Isaiah 40:1-11

Advent 2 - Year B

"This haunting, evocative poetry is so beautiful, I can feel the hair on the back of my neck tingling. And of course, I hear Handel's music when I read this. But Handel is part of the problem because he used the King James translation, and they got the coma in the wrong place in verse three. King James has the 'voice of him that crieth in the wilderness.' But the newer translations have, 'In the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord.' (Mark goes with the King James Version. Or the KJV goes with Mark.)

"Having just returned from more than three weeks trotting about doing workshops, I came back with the deep feeling that clergy and other leaders in the mainline American churches are feeling a deep sense of agony around the foreign policy of their government. They find themselves being that voice crying, 'in the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord.' And that wilderness may be in the hearts of many called to preach this Sunday.

"Rev Bev points to the first part of this powerful passage for some hope. 'Comfort, O comfort my people!' She wants us to think about 'who needs to hear these words today?'"

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http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2002/december2002.html

There is a strain within us that wants to read this passage as a warm comfort. A road is built for us to get to God. We'll be like little chicks under powerful wings, taken care of all our days. All we have to do is hold on during our period of supererogatory suffering - no whimpering during our whipping or we'll get wiped out.

It appears the road in the wilderness is more closely allied with the interstate system sold as a quick way to mobilize our troops for internal defense when the commies invaded. The road is a way for the Lord to get the penalty to us more quickly so the extravagance of punishment might be escalated and thus end more quickly (or something like that, hard to tell in cases of "this is for your own good"). Somewhere in there is our current Iraq situation. Somewhere in there is the cutting of social services even more drastically than cutting taxes on wealth. Somewhere in there is individualized insurance in corporately run illness care (preventive care is health care, what we have is illness care).

Look, people to God are as grass. So what's the big deal. Redemptive violence is the model here and we claim we are made in that image. The comfort here is to roll over and do what we're told. No partnership, no participation, only puppetry. Here is stasis, here is infinite nursing of an eternal newborn.

On the surface this is Comfort, with a capital "C". Below the surface we find cold comfort in hot water.

Creation is not a smooth marble, but highly variegated. Thanks be for valleys and mountains. May God and all holographic images of same soon appreciate the importance of difference and hurry more toward compassion than a punishingly strict standard that accepts no variation from some idealized, recursive norm.

http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2005/december2005.html

Isaiah 40:1-11
Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13
2 Peter 3:8-15a
Mark 1:1-8

Cry out!
What shall I cry?
Here is G*D
. . . a shepherd.

What a let down.

Still want to hear what this shepherd G*D has to say? It won't be doctrinal, but will place us smack-dab in the middle of the realities of life.

Enjoy being between:
salvation and fear
faithfulness and righteousness
waiting for and hastening
waiting for new heavens and earth and striving for peace
time not being slow but patient

Of such matters do shepherds have the time and space to contemplate what it means to both have a penalty paid and to yet be preparing a new creation in a wilderness all too present.

Non-shepherds keep trying to resolve these matters and lose the spark of life they set off when they come in contact with one another.

This is not as high flown as Year A, not as packed. Slow enough to appreciate waiting for the pieces to come together.

- - -

Lift up your voice - with strength
Baaaaaa!
We will be fed, gathered, carried, gentled.
Aaaaaaa!

Aaaaaaa! Baaaaaa! Baaaaaa! Aaaaaaa!
What a rhyme scheme - Abba

Pieces -
faithfulness
righteousness
- Peace is

http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2006_12_01_archive.html

Comfort, tenderness, release. This is quite a trio of qualities that define our relationships with one another as we find ourselves in various exiles. Sometimes these will be offered to me by you and sometimes by me to you.

It seems as though living this way is not an easy thing for us to do for one another. Therefore the discipline of preparation. If you are interested in the result of preparing for a Presence of G*D refer back to the three characteristics that began this note – comfort, tenderness, release. If we can see where we are going it makes it a bit easier to stick to the discipline of preparation.

In some sense this is quite natural to us. After all, what we do now leads to what comes after. We know about cause and effect and intention. But sometimes we get confused and participate in some magical thinking that better will just happen regardless of how I am engaged in life.

Finally, an image of a discipline of strength is that of feeding, gathering, and gently leading. The end of the passage can be seen in parallel with the beginning.

Whether focusing on a discipline of preparation (waiting) for use of strength or a discipline of strength (stepping out) as preparation for larger living, may your advent disciplines be a gift to you and through you to others.

http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2008_12_01_archive.html

Before preparing an honest way forward, attention is paid to resetting the past.

Here a comfort of forgiveness comes prior to announcing a better future. There may be times when a vision of a better way will bring recognition that some form of a truth and reconciliation process needs to be set in place. But here it is a shift from past realities that leads a way into today’s work on behalf of a preferable tomorrow.

When we have lifted valleys and lowered mountains so all are on the same plane to look together at some clearer semblance of reality, we find we can also look at our own lives without shrinking away from the reality of being temporal beings.

Inconsistent? Yes.
Mortal? Yes.

So how might we better deal with these realities? Two quick ideas:

We need a consensus approach to life. Majorities tend to let power (money) dominate. Dictatorships focus on what’s good for those in power. Consensus processes can be manipulated, but when we focus on intentionally hearing everyone’s voice and concerns there is a much improved chance for us to catch our inconsistencies before they are inflicted on others.

Knowing we are not only frail, but temporary, assists us in sorting through our various options to ask about folks generations ahead and their benefit from today’s decisions. When doing long-term deciding there is an improved chance of our best intention carrying on long after our body has faded.

After lowering mountains that we might better see, we need to rebuild the mountains where we can lift up a voice of good tidings. So far we have seen that every generation needs to find their own way to honor that which brought them this afar along and to deal with their own divisions (partly based on our mountain building) and to tear down our Announcement Mountain that they better see how to care for generations yet further ahead. Someday this dynamic may change, but for now it obtains.

For now, be comforted - the future is open. Gently assist one another onward.

http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2011/11/isaiah-401-11.html