December 10, 2006 - "Signs of the Season: Construction Zone"

Title: “Signs of the Season: Construction Zone”
Text: Luke 3:1-6
Day: Advent 2C
Date: December 10, 2006

I have to confess: I am a Food Network junkie. I’m one of those people who can – and often do – sit on my couch and watch someone cook on television, and I am just as interested in that as in, say, watching some great new television drama. Paula Deen, Emeril Lagasse, Rachel Ray, or (my personal favorite) Alton Brown – these are people I am genuinely interested in watching as they cook on television. Eryn, of course, is sure this is more than an obsession, bordering more on addiction. But I can stop any time I want…really! Well, okay…maybe it is bordering on addiction. But I can tell you that it is an addiction from which Eryn certainly benefits because watching these shows allows me to come up with new and interesting ideas for our meals.
You see, between the two of us, I am the cook. It is a well-worked-out system that Eryn and I have in place because I enjoy cooking. I enjoy getting in the kitchen and working with my hands and creating. Somehow, I find that cooking is relaxing for me.
Eryn, however, doesn’t understand my fascination with cooking. It is anything but relaxing for her. What seems to me to be well-ordered recipes leading to a great meal seems to her to be unorganized chaos leading to a mess in the kitchen.
That’s why Eryn and I work so well together…the mess in the kitchen part. You see, I love cooking but I hate doing the dishes. Thankfully, I married someone who dislikes cooking, but loves putting things back in order again! For reasons that I don’t understand, she gets some sense of satisfaction from taking a load of dirty dishes, making them clean, and putting everything back in its proper place…just so that I can go back to the kitchen the next day and, once again, throw everything into disarray.
While Eryn I’m sure doesn’t always think this is true, I don’t intentionally use every utensil and cooking apparatus in the kitchen on purpose. The problem lies in the fact that cooking – real cooking, not cooking out of a box or can – real cooking necessarily involves a lot of preparation. I mean, sure, I could just throw a piece of unprepared chicken under the broiler for a few minutes, and it will indeed be edible, but it would sure taste better if I let it soak in a marinade for a half-hour before putting it to the fire.
Most non-cooks don’t understand that the real bulk of time spent cooking isn’t spent cooking at all…it’s spent preparing. And this is true for many things in our lives. Take this worship service, for example: I would be willing to bet that – between sermon preparation and writing; music selection and rehearsal that Terry does; bulletin formatting, printing and folding done in the office; any work that the ushers and altar guild do to prepare this sanctuary space for worship – I’d be willing to bet that 40 hours of work or more has been spent in preparation for this one-hour worship service, and that doesn’t even include time that you might have spent individually preparing yourselves for worship. And we could go on and on, naming things where more time is spent in preparation for the event than the event itself.
I am convinced that this is one reason why we hear John the Baptist’s proclamation at the beginning of Advent every year: his message is about preparing for the One who is to come after him, the Messiah. As John is wandering throughout the desert region around the Jordan River covered in mangy camel hair, he proclaims a message for all Israel to hear, fulfilling the words of the prophet Isaiah hundreds of years earlier:
“PREPARE the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth.”
John’s proclamation called the people of Israel to action. Quite simply, he tells the people that they’ve got some work to do. The coming of the Messiah was imminent, so everything that would hinder the Lord’s coming had to be cleared away. The hard work of preparation had to begin.
As Pastor Tim mentioned last week, our temptation at this time of year is to innocently skip over the hard work of Advent and get right to Christmas, but John the Baptist’s proclamation issues a bold “NO” to that desire. Not only shouldn’t we do that, indeed we cannot do that. We cannot get to Christmas without preparing for it. Ask any mother in this room and I’m sure she will tell you that she did not just spontaneously give birth to her child. It took NINE MONTHS. Nine months of preparing and anxiously awaiting the day when that child would come into this world. And that time is not spent idly waiting; it is an active time. You have to prepare a space for the child to live and to grow. You have to get the essentials in place. You have to arrange where to go once labor has begun. There is a lot of work that needs to be done before the child arrives.
Likewise, John’s message tells us that we need to prepare a space within our selves, within our hearts, within our minds for the coming of the Babe to be born of Mary. To do so he uses the vivid imagery of a large-scale construction zone, and this hard work begins with the mountains. The mountains within us are those places crested with our pride. They grow with every thought that we have done something to earn God’s favor. They loom larger within us with every time we take credit and honor away from the One who gives every good gift. So…break out the jackhammer, says John. These mountains of pride within us must be made low!
Then on to the valleys. Our valleys are those low places in our hearts lined with our shame. These vast expanses seem to get deeper and deeper with every shortcoming and every feeling of inadequacy that we encounter. Spend too long in these desolate places within you and you will no doubt notice that these valleys can quickly be swallowed up by the shadows of depression. So…bring in the dump trucks, John proclaims. These valleys of shame within us must be lifted up!
Now on to those crooked paths. These paths have deep ruts, which were created by our attempts to trust our own skewed sense of direction for our lives, rather than relying on the GPS – that is, the God-Provided Spirit – which comes standard within each of us! I’m sure many if not most of you have experienced a time in your life when you had created a detailed map for your future, only to find that map crumpled on the floorboard after encountering too many cul-de-sacs, detours and dead-ends. So…pour out the concrete, says John. These crooked paths have got to be straightened.
Finally, after the mountains, the valleys, and the crooked paths have been dealt with, our preparations will be almost complete. One more task remains and in many ways it is the hardest of them all. We need to deal with our rough places, those spots where we like to hide all of those things we want to forget about forever. Most often these places get filled up rather quickly with these ugly things called grudges. These are feelings of resentment and hatred that we feel toward our neighbors. And if there’s anything I know about grudges, it is this: they may seem little at first, but the moment they are tucked away they begin to fester and grow, and they get ugly. The hard work of preparation, then, requires that we clean these places out. We must plumb their depths and engage in the difficult yet healthy work of forgiveness. Yup…John would tell us to call for the backhoe. These rough places need to be made smooth.
Obviously, given all of this, preparing the way of the Lord is not easy work. In fact, it would be impossible work if it weren’t for the fact that the Lord has already come. We would be striving in vain if the very One for whom we are preparing hadn’t encountered us in the waters of our baptism. We would be struggling if we had never been nourished with the body and blood of Jesus Christ at this table. What John fails to tell us in his proclamation is that the only way we are able to prepare the way of the Lord is that the Lord has already come.
It is the Lord who enables us to bring down our mountains of pride. It is the Lord who empowers us to fill our valleys of shame. It is the Lord who finds us on our crooked, rutted paths and leads us to the straight roads of God’s will. It is the Lord who helps us to turn our rough places full of grudges into smooth avenues of forgiveness.
This is what Advent is all about: the hard work of preparation. We cannot skip it. We cannot take it lightly. We cannot postpone it. So…put on your hard hats, people, cuz we’ve got some work to do.