges become even more daunting, but when you have a child with a disability it can be a very dark and lonely road. My son Tobias, is an amazing young man. He has above average intelligence but because of the way information gets processed, or rather gets blocked on its way to getting processed he struggles with almost constant anxiety. This anxiety causes him to have all kinds of hand, arm and head movements, and makes him need to slide his feet, and run his hands along edges, walls, cabinets, anything to help him ground himself. This presented a challenge at school where the best they could do was offer him some coop placements stacking shelves and straightening clothes on hangers. But for someone who is anxious to make things perfect very little progress can be made so the placements haven’t been successful. And now as we face the last year of high school that the system can offer, all that is ahead
While we wait for the birth of our Messiah, the Christ Child, let us prepare the way of God in our hearts, and be empowered to speak out, to be prophets for peace, for love, for justice, for truth. And if we, like the one in Isaiah say, “what shall we cry out?” Let us hear God’s reply: “All humankind is grass, and all their glory like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower wilts. Though the grass withers and the flower wilts, the word of our God stands forever.” And that word gets revealed in the helpless and vulnerable form of a poor baby born in a manger, a poor baby in an occupied country who becomes a refugee, learns to toil with his hands, and then is arrested, beaten and tortured, and ultimately is put to death. But Love does conquer all, Hope outlasts despair, the Light does come into the world, and while we huddle in darkness these darkest of days, we know that Christ, the Light will be born.
