Sermon for December 5, 2021 - The Fifth Sunday of Advent - Year C - The Rev. Elise A. Feyerherm

Baruch 5:1-9; The Song of Zechariah; Philippians 1:3-11; Luke 3:1-6

“I thank my God every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you, because of your sharing in the gospel from the first day until now.” These words of St. Paul express perfectly what I have felt during these past two months of family leave, and it seems a bit like the Holy Spirit planned for this to be the epistle reading for my first Sunday back. It is so good to be here among you again, and my heart is filled with joy. Thank you for your prayers, for your support, and above all, your love.

What caught my attention upon reading the lessons for this day is where Luke quotes the prophet Isaiah: “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.”

What do you imagine when you hear these words? What pictures come up in your mind? For good or for ill, the image that immediately rose in my mind was that of mountaintop removal mining, in which the top of a mountain is essentially amputated to expose the coal seam within, to make extracting the coal easier.

Another image that came to mind was the damming up of the Columbia River in Oregon where indigenous people had fished for salmon for centuries. Waterfalls were flooded, and places where salmon had leapt became still pools. A cherished and essential community way of life was rendered impossible.

Is this what Isaiah and John the Baptist and Luke believe God will do? Erase every peak and bring every dip up until the world is one flat surface, like a bully kicking down a sand castle? That does not sound like a world I’d like to live in. Nor does it seem to be the way the God I know operates.

But when scripture presents a troubling or confusing image, I know I need to dig deeper, not run away. At the beginning of the chapter, Luke gives us an important clue as to how he is interpreting Isaiah and how he understands the significance of the ministry of John the Baptist as the forerunner of Messiah.

“In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of

Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea

and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and

Caiaphas, the word came to John…”

Yes, Luke is reminding us of where these events fall in history, reminding us that these are real people in real times and places. But the evangelist is also telling us something more: he has a message for those on the heights. He lifts our gaze to the those who sit on the peaks of human society and wield more power than anyone can imagine, and then says: here’s how God is going to deal with the high and mighty. Here’s is God’s way of ordering human society. There will be no high and low among God’s people, but the mighty and the lowly will be brought together. You emperors and rulers and governors and high priests – don’t get too comfortable.

The voice in the wilderness is preparing a new way. The coming reign of God does not bow before these rulers – they are not what matter. The Messiah values justice over power, abundance over scarcity, need over privilege.

The image of lowering hills and rising valleys might evoke that common expression, heard sometimes in political and economic discourse: “leveling the playing field,” otherwise known as “equal opportunity.” Make the rough ways equally smooth for everyone, no matter who they are. Might this be a vision of the way of the Lord?

Perhaps – my personal experience, and what I see around me, tells me a different story. For both individual persons and in society, simply leveling the ground isn’t enough. I think God dreams of more.

You have probably seen the meme depicting three people standing behind a wall watching a baseball game. Each of them is standing on a box of the same height. One is tall enough to have a clear and expansive view of the action. One can just see over the wall. The other is not tall enough to see anything, even standing on the box. They have all been given the same support – a level playing field. Yet at least one of the three has no access to what the other two have, despite this “equal opportunity.”

In the next frame, we see the same people, but all of them can see the game. The tallest person needs no box to stand on. The middle person needs a short box. And the shortest person has a box tall enough that they can see just as well as the other two. This is the kind of leveling that I imagine is the fruit of the reign of God, the result of repentance and the forgiveness of sins – both our individual sins and the sins of our society.

I can see this on a personal level as well as in the world. Back in September, I was in a deep valley, struggling to do my work, care for my husband, and care for myself. I didn’t need a “level playing field,” or “equal opportunity.” What I needed, and what I got from St. Paul’s, was a way out of the valley. I needed the road to be not so steep, not so rough, not so crooked. And that’s what you gave me. I needed a really big box to stand on for a while, until I could get up again and stand on my own feet. What I received was grace,

In our country and across the world, it sometimes works that way, but not very often. The mountains are dauntingly high, and the valleys so very deep. The COVID pandemic continues to surge in part because wealthy nations like ours have bought up vaccine supplies without helping poorer countries to get the vaccines they need. We’re already tall enough to see out of the valley of the shadow of death, but others need a much taller box. They need their valley to filled, which will probably mean that those of us on the hills will need to trim our mountaintops.

Those on the heights usually don’t like the idea of being made low. Even within the Body of Christ, we tend to see our own advantages as just that – our own, to which we have an inherent right. In our diocese, there are parishes as high as Everest in terms of resources, and there are parishes deep down in the Grand Canyon. We all give a portion of our wealth to the diocese, and it is shared among us in that way, but beyond that, we all hold on to our wealth pretty tightly. If Isaiah’s vision – John the Baptist’s vision – Jesus’ vision – were to come true, what would it look like? What if we pooled our resources and distributed them such that each parish was able to flourish in ministry and serve its community without worrying about whether it will survive? What if the valleys were filled and mountains and hills made low? What might the Body of Christ be able to do, be able to witness to in the world?

In Advent we wait for Christ in both his first and last comings, each of which shows forth God’s dream in which the whole world, like Jerusalem, can arise, stand upon the heights. This is God’s vision, that we see God’s children gathered from west and east at the word of the Holy One, rejoicing that God has remembered them. Leveling the playing field simply can’t hold a candle – even an Advent candle –  to the way of the Lord.

Glory to God, whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. Glory to God from generation to generation in the Church, and in Christ Jesus for ever and ever. Amen.