A sermon on Isaiah 40: 1-11 by Nathan Nettleton

I’m not sure about you, but I don’t think I’m the only one who starts to feel a bit jaded by this end of the year. I’m never quite sure why that is. I can understand it for school teachers and other people whose year runs on a set format and has a big holiday coming up soon, but I don’t have an excuse like that. Even if the last twelve months has been lots of hard work, the last twelve months had been lots of hard work in June too, so I’m not sure why this is different now. Maybe it’s got something to do with the nauseating commercial crassness that Christmas has become. Maybe its the sense of hopelessness that comes with being in a profession that is still trying to maintain that Christmas speaks of silence and mystery and humility. Maybe I just pick up the vibe from my friends who are school teachers!

Whatever it is, it is not something that is entirely unique to this time of the year. I’m sure if you look at a longer span of your life, then like me you will see that there have been times when a sense of dryness, of barrenness, sometimes even of despair gnawed away at your insides for longer periods of time, maybe even months or years. And hopefully there have also been times when life was green and juicy and luscious and you thought the good times would last forever. Some of you have had precious little of those. These highs and lows happen within us, and they also happen outside us on bigger stages. The economy goes through times of boom and times of bust. Recession, depression, recovery. Words that are used to describe our inner lives also get applied to the world of finances and markets.

Whether it is the hard dry times of the spirit within us, or the hard dry times brought about by hard dry men with calculators for consciences, none of us are immune to the ebb tide of emotion and hope. All of us have known in one way or another, and some are knowing all too well right now, the feeling described in Isaiah’s vision as being like grass withering before a hot wind. Or the feeling of standing in the midst of a wilderness desperately looking for a road out or even a goat track, but all you see is deep treacherous looking valleys and towering formidable looking peaks and you know your promised land lies beyond them. You just long for someone to fill in the valleys and level the mountains and illuminate the path and the promise.

Well the message from Isaiah this morning, and from Second Peter and from the beginning of Mark’s gospel, from all three of our readings, is that there is someone who longs to do that for us just as much as we long to have it done. God has seen your suffering and your hungering and says, “You have suffered long enough.” God has seen you struggling under a sense of misgiving about what you have done and who you have been and says, “Your sins are forgiven.”

God has seen the peaks and valleys of your life and has promised a better saviour than Prozac. The hills will become a plain, and the rough country will be made smooth. And the glory of the Lord will be revealed with no insurmountable object left between you and the joyous embrace of it all. Where once you found only loneliness and vulnerability and fear, now you will find yourself gathered into the loving arms of God like lambs into the arms of a tender shepherd.

God’s intentions for you are loving intentions. God’s great desire is to bring comfort, to wipe every tear from your eye and to make safe and welcoming and nurturing the world that once was hostile and unyielding. God’s desire is to restore life where there has been deadness, to restore hope where there has been despair, to restore joy where there has been mourning, to renew our dry barren places so that they might again blossom forth in fertility and creativity and beauty.

But don’t take this as some instruction that you should just try harder to feel better. The gospel is not good news if it just tells you you’ve got no excuse to feel the way you do and that you should try harder to change. The good news is that God is ready to change things for us; that God wants to break into our lives, into the barren lifeless places and turn despairing into dancing, to fill the dry empty spaces with love and celebration. It is God’s job, there is relatively little we can contribute to it. All we are called to do is prepare for it.

Prepare in the wilderness a way for the Lord.

Prepare a way for the Lord where? In the wilderness. In the dry barren places. In the jaded run down places at the end of the year. In the times of recession, depression and despair. Wherever in your life and your world the dry barren wilderness places are, prepare a way for the Lord!

And so John the Baptiser came in the wilderness saying “Prepare. The time is at hand. Prepare in the wilderness a way for the Lord.” And Peter wrote “I know you feel like the Lord is delaying forever, but he is not willing to lose anybody and a thousand year are but a day to God. So prepare for his coming.”

Perhaps this should not sound so surprising. Hasn’t God’s intervention in our world usually come in the hard places, the hurting places. God’s covenant with Abraham was made when Abraham was despairing of ever achieving his most cherished goal in life, to have a child. God’s words to Moses from the burning bush were, “I have heard the cry of my people suffering cruel oppression, and I am coming down to rescue them.”

Most of all we see it in Jesus. Born to a family who were refugees for his first couple of years. A man whose message of God’s radically inclusive loving presence among us had his name on death lists fairly early on in his career. A man who agonised over the decision of whether back down and compromise that message or face the consequences, and whose refusal to compromise resulted in his being publicly humiliated and tortured to death. And yet as we could only later see and comprehend, this naively idealistic loser was actually God coming among us, into the hard places, walking the wilderness paths of our confused and tormented humanity, and blazing a trail from here to heaven on which all may follow, levelling the impassable mountains and filling the uncrossable valleys.

So how do we prepare a way for the Lord in the wilderness places? Well there’s no easy answer. If there was it probably wouldn’t be such a wilderness. And it will depend a lot on what kind of wilderness it is. But a couple of suggestions probably hold true more often than not.

The first is to accept the situation for what it is. If you’re in a dry and barren place, you’re in a dry and barren place. I’s not something to be embarrassed about and ashamed of. It is an all too common fallacy that when you accept Jesus all your problems disappear and you live a life of unmitigated joy, blessing, confidence and victory from that day forward. This is a lot of codswallop. Following closely in the footsteps of one who was known for tears on anguish, sweating blood and who died at the hands of his enemies abandoned by his friends is hardly a sure-fire recipe for avoiding doubt, hardship and uncertainty.

If you hope to ever find a way out of a harsh wilderness place, the first requirement is that you acknowledge that you’re in it. It should be fairly self-evident that it is more difficult to negotiate your way out of a situation if you are still denying that you’re in it in the first place. Accept it. Allow yourself to experience the depth of it, the harshness of it, the bitterness of it. It is a part of life that we too often flee from to our own cost. Unpleasant as it is, pain embraced will deepen you and enable traits of character to strengthen within you that will enrich you life in many other situations. If you want a model of the willingness to embrace pain, you need go no further than Jesus.

As often as not, a barrenness of spirit, a time of painful emotion is being fed by something deeper that can only be faced and adequately dealt with when we enter fully into the depth of the pain and confusion. And in my experience, it is often there, in the deep places of pain and confusion that we will encounter Jesus Christ stepping on to the way we are preparing for the Lord. If Jesus was one who frequented the painful and tormented places of the human spirit, then we may in fact find that it is when we are in those places that we will most find the Spirit at work transforming us into the image of Christ.

This is perhaps the second, but very much related, thing that I wanted to say about preparing a way for the Lord. Beyond just accepting that you are where you are, be prepared for God to work where you are, for God to not mount a rush rescue operation, but to hold you where you are, barely afloat, and to work in and through that experience to continue the work of preparing you for the fullness of resurrection. Just as the gospel tells us that Jesus descended into hell for three days before being resurrected, so too we may sometimes need to serve some time in our own hells before a resurrection would be of significant benefit. If it took three days in hell, or forty days in the wilderness struggling with the Devil before Jesus was ready for the next step of his journey, I don’t see any reason to imagine that I’m likely to be able to accomplish whatever it was any quicker. Fighting it will probably only prolong it further, and unnecessarily. It may be when you stop fighting and let go of the rope you thought was your lifeline that you find yourself falling into the loving arms of the waiting saviour, Jesus Christ.

For that is the ultimate promise of this passage from Isaiah. It starts in the wilderness with a people who have suffered long enough, and it ends with God taking care of his flock like a gentle shepherd, gathering the lambs together and carrying them in his arms. God does not wish our suffering and struggle to continue without reason, but calls us to prepare a way for him in the wilderness so that we can allow him in to gather us in his arms and carry us to safety and the fullness of resurrection life, with all its joy, hope, fertile growth, freedom, love and peace.