This sermon was preached for the second Sunday in Advent, Sunday, December 10, 2023. The readings for this sermon were: Isaiah 40:1-11, Mark 1:1-8, and Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13.
It wasn't until my twenties when my father-in-law retaught me how to ride a bike that I learned that no, actually bike gears are simply tools for different situations you’re riding through. You adjust your bicycle’s setting to your body, not the other way around. Use bike gears properly and the rhythm and pace of your pedaling, the amount of effort you need to power the bike, stays pretty constant. Turns out lower gears weren't less moral or less character-building or lazier than higher gears. Using a variety of gears simply enables you to bike faster, further, and longer over the course of a ride, essentially evening out the terrain. Turns out using gears properly also makes riding a bike a lot more enjoyable.
This realization about bike gears actually led to a larger breakthrough not only in my approach to life, but in the fundamentals of my theology. Turns out I’m not supposed to make my life as hard as I can bear it, take on as much as I possibly can, and just muscle my way through until this hardship or that unexpected uphill knocks me down. Turns out when I’m facing stress, transition, a new hard thing, it’s not only okay to ask for help, admit my limitations, and seek a doable way through - it’s actually a much more faithful way to move through the world.
Turns out God wants our lives to be meaningful, enjoyable, and fulfilling. The key is that God wants everyone’s lives to be meaningful, enjoyable, and fulfilling.
The book of the Prophet Isaiah is basically a collection of literature spanning more than three centuries of hardship and turmoil for the people of God. In it, we hear God’s people struggling to understand some really difficult collective traumas: wars, foreign occupations, the destruction of Jerusalem, and the exile of its elite. The first two main chunks of Isaiah, called First and Second Isaiah, chapters 1-39, are dominated by harsh and provocative voices, a prophet crying out to his people to be better, do better. For God’s society to repent and give up their violence, injustice, corruption…or else.
Then, we get to Isaiah 40. Another voice that was present in the book grows in strength and eclipses the others - a voice of tenderness and compassion. Hope and the promise of a better, easier life for God’s people. God’s people are being called home. Gathered up. Restored.
Then Isaiah says: “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her…He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.”
Perhaps this is as true for you as it is for me: your willingness to take on challenges, your determination to persevere up hills, your hard-won ability to push through pain and sweat and tears and not give up, that all has served you well. The idea that this or that difficulty has a purpose may have gotten you through a lot in life. Oftentimes the thought that keeps me pedaling on goes something like this: This is God teaching me patience. This is God teaching me grace. This sacrifice has meaning. This is the way of the cross Jesus speaks of. I signed up for this.
So I don’t want to throw away that theology. Not completely. I just want to add in another voice, the voice of Isaiah 40. This voice speaks of a complete reshaping of the landscape of our lives. Not only mountains made level, but streams in the desert, rich pastures in the desolate places, flourishing forests where once there was only barren land. Prepare the way of the Lord - a way of life, of ease.
Now, we can’t talk about Isaiah without talking about justice, too. God’s justice looks like restructuring life so that every child of God has a straight, level, and clear path ahead of them. It looks like fighting for all people to have an easy, fruitful, and enjoyable life. It looks like God’s Sabbath commandment that all beings deserve rest from their labors, no matter what their labors are or how well they’re doing them. Justice, preparing the way of the Lord, looks like declaring that I want that vision of ease, abundance, and joy to be as true for you as I want it to be true for me. It means committing to doing what it takes with you to make it so, for the both of us, for all of us.
I can’t read this passage without thinking about a project I did back in seminary. For my Christian ethics class, a couple classmates and I were assigned a project to investigate how a particular group of people were being denied full dignity and access to church. We were to imagine and present on what action and advocacy might look like through a theological and scriptural lens. My group chose to consider folks who lived with physical disabilities, particularly those who use a wheelchair, walker, or cane to get around. We also decided to take the project a step further and make some holy trouble.
See, our seminary, Church Divinity School of the Pacific, was nestled on a steep hill in the hilliest part of Berkeley. Our campus was connected through a series of stairways that made it virtually impossible for anyone with physical impediments to navigate to class or worship. What did that imply about whom the church thought it was important to ordain? Or at the very least, to make it real specific, what would that mean for the wheelchair user we knew was applying to study there next semester? So, early one morning, my project partner and I snuck around campus and blocked off all the stairways with caution tape, maps, signs, and of course, Bible verses. Chaos ensued. Professors and students alike were late to class and chapel all day. Folks got lost trying to figure out the long winding go-around on the broken sidewalk that skirted campus. No one knew where the elevators were or how to get the key to access them. And so, just for a day, everyone had a small taste of what it was like for people in disabled bodies to study at our school.
This passage from Isaiah was one of the scriptures we pasted up on giant posters. “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.”
God is the force that bulldozes obstacles, that tears down high walls and steep stairs, and all the other parts of life that make it unfairly, unbearably difficult. When we install ADA-rated ramps, when we invest even more money into making sure that darn elevator in the Great Hall actually functions, we are participating in God’s work in the world, we are preparing ways back to God for all people.
Another lesson from cycling: it is a lot easier to notice when you have headwinds slowing up down than it is when you have winds at your back, pushing you forward, much easier to sense when there’s a slight incline than a slight downhill. Sometimes we can be oblivious to the ways our lives are easier than others, the advantages we’ve received, because our disadvantages are so much more front of mind. It’s why we are so deliberate and intentional about gratitude in the Christian tradition - about counting our blessings, pausing to notice how there may indeed be a divine hand at work in our lives, clearing a highway ahead.
We, too, can be that force in others’ lives. I think the zero-sum attitude that’s so pervasive in our society would have us believe that me making my life easier necessarily makes yours harder, and vice versa. I can’t put down my burdens without someone else having to take them up. But this voice of good tidings calls us to a new vision - a level, straight, easy way for all people, not just for the lucky few, not even just for the righteous.
If we take a moment to believe, to really imagine, that God has already given us the tools we need to make that vision a reality, a life of ease for all, could we make different choices about how to form community, how to structure our households, parishes? Could we dare to let things fall without anyone needing to stoop down to shoulder them? Could we give ourselves permission to shift into a lower gear? To seek out comfort?
Isaiah said, “For thus said the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel, “In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.”
In this time of Advent, the nights are growing longer, the days darker and colder, and dare I mention, sicknesses even more relentless. For me, at least, life just seems to get harder and harder this time of year. Perhaps it is more challenging, for you, too, for various reasons. That’s why I love the practice of lighting Advent wreath, and in our household this week, the Hanukkah menorah. In both faiths, we light more and more candles in the encroaching dim. It is good and even holy for us to turn to more and more sources of comfort, warmth, and light in these days. Advent, perhaps more than any other season, is a time for shifting into a lower gear.
So thank you, God, for all that brings us comfort and slowness and ease. Teach us to make those blessings real for every child of God.
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