The Reason for the Road--December 19, 2019

The Reason for the Road--December 19, 2019

"A voice cries out:

'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'." [Isaiah 40:3-5]

Here's a fun fact: God doesn't need roads.

Maybe you never really thought about it, but go ahead.  Give it a moment's thought.  As we get to know the God who is revealed in the stories of Israel and Jesus, it is pretty obvious pretty quickly that God doesn't "travel" like we do... or even experience time and space with the limitations we have.  God doesn't have any difficulty being in every location at once, and God is not slowed down or thwarted by obstacles.  You can't keep God out with a wall. You can't slow God's progress by slashing the tires of the God-mobile.  God cannot be delayed by inclement weather at the airport or a landslide on the highway.  That's just not how God's existence works.

And yet, here's the funny thing: prophets like this voice in the fortieth chapter in Isaiah keep envisioning God clearing out a pathway, a road, in the middle of the barren wilderness.  And long the way, the hills are leveled, the low spots are filled in, and the rough ground is smoothed out--like a major landscaping project for the local Department of Transportation.

But... if God doesn't need to travel by road, who is it for?

Us, of course.

I need to confess something.  This is one of those "Sometimes-the-good-news-starts-with-the-words-'I-was-wrong'" situations. For a lot of my life, I heard these visions from the prophets about a highway for God and a way for the Lord being prepared in the wilderness, and I assumed that the prophets were saying that God needed the road to travel on.  I assumed the picture was that we are here ("down on earth," I guess) and that God was somewhere else (our standard answer is "up in heaven"), but needed a way to come "down" to where we are.  I assumed that the road was necessary for God's convenience or access.

I was wrong.  Beautifully, blessedly wrong.

The prophet isn't picturing a distant God who has to hoof it on foot to come to where the people are.  These words are words of promised homecoming for people in exile, who were stuck in Babylon hundreds of miles away from their homeland, with nothing but wilderness and emptiness in between.  Part of the prophets' message was that God had not disappeared, but rather was with them in exile (sometimes they even envisioned God's glory getting up and going into exile in Babylon ahead of them as if to say that God would be waiting for them in exile).  But then that also meant that if there was going to be a homecoming, there would have to be a way provided--a way across the emptiness to get back home.  

So the prophetic voice we hear in Isaiah 40 isn't saying that some distant deity would love to come down for a visit but needs us to cut a road in order to come down from heaven.  Rather, it's that the same God who is with the people in exile will now clear the way for them so that they can go home--while God goes with them all along the way.

The way in the wilderness is for us.  The road in the desert is for our homecoming from exile, not God's field trip from heaven to check on us.  God hasn't abandoned us in the first place, and God will go with us on the journey from here.

And so the road has to be straight and smooth, not because God can't handle rough terrain, but because God knows that we need a cleared pathway.  The highway is for all of us, from the young to the old, the speedy to the slow, the folks who are stooped and hunched and the ones who just trained for a marathon, and everybody in between.  God makes the road way accessible for everybody, because God's vision is a homecoming for all the folks left in exile.

That really changes our picture of what this whole Advent thing is all about, doesn't it?  For a lot of my life I saw this season as our best attempt to clear away the clutter so that God could get through--as if God could not overcome the obstacles that I have in my life, from my busy schedule to my weary heart to my past sins to my present bad habits.  I sort of assumed that this was one of those times that "the church's job" was to remind me to clear away the bad things in my life, or else God wouldn't be able to get through--almost as if to say that if I didn't clean up my act, Jesus couldn't come in to my heart... or be born... or come down the chimney with spiritual gifts.  But this was never about God needing a way cleared for God's sake.  It's always been about God clearing a pathway for us to come home, with God already among us and leading the procession out of exile.

The Christian faith is NOT, then, a list of things you have to do to make yourself worthy in order to open up a highway for God to come down and visit.  It is rather about the God who has already come among us, who bears with our slowness and clumsiness to clear a pathway for us to go home together.  The child whose birth we celebrate next week is the sign of that God's coming to be with us, and he comes, regardless of whether we have made it easy or hard for him to get to us, whether or not we have cleared away the obstacles, in order to go with us all the way home.

The way in the wilderness was never to meet God's need.  But God's love for us was the reason for the road all along.

Lord God, walk with us, and clear the way for us to go as you lead us into your future.