In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places a plain.
Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
and all people shall see it together,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”
We took a mission trip to New Mexico about ten years ago and during the trip, there was a stretch of road that we drove that was so flat and so straight they you could see the road just stretching on and on in front of you until it just disappeared into the horizon for a very long time. It was very boring as a driver. I found myself wishing the trip were a little more exciting.
Later in the trip we went through a mountain pass on the Arizona border and the road was twisty and winding and up and down and you could hardly tell which direction you were going or where you were going next. In some
places the road dropped off very steeply on the shoulder – you could see the tops of trees below you. That drive wasn’t boring, especially in a 15 passenger van full of teenagers. I found myself on that drive wishing for the straight boring path again.
Mark opens his gospel by quoting this passage from Isaiah and comparing it to John the Baptist, who proclaimed “baptism of repentance”. Repentance is one of those church words that I feel like has lost its meaning somewhere along the way. Or maybe not lost its meaning as much as it’s a word we’ve started to block out because we don’t like it. It feels negative and judgmental. It assumes things. It assumes that there’s something wrong with us that we need to fix.
And lets face it…. There probably is! We don’t like to think about it because we don’t like to change. And when we do get motivated to change it’s hard and we tend to give up and return to our old ways.
I’ve lost some weight recently. I did it last year too. But if you look at my weight tracking over the last year it looks a lot more like a mountain range than a straight path. It goes up and down and up and down. Because its hard to stay on top of it. Losing weight is easy. Eat right and exercise. There’s no real big secret to it. But eating right gets boring after a while.
In fact, if you've seen my Instagram you know that last night I wrote this while eating straight out of a gallon of ice cream. A GALLON. (I didn't eat it all!) Some days, you wake up and decide its too dang cold to go for a walk, no matter how expectantly your dogs look at you and make funny noises.
The reality of the human condition is that there is rarely any straight lines to our goals, but the funny thing is that there CAN BE. It just usually involves change and that’s hard for us.
The good news is in that last little bit… that the glory of the Lord shall be revealed. This is the thing that we’re waiting for. And just like when you’re driving through the mountains and every once in a while you can see your destination way off in the distance as you come around a corner, we can kind of see this glory sometimes in our lives if we’re paying attention. Think of how much better our view could be if there were nothing between us and that glory than a straight path.
In the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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