A Cry in the Wilderness

On the way home from Phoenix last week, we stopped at the Flying J Travel Center to get gasoline.  I love Flying J Travel Centers.  They have lots of strange merchandise you just don’t see anywhere else, blue denim rodeo jackets with real country-western designs on them, for example, or little toy electric weasel looking creatures that roll around on the floor around a plastic ball.  You just don’t see that stuff around anywhere else.  You see a lot of interesting people there, too.

While we were stretching our legs, walking around in the desert right behind the store, we looked down on the ground and saw some corn nuts.  My wife, Becky, said, “I used to like those things—when I was younger.”

“Me, too, “ I said.  “My teeth can’t handle them anymore.   But I used to love them.”

Funny how that is.  There’s all kinds of stuff I used to like, but I don’t eat anymore because now, my teeth will break.  I used to love all kinds of taffies and other really chewy stuff.  But not anymore.  Moreover, I have dental issues.  Well, not dental issues so much as dentist issues.   When I was a boy of ten or so, my mother got it into her head that I was allergic to Novocain.  So when I went to the dentist, she insisted that the work be done without any anesthesia.  Let me tell you, dental work without anesthesia isn’t as much fun as you might think.  I wasn’t allergic, by the way.  My mom was obviously mistaken.  At least, I hope it was a mistake.  Maybe it was just her way of getting her revenge.

So I hate going to the dentist.  It doesn’t matter that I now insist on enough Novocain to numb an elephant (no fat jokes!).  Going to the dentist just gives me a certain amount of anxiety.  And I have a great dentist.  I recently had to have root canal work done on a molar.  There were three canals.  It was not fun.  I got through it though, the same way I always get through that kind of work.  I get through it because I know that, at some point, the dentist will be finished and I will be fine.  I have hope.

Hope is what Advent is all about.  Hope is what Christianity is all about.

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar,
when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea,
and Herod was tetrarch of Galilee,
and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region
of Ituraea and Trachonitis,
and Lysanias was tetrarch of Abilene,
during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas,
the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the desert.
John went throughout the whole region of the Jordan,
proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins,
as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah:
A voice of one crying out in the desert:
“Prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight his paths.
Every valley shall be filled
and every mountain and hill shall be made low.
The winding roads shall be made straight,
and the rough ways made smooth,
and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” (Luke, Chapter Three)

Now everybody who likes to cast stones at religion and religious people will point out to any who care to hear that the names and dates here given by Luke in his gospel don’t work. Tiberius succeeded Augustus as emperor in 14 CE and reigned until 37 CE. The fifteenth year of his reign, depending on the method of calculating his first regal year, would have fallen between A.D. 27 and 29.  So Jesus (and his cousin, John the Baptist) would have been born during the reign of Augustus Caesar.  There is no record of any census or taxation during this period and the Romans were very good at keeping records.  Herod the Great would have been dead by the time Jesus was born, so the whole story of the Magi and the murder of the innocents would be false.

This misses the point.  It doesn’t matter if any of this is true.  The Bible is not meant to be a history book any more than the Mahabharata (Hindu holy book) is supposed to be a history book.  The Bible is not a book of facts; it is a book of truth. Luke would have written his gospel about 55 years after the death of Jesus, taken from an oral tradition, so it is reasonable that he might have made a few mistakes.  The great Lutheran theologian, Paul Tillich, once said that there was no need for there to even be a historical Jesus for the Christian faith to be true.    The truth of this portion of Luke’s gospel is in the message.

All of us travel through the wilderness at one time or another.  What is a wilderness, after all, but a place where there seems to be nothing to sustain you, where you are lost, where you feel hopeless?  At some point, every person old enough to read and understand these words has found himself lost in a wilderness of some kind.  It could be a financial wilderness.  It could be wilderness of isolation.  One way or the other, it is a wilderness of despair.  And when things look hopeless, there is a small voice that calls us, a voice in the wilderness, that says to take hope.  Things will be better.  And they will.  That is one of the great truths of the universe.  Everything changes.

The darkest night leads to the dawn of a new morning.  Sorrow will fade.  Joy will arise.  The yin surrenders to the yang, and so it goes.  So times are bad.  But they will get better.  Once times get as bad as they can get, they will get better.  So take hope from that.  Nothing lasts forever.  This too, shall pass.  This much is certain.

John came as one shouting in the wilderness.  He called all those who would listen to repent.  The gospels were written in Greek.  That was the world’s common language in the first century.  It was the language that everybody spoke, much like English today.  The Greek word translated as “repent” means to change your way of thinking, to see things in a new way.  John told us to change our way of thinking, to see things a different way.  He called upon us to reach out to God, to hold onto hope.  Better times were coming.  Every valley will be filled.  Every path will be made straight.  In other words, everything is going to be okay.  Just hold on.  Do the things you know are right and good, and things will be okay.

John was a prophet.  In the biblical sense, a prophet is not necessarily one who sees the future.  A prophet is someone who speaks for God.  You could say that a prophet is a person who teaches the way to peace, the peace gained by being in harmony with the Tao, the oneness, the source of all creation.  Jesus was a prophet too.  Jesus taught us the way to be in harmony with that creative spirit most of us call God.

Now whether or not there was a John the Baptist (although the historian Josephus does refer to him), or even a Jesus, these words are still true.  Our world seems like a wilderness much of the time.  It is scary, and at times, it seems hopeless.  It is easy to feel anxious and full of despair when you look at the events unfolding in the world.  And in that wilderness there is a voice calling out telling us to hold onto hope.  Things will get better.  And they will.

Hey, I’m a prophet too.  I’m a prophet because I can see the future.  And here is what the future holds.  Times will be bad.  Eventually, they will get so bad that you would think that they can’t get any worse.  And then, they will.  But then, times will begin to get better.  Prosperity will return.  And in the meantime, you will have what you need.  You may not have all you want, but you will have what you need.  And if you don’t, and you should happen to die, you will rejoin that one creative spirit and everything will be okay for you, one way or the other.  What Jesus taught was that death is nothing to fear.  It holds no power over you.  Just wait and see if this isn’t true.

The prophet Isaiah said that the one to come will be called Emmanuel, which means God is with us.  The Christian church sees Jesus as God with us.  And Jesus taught that God is always with us.  We are not alone.  No matter how bad things may get, God is always with us.

The entire story of the Bible is the story of our lives.  As children we feel safe and loved, just as Adam and Eve do in the garden.  Then, at some point in our lives, comes that loss of innocence, that sense of separation from love.  We are cast out of the garden.  The story of the Bible tells us Jesus came to bring us back into that garden, to reconnect us to God.  We reconnect, Jesus says, by loving one another and taking care of one another.  This is how we regain paradise.  God is always with us.  S/He is right there next to you on the freeway.  That’s God right there in front of you in the checkout line in the market.

The hope of the Christmas season, now in the heart of winter, is the coming of spring.  We celebrate the Winter Solstice because it is when the sun is at its lowest point on the horizon.  From this point on, the days will begin to become longer.  The long night is coming to an end.  Christianity teaches that this is true, not only in the astronomical sense, but in our lives as well.  This is why we celebrate a joyous holiday in the midst of winter.  This is why we feast when the trees and fields are bare.

When times are hard, it is time to celebrate.  The good times are coming.  God is with us.  Reach out and take hold of hope.  Grab onto it.  Embrace it.  Hope is the meaning of Advent.  We are not lost and abandoned.  We have Emmanuel.  God is with us.