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Dr. George A. Purnell
December 6, 2009
“Desert Voices”
Luke 3:1-6
Wednesday night was cold and wet. It was dark as I turned left off of Smith Road into my subdivision. Although there was oncoming traffic, I had given myself plenty of time to clear the intersection. But halfway into my turn, I had to stop because a jogger in shorts appeared out of the darkness and ran across the entryway to Gentry Honours.
Two thoughts came to mind as he ran past. Since I had to stop in the middle of turning, I was aggravated about his lack of attentiveness, and I think I might have muttered something to myself as he disappeared again into the darkness. My second thought was – now there’s dedication, running in this weather! (Although wearing shorts seemed like showmanship.)
Then I started thinking about how often I see runners out at all hours and in all weather conditions. Early, while it is dark and I am going out to get my newspaper, joggers pass by. On my way to work and on my way home…on holidays and over lunch hours on workdays…people are out exercising.
I think it’s fair to say that we are more health conscious today than we were during my youth. While it is true that obesity is increasingly a problem with segments of the U.S. population, it is also true that many people smoke less, eat better, and exercise more than we did 30 years ago.
While many of us are disciplined these days when it comes to physical conditioning, however, I think the fact that we are constantly connected to distractions (cell phones, laptops, blackberries etc.) makes it easy for us to neglect our spiritual conditioning.
Advent is a season of waiting and watching, a season when we are preparing to make room for Jesus’ arrival into our lives. Accordingly, it seems an appropriate time to ask ourselves the question: do we take as much care of our souls as we do our bodies?
I have long been disciplined about getting physical exercise. For several years I worked in a building connected to the IU Natatorium, and during those years I would swim laps for 30-45 minutes almost daily, including weekends. I would also walk briskly for another 30 minutes either before or after work. And although I no longer swim, I still walk 30-40 minutes almost daily.
Do I spend a commensurate amount of daily time in prayer, study and reflection, deepening my relationship with God? This is a question I must ask myself, as I prepare for Christ’s coming.
Today we get a picture of one of Jesus’ earliest and most vocal evangelists – John the Baptist. There is much we can learn from John. Let’s look…
Luke is very precise about setting this story within its historical context. He writes:
“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 ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John…in the wilderness.”
Luke wants us to know that he is writing about a real man in a real place in a specific point in time.
Because of all the markers Luke provides, scholars are able to identify 29 A.D. as the year when the word of God came to John.
It could be written that in the first year of the presidency of Barack Obama, when Mitchell Daniels was governor of Indiana, and Mark Kruzan mayor of Bloomington, and when Michael J. Coyner was the United Methodist bishop in Indiana, the word of God came to you. That would identify 2009 as the year.
This word came to John where? In the wilderness, the desert – a common motif in scripture.
John heard the voice of God in the wilderness. And as soon as he was baptized by John (in Luke’s next chapter), Jesus went into this same wilderness, around the region of the Jordan, to fast for 40 days and nights and seek to know God’s will for his life.
The Hebrew people spent 40 years in the wilderness, after God saved them from captivity and slavery in a foreign land. God orchestrated their escape from Egypt and led them across the desert. God protected them and fed them throughout the 40 years. God ushered them into the land which God had promised the ancestors, Abraham and his offspring throughout all generations. And the memory of this formative time in the desert is as central to Jewish faith as our remembrance of Jesus’ suffering is to Christian faith.
We have become accustomed to a world filled with distractions created by technology. And, truthfully, we find comfort in the distractions, because they allow us to avoid the journey inward. So we often must be taken to a place set apart from the clamor of the world to hear what we need to hear; as John, and Jesus, and the Hebrew people went to the wilderness.
Faculties often use retreats to escape the routine. On retreat, curriculum questions are raised. Core courses may be restructured to make them more relevant to the day. Instructional technology and other teaching methods may be reviewed. Yet the question beneath these is not ‘how can we do what we are doing better,’ but ‘are we doing what we should be doing to prepare students for a world where the pace of change is astonishing today, and accelerating daily?’
Corporations take their executives on retreats in order to get them away from the details on their desks and the people demanding their time…away from addiction to blackberries and laptops…away to an uncluttered place where leaders can look more clearly into the future and prepare for its challenges.
Many churches also have leadership retreats each year, so that clergy and lay leaders can dream together; worship together; pray together; play together; plan together; eat together; learn together; and, at night, retire to rooms not equipped with all the gadgets of technology so the time alone is quiet time. Churches go on retreats seeking to discover what it is God will have them be and do in the world. Proverbs tells us that where there is no vision, the people perish. These retreats are a time for visioning.
I believe that it is in the desert experiences of life that the word of God comes to us, and lets us know how God will use us to further God’s mission on earth.
When the word of God came to John in the wilderness what did he do? Did he have a private spiritual moment and then pretty much resume life as it had been before? No! We read that “He went into the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”He drew upon the scriptures of his own faith tradition, saying “as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah,
‘The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘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; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’”
What are we to do when the word comes to us?
I think this text tells us that in the desert we are to hear the inner voice calling us to prepare a way for the coming of the Lord into our lives. I hear the voice of Isaiah – as retold in the desert by John the Baptist – telling me to make a straight path for God into the very center of my being. I hear the voice telling me that my valleys will be lifted, my times of despair relieved. I hear the voice telling me that those problems I let grow until they reach exaggerated proportions – grow from molehills into mountains – will be brought low. And then – when the path is straight and all obstacles that block our view are leveled – “all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”
Advent calls us to prepare for the future, for the day when the Lord will come. Advent is our time of spiritual conditioning, our time of doing whatever it takes to get ready to meet the Lord; just as we do whatever it takes to get our physical workouts in regardless of the hour or the weather.
Frequently it is in the desert of life – when all else has failed – that the life sustaining word comes to us. Maybe your desert is the hospital room, as you sit by the bedside of your lifelong love as she lies dying. Maybe the desert comes when you realize that you have spent your life to this point putting your trust in things that have no lasting value…things that will never make you happy, or even content, because there can never be enough of them to fill the hole that is your spirit groaning for you to be what God has created you to be from the beginning…
And then, when the death of hope seems imminent, the word of the Lord comes to us, and the unexpected happens: we see new life breaking forth in the desert, of all places.
But we don’t have to wait until we are in the desert to hear God’s voice. The word of God can come to you now, in this worship service; in this place and time that you have set apart for the Lord. And the journal of your life could read:
In the first year of the presidency of Barack Obama, when Mitchell Daniels was governor of Indiana and Mark Kruzan was mayor of Bloomington, and when Michael J. Coyner was resident bishop in the Indiana Area, the word of God came to me, and my life was changed from that moment forward…
May this occasion…when you come to receive the Lord’s Supper…be such a time for you. Amen.
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