Preparing our Hearts: Hearing the Cries

My family has always been ones to prepare for things early. My mother is always good about making us have our Christmas lists complete before October, shopping done before November, tree up in November, and so on. Our preparation is not limited to Christmas – even to this day I usually have my bags packed a week before I make a trip. 

But really that’s what makes part of anything we look forward to worthwhile, right? The sense of expectation that comes when we begin to prepare. The mounting joy and sense of wonder that comes as each day brings us one step closer.

The people of Israel had lost their sense of expectation. Their sense of having something to prepare for. The place they lived and worship, the place that they believed the spirit of God dwelled had fallen – Jerusalem had been taken by the Babylonians and with it, the people of power had been marched on a three month journey to be exiled in Babylon. It was a bleak time that lasted for many years. So many that those who were first taken away had died off, leaving only their legacy and stories of what once had been of the people of Israel and the mighty city of Jerusalem. And with the death of those who first traveled so many miles seemed to be the extinction of any hope of returning.

The people felt that they were being punished for breaking their covenant with God. It is what the prophets of old had told them. It was what their forefathers and mothers had drilled into their heads. It was what they believed.

But then. But then the unexpected happened. In a community so wrought with despair, God appeared. God not only appeared, but God did this radical things. God commanded God’s very self to comfort the people of Israel. Let’s stop for just a moment and think about that. No one on this earth or in the host of Heaven has the power to command God and actually expect God to do what was commanded. No one. No one, except for God’s very being. And that is what we have here; God telling God to comfort the people of Israel. God wants Israel to know that their time of trial is coming to a close. That salvation is just around the corner. God gives the people something to hope for. Something to prepare for.

Whenever we are given something hopeful to look forward to we prepare more. Both of my brothers got married in 2014 - so there were a lot of preparations in our household. Now we are preparing for the birth of the baby. My sister-in-law is preparing for the birth. Their will be baby showers and advice given. A nursery to set up. And all of that takes time. When we have hope on the way, we prepare. 

God tells the people that help is on the way. A road must be cleared for the Lord. God is going to walk across the terrain that no one could survive before – the desert places – in order to make a new path for his people to follow as they return to Jerusalem.

And this must be done – for God has commanded God, and God cannot go back on the very word of God. Everything else is this world may only be beautiful and true for a fleeting period of time, but the word of God always is fulfilled without mortal limitations.

God is doing a new thing. God is about to come in and declare Holy might by gathering up this people, God’s very own, and carrying them back to the place of freedom form which they came. 

What a powerful message. What a radical message for a people who had never actually seen or been to Jerusalem. We will find is subsequent weeks that not all followed this message of God and not all believed this message of God commanding God’s very self. But maybe this message and the reaction to it by God’s people isn’t too far off from our reality today.

We are in the season of advent – the season when we prepare individually and as the community of God for this radical thing – the Son of God descending into flesh like ours to live among us. And through the presence of the Christ Child, God will make a new way in order to bring us back.

But for far too many of us this message gets lost amongst the hustle and bustle of wrapping presents, shopping, and baking cookies. We become preoccupied with the details instead of focusing of the excitement that the truth about advent brings. 

And maybe the reason we can become so easily distracted is because we forget who we are. We forget that we are the people of God and that God is so faithful, because we are being held captive by the world around us. So when some of us hear this message of hope that some in our midst become excited about and start to prepare for, we dismiss them as optimists or dreamers. Because in all actuality, we don’t want to return to this place we have never been. We don’t want to trust this God whom had just be handed down to us through our ancestors but whom we have never met. So we choose to stay put. We continue in our bleak daily existence, because we don’t have anything radical to become excited about any more.

But others of us will hear the still small whisper of the truth about this season. The truth about what is yet to come. So we become excited. We look forward to something that we don’t know quite what to expect. We prepare. 

We can see our preparations  from different angles. We can either see it as an act where the church is just prescribing to the greater culture around us – buying into the bustle of the season. Or we can make it mean something – we can set this up to be our reminder of what we expect to come. Be our tangible reminder of the presence of God that has come to dwell among us. This could be a constant reminder over the next few weeks that we are excited because God is moving among us and will continue to move among us in this amazing way. We prepare together. Because we are a community. Those who believed this message today in Isaiah dwelt with those who did not believe it. For they were still a community. So come from the east and come from the west. May we once again become excited about the message of God as we live together these coming weeks.