Prepare the Way of the Lord!

[Our readings were Baruch 5:1-9; Canticle 16; Philippians 1:3-11; and Luke 3:1-6.]

As we know, Advent is a season of preparation. We are busily cleaning our homes, getting out decorations, making travel plans, deciding what gifts to give, attending parties, and so on. Of course, that’s really not the “preparation” that the Church calls for in Advent, but it seems that this is what we are all doing—and all we are doing—these days. It’s little wonder that we often are tired of Christmas before Christmas gets here.

But into our Advent “busy-ness” comes John the Baptist. He interrupts our cluttered schedules to demand that we make preparations of a different kind. Although he appears in the New Testament, he is more in the style of an Old Testament prophet, challenging us to examine ourselves, both as individuals and as a society. Advent is a time to prepare to welcome Jesus and not just our Christmas guests.

When I was a child, whenever my parents were expecting guests, my mother would work extra hard to make sure the house was “just so.” Everything had to be perfect; no detail was too small. Another way to say it was that the expected arrival of guests called for self-examination of our house—cleaning and fixing up.

John the Baptist calls us to a different type of self-examination. I don’t think he’d have had much time for straightening up our houses—after all, he was a locusts and wild honey type of guy. What he did go in for was repentance and preparation.

We tend to think that “repentance” involves feeling bad about what we have done. When public figures get caught out having committed various misdeeds, either public or private, their usual, carefully massaged response (normally vetted by lawyers and PR consultants) expresses their heartfelt sorrow and normally deflects responsibility for their actions onto someone or something else, so that they seem to be kind of apologizing for something that they say wasn’t really their fault to begin with.

That isn’t repentance as John the Baptist meant it. Repentance is quite literally changing your mind, turning around, reorienting yourself.

In the Gospel today, we heard a famous quotation from Isaiah, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight… the crooked shall be made straight and the rough ways made smooth.” I want to tell you of a different kind of trip.

What MapQuest had indicated was a real road was, in fact, a road under construction. The father said to himself that he should have known better. When he had turned onto the road and left the main highway, there had been a warning: “Proceed at Your Own Risk. Construction Ahead.”

Just past the turn-off, the surface was paved, but there were no markings, just blacktop. But, after a few miles, the asphalt gave way to gravel and a thin layer of tar. The smell of the tar and the sound of gravel bouncing up against the bottom of the car woke up the children. “Are we there yet?” “How much farther?”

“We have a ways to go,” said the father as he wondered whether he still had an old-fashioned map in the car.

When the gravel ended and they hit dirt, he started to worry. It didn’t help that they seemed to be the only ones on this road, and they had seen no one else coming from the other direction. Even worse, what at first seemed to be dirt was actually mud. He decided to keep driving and hope that this was just a bad patch–that the “real” road, the good road, was just ahead.

Soon, however, the noise of gravel against the car’s undercarriage had given way to a slurping sound as the tires kicked up mud and then sank into it.

He thought, “I have to keep going, If I can just keep moving forward, we’ll be all right. We’re behind schedule, but we’ll be all right if we can just keep moving.”

But the car became mired in the mud, sunk right up to the axles, tires half submerged. He turned the engine off. “What’s happening, Dad?” the children asked from the back seat. “Are we there?”

Help came in the form of a tow truck that traveled that stretch of road a couple times a day in case things like this happened. The car was towed back to the main road, and directions were given for a much longer, but passable, route.

The family would call that part of the vacation “the repentance trip” because it embodied so well the definition of repentance–an active turning around, going a new direction, a change of heart, a change of mind, rather than continuing down the same path, moving in the same direction that is leading nowhere or somewhere dangerous, fast.

Repentance isn’t an emotion; it isn’t feeling remorse or regret or guilty or ashamed. It’s not simply wishing that you were a better person or that bad things didn’t keep happening to you. Repentance is change, movement. Repentance is turning aside from your current path and when you do, you will find God waiting there for you.

We need to put as much effort and attention into our preparation to receive Christ at Christmas as we do in selecting the perfect holiday gift, putting the most dazzling light display on our house, and putting on the most glittering party. We have a serious disjuncture between the secular calendar and the church calendar right now. Outside the church, we are partying, shopping, and decorating. But here in our liturgy, we hear John calling for a different kind of preparation. We hear it every Advent. “Prepare the way of the Lord!”

John makes us uncomfortable, just as he made the powerful of his day uncomfortable. May he make us uncomfortable enough to truly repent and prepare for the coming of Jesus.

Is the world safe for the coming of Jesus! Have the paths be made straight? Have we made them straight? We soon will hear of a young woman, eight months pregnant, who will make a journey over hills and through valleys to Bethlehem. There is still time, a little bit of time.

May we use that time to hear the warnings of Baruch, Isaiah, and John, to forsake our sins, to put on the robe of righteousness and prepare to greet with joy the coming of our Savior.

[My thanks to the Rev. Amy E. Richter, St. Anne's Episcopal Church, Annapolis, Md., for the parable of the repentance trip.]