Sunday, June 29, 2014
Third Sunday After Pentecost
Bulletin
Sermon Audio
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It is important for sermons to start in a compelling way. That is, at least, what those of us who have gone to seminary and taken preaching courses were taught. We have to draw the congregation in at the beginning or risk you deciding to tune us out for the next 12 minutes in favor of surfing Facebook.
There’s a long list of other things we preachers are supposed to do in a sermon – everything from how we handle our posture to how we handle Scripture. And there’s an even longer list of things we are not supposed to do. For instance, I am not supposed to tell you about how I was convinced 36 hours ago that I would have nothing to preach this morning. A congregation should never know a preacher’s uncertainty or fear for the sermon she is about to preach – and especially not for the sermon she is currently preaching. You should never see behind the curtain of Oz to where we keep the horror stories of 2 am edits and lost sermon pages, the slaughter of words that is the re-writing process, that time last night when my printer broke. You should never ever witness the moment when we stare at the computer screen in horror and despair and think, “If there was a Nobel prize for producing crap, I would win.” Even when we know our sermons are crap, you should never know we know it. As one of my preaching professors once said, “If you have a dog, walk it proud.”
And there’s actually a very good reason for this. Keeping you from looking behind the curtain isn’t about protecting the preacher’s ego or making us seem more together than we actually are – though that is an added benefit. The reason we are never supposed to tell you about our panic or lack of confidence in our words is because what happens in the pulpit is not actually about us. What happens in the pulpit is about God. Even when I lack all confidence in my words, I am to strive to have confidence in God’s Word. Our job as preachers is to prepare – to study, to reflect, to tinker with phrases and fiddle with stories. And when we do the work of making ourselves available to the Word of God, miraculously, somehow, at the very moment when my words fail, God shows up. This is a lesson Pastor Amy taught me over and over again. God shows up. God always does.
This was the lesson that I was desperately trying to remember 36 hours ago when not a word of this sermon had been written – though I shouldn’t be telling you that. I was sitting alone by a river in the mountains of western North Carolina staring at a blank piece of paper and praying for help. Praying for God to show up. I hope that sounds sufficiently spiritual and holy that it distracts you from the fact that I left on Thursday morning for 3 days in the mountains without my sermon for Sunday done. The purpose for my skipping town without a sermon was to join fellow Calvary members at the Wild Goose festival. For those of you looking around the sanctuary this Sunday and thinking it is a little sparse, about 20 of our Calvary family should be on the road back from NC right now and we pray for their safe travels.
Wild Goose is an annual festival that has attracted Calvary members for the last 4 years to leave the frantic pace, concrete landscape, and highly networked lives of WashingtonDC to spend four days sleeping outside, cooking communal meals, and talking with other Christians about some of our most central convictions of faith. The camp ground does include enclosed showers and charging stations for our electronics, so I can’t claim we were really roughing it. But we did spend the final hour of our seven hour drive winding through curvy mountain roads toward a land without wifi and where my cell phone was on something mysterious called “extended network 1x.” In short, we were in the wilderness.
And the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, prepare the way of The Lord.
I’ve secretly always been captivated by biblical imagery of wilderness. When I’ve pictured the biblical wilderness in my minds’ eye, I can’t say that I’ve thought of it as a beautiful place – certainly not the lush greens and blues of the North Carolina mountains. In fact, my brief trip to Israel a few years back confirmed my impression of the wilderness as a pallet of earth-toned colorlessness. As I was driving from the Dead Sea to Jerusalem, the dry earth I saw from the car left no signs of hope that returning rains would bring a resurrection of greener pastures. It was a terrain marked by absence. And yet, this barren landscape has always held a haunting attraction for me. I can feel the dusty earth on my bare feet and the wind that whips up from some unknown place carries with it an echoing refrain – “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord.”
Think of how often Scripture returns us to this place – not a person or an object, but a place. For forty years the Hebrews wandered in the wilderness. When Elijah was fleeing for his life after angering the mighty and powerful with his prophetic message, he went into the wilderness. When Israel was laid to waste – again – and Jerusalem was left in ruins – again – and all God’s promises seemed gone – again – the wilderness was the place where the prophets called the people back together and there where they began to rebuild. And in the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.
You have to wonder if the Israelites ever thought, “How did we end up back here? And, now what are we supposed to do?”
Wilderness isn’t exactly a pleasant place to be. It’s the place where plans have fallen apart. Liberation from Egypt was not supposed to land the Hebrews in the wilderness for forty years. Being God’s chosen prophet was not supposed to send Elijah fleeing for his life. Being God’s chosen people, Israel was not supposed to fall to a multitude of conquering armies. The wilderness is not where we are supposed to be. It’s where we’re stuck when dreams are stalled. It’s our wits’ end, and hopes lost. Visions, hopes, plans, they’re always about ways to emerge from the wilderness, not how to land back in it.
And the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord.
You and I are in a wilderness. The first step of wilderness wandering is to acknowledge that this is not where we planned to be – it is not where we want to be. My voice is not the one we want to be hearing in our pulpit this morning. We want Pastor Amy. Saying goodbye to Myra and Jason is not what we want to be doing next week. This was not the plan. “How did we end up back here? Now what are we supposed to do?”
It’s not only in the life of Calvary that we are having this experience. I look out at all of you, people I love dearly, those of you here and those missing, and I see on your faces the recent pain of loved ones who have been lost and friendships that are being grieved. I see changing jobs and changing homes, new beginnings that we don’t quite feel prepared for, fear for aging parents and worry for our kids. Life brings us to the wilderness plenty of times all on our own. Sometimes things fail to come together. Sometimes things fall apart. All of a sudden, we’re stuck asking, now what are we supposed to do?
And the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord.
In the wilderness we are stripped down, laid bare. Everything we’ve built, all our plans and hopes, everything we’ve tied ourselves to, and all the responsibilities we bear – they’ve all been left behind . . .
But is that really so bad, after all? I’ve begun to wonder, what if the wilderness isn’t the place where we end back up? What if, it’s the place we’re called back to?
It is after all, the place where God’s faithfulness is shown – again and again. After freeing the Hebrews from captivity in the land of Egypt, for forty years God provided manna in the wilderness. When Elijah was curled up, shivering, fearful, and alone, God’s still small voice came and said “Eat, rest, nourish yourself for the journey.” Note how many times God’s care is shown through food and rest. In the books of the prophets, the wilderness is not just understood as a place of banishment; it’s a place of covenant and renewal. The wilderness is where Israel and God find each other again, fall in love with each other again, and begin their covenanted relationship again. In the wilderness, God shows up. God always does.
So I don’t think Israel was running around in circles, repeating history again and again like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football only to end up flat on his back. Instead, I think the wilderness was the touch stone they returned to to remind themselves whose faithfulness sustained them. Faced with the challenge of giving in to despair and hopelessness, of giving up on all that God had planned, I think the wilderness is where they were reminded who they are; I think its where we are reminded who we are. We are wilderness people.
Here’s the thing about being stripped bare, it shows you all the extraneous things you can live without. When everything we’ve built falls down around us, it frees us from the exhausting labours of trying to hold things together. Our vision is no longer clouded by all that must be done, and we can focus on all that could be done. We can dream dreams and have visions. Returning to the wilderness strips us down to where it is just us and God again. What an exciting place for our church. What a comforting place for us.
And the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord.
I noticed something interesting when I was studying the text I chose for today. Three Gospels – Matthew, Mark, and Luke, all take this quote from Isaiah and translate it in exactly the same way – the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord. But that is not what Isaiah says. Read the Hebrew Scripture closely and you see that it says – A voice cries out: In the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord. I think the Gospel writers were doing what any good preacher does, repurposing the Scriptural text for their context, for a people needed to be called back and reminded who they are. Isaiah’s need was different though. For him, the call to make way for God is not one that is issued from the wilderness. It’s a call for the wilderness. It is instructions that answer the questions “How now shall we live? Now what are we supposed to do?” A voice cries out: Prepare the way of the Lord in the wilderness.
The fact is, our wilderness wandering is not just about us. The story we are living is not only our story. Our wilderness life is about God. The story is God’s story. Just like with writing a sermon, our job is to prepare. Because what God is doing here, among us, is so much bigger than any of us can imagine.
And what does it look like to prepare the way of the Lord? Oh mortal, you know that. It’s doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with our God. It’s loving our neighbor, and having the grace to love ourselves as well. It’s practicing love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and gentleness. It’s making food in times of death. It’s knitting baby blankets in times of birth. It’s sharing a meal – and of course a good bottle of wine. It’s showing up here each week. It’s speaking truth to power, and compassion to the hurting.
It’s being the Calvary we have always been. This is a church that survived Civil War and two World Wars, race riots and economic depression. A church that has had the world change around it again and again and again and has had the audacity to believe that God still has work to do on the corner of 8th & H, that God still has work to do in and through us.
And a voice cries out: In the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord.
A voice cries out: CalvaryBaptistChurch, prepare the way of the Lord.
And when we do, God will show up. God always does.