Second Sunday of Advent
Isaiah 40:1-11, Mark 1:1-18
I thank God every day that I am still able to fix everything in Patrick’s life through simple comforts – a kiss where it aches, a particularly goofy facial expression, a cookie that magically makes all the hurt go away. These are the simple comforts of childhood and, thankfully, as we age, these simple things – a kiss, a joke, a sweet treat – can still provide comfort. During a rough patch, one of you said to me recently, “I just can’t wait to come to church on Sunday. I know I’ll feel better there.” The simple comfort of community – what a gift. A hand on the shoulder, a hug, a hymn. A listening ear. Thank God for simple comforts.
In our Hebrew scripture text for today, the people of Israel are finally getting some comfort. As I mentioned last week, this part of Isaiah – called Second Isaiah – was written after Israel’s homeland had been destroyed and the people deported into exile in Babylon. It is the lowest period in their life as a people thus far, made doubly harsh since they believe their exile it is due to their own sin. If only they had been faithful to God, this would not have happened. But finally, after decades in exile, they hear, these words: “Comfort, O comfort my people,” says the prophet.. “Speak tenderly to her. Tell her that she has paid her penalty, that she has served her term.” The prophet Isaiah is telling them that their time of exile is almost over, that God will save them, that they will be able to go home.
The author of Mark uses some of Isaiah’s words to speak his own words of comfort almost 600 years later. The person speaking these words is John the Baptist who, for Mark, is like the voice that announces comfort to the exiles in Babylon. “Although first-century Jews were not in exile, they were under foreign occupation. It was if the Babylonian exile had followed them home.”[1] And so John tells these people that a powerful one is coming, the promised Messiah, the one – so people thought – who would rescue them from occupation.
The people of Israel in both Isaiah and Mark’s time are a people defined by a tragic past, enduring a painful present. Isaiah and John both give them a future tense – they give them hope. You will be going home. Your savior is coming. But the comfort being offered is not a simple kind of comfort – like a kiss that makes it all go away. The comfort offered to the people is a more complex comfort.
True, God is coming to save them, says Isaiah. But this God is a complicated God – both a tender God, who feeds her flock like a shepherd, gathering the lambs into her bosom – and a God who “comes with might,” who demands that the “valleys and mountains of human inequality be leveled out.” This is a God “for whom bringing comfort can also involve upsetting those who have grown comfortable with status quo living”[2] – or, as the saying goes, a God who will afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. God’s future is coming – but, depending on who you are, you may not find it, at least initially, very comfortable. This is a complex kind of comfort.
True, your Messiah is coming, John says. But some paths need to be made straight in the meantime. John is not talking about political or military preparations here – straightening highways so that the liberator’s army can march through – cleaning up corrupt political establishments – in other words, preparations the people might be expecting to hear about, given the imminent arrival of a liberator. No, the paths needing to be straightened are much more personal. You need to take stock of your lives, John says – where are you living in wrong relationship? What needs to be healed? What needs to be confessed? What needs to be forgiven? This is a complex kind of comfort.
The people have been given a future tense. A hopeless people have been given hope. But they have a lot of preparation to do in the present, during this threshold time between what has been and what will be. And it is not easy, simple work. It demands the rearranging of priorities and relationships as they prepare for the inbreaking of God into their lives and their world.
And so this is the complex comfort of Advent, this threshold time between what has been and what will be. We are expecting the birth of Immanuel, God with us. We have a lot of work to do to prepare.
When I was pregnant with Patrick, after 2 ½ years of trying to conceive, my overwhelming emotion was ambivalence. I’ve talked to enough of us who have been pregnant to know that I am not alone in this. In fact, during my pregnancy I read a book by a midwife who said that the number one emotion pregnant women report experiencing is not joy but ambivalence. It was a great relief to me. I’d have fleeting moments of joy, but for the most part I was anxious and just sort of… confused. This thing that was happening in me and to me was bigger than anything I’d ever experienced before. It’s like my mind couldn’t quite make sense of it: Who am I? Who am I becoming? How am I changing? And in the midst of all these ponderings, I was busy preparing – doing the actual physical work of making space for a new person in our life.
Pregnancy is one of the classic “liminal” or threshold states, so no wonder it is the overriding metaphor for Advent. A liminal state – that place where we are in transition, where we are in between – is characterized by ambiguity, openness, indeterminacy. One’s sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation. Liminality is a period of transition where normal limits to thought, self-understanding and behavior are relaxed. It is a sometimes scary, sometimes hopeful, often unpredictable. It offers a mix of possibility and peril.[3] We needn’t have been expecting a child to have had liminal moments – being a teenager, being in between jobs, being on pilgrimage, moving to a new place, moving into a new phase of our lives – these are all liminal or threshold states. As a country, we are in a liminal state right now – not just between presidents but between two different visions for who we are as a people.
And as a people on a journey of spirit, we are in that place right now. Our Advent work invites us to open ourselves to the complex comfort of preparing for the promised one: What has to be made low and lifted up in you? What needs comfort, what needs challenge? What needs to be reprioritized, healed, forgiven? What future tense might God be drawing you toward? What way is God making within and through you? What way are you making for God?
[1] From Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary.
[2] From the Advent worship resources found in Leader magazine, Fall 2008.
[3] Some of the description on liminality was found on wikipedia.org.