Second Sunday of Advent
I have to admit that when I read the words, “Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low, and the crooked made straight and the rough ways smooth,” I get a mental picture of some A&M graduate, or someone out of one of our other great engineering schools, laying out a plat with drawings of grades and backfills and bulldozed elevations, millions of dollars of backhoes and graders and all the marvelous inventions of the last two hundred years to conquer the landscape and build Interstate highways.
But, of course, God’s vision for the earth, for humanity, is so much broader and better than what I picture here. Isaiah, and John the Baptist and St. Luke are not interested in civil engineering at all. The words “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” have nothing to do with physical picks and axes and shovels. These words are taken right from John’s father’s prayer at the circumcision of John that made him a partaker of the covenant God made with Israel, a prayer we say every day of our lives in the morning. It was John’s mission, given to him by his dad eight days after his birth. John would spend his life “to give to His people the knowledge of salvation through the forgiveness of their sins, because of the tender mercy of our God, by which the Dawn will visit us from on high, to shine on those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the path of peace.”
The valleys to be filled are moral and spiritual depressions, to be filled with the presence of God. They are the little guy, spending his life in a kind of permanent funk, with no hope of anything better, who would be raised up to a new life in Christ and for Christ. I think of the blind man begging on the Jericho road, who not only regained his physical sight at the word of Jesus, but saw a new life of grace and giving as His disciple.
The mountains and hills are the proud, the people rich in all the wrong things, who for their own sakes need to be taken down a peg, humbled so they could repent of their sins, give to the poor, and value Jesus Christ as the most important person in their lives. They would be tax collectors like Zacchaeus, short in stature but long in sorrow for his habit of cheating his way to wealth and power, transformed by the words and presence of Christ.
In other words, Isaiah and John and Luke challenged every one of us in this Advent season to examine our own moral and spiritual and financial topography and let the Holy Spirit of God change us, fill, and scrape and conform us to the image of God we were meant to show.
But there’s even more to this new life God wants for us. St. Paul tells the church at Philippi, and this church, too, what God expects us to do as we are scraped and filled and conformed. The work God started in them and in us is not complete with our own change. No, he tells us that our love must “abound more and more” with both knowledge and discernment, so that we can approve what is excellent and improve what is not and become pure and blameless and filled with the fruits of righteousness coming from Jesus. All this culminates in praise and glory to God. Let’s take this prayer apart and apply it to ourselves.
Love must abound more and more with knowledge and discernment. We live in a culture of death and despair. That’s why drugs and alcohol and pornography and theft and sex trafficking are our modern afflictions. People around us have no hope for their ultimate end and think all they can do is numb or suppress their consciences and do wicked things that make them feel better. It turns to self-destruction, spiritually and physically. Knowing that, and knowing that God wants every person to come to salvation, to life with Him, we are challenged to discern a way to communicate with our friends and relatives in that situation, and show abounding love to them so they can turn their spiritual and moral lives around and become alive in Christ.
Approving what is excellent implies discernment of what is and what isn’t good. That means that we need to study Scriptures, commentaries, and orthodox Christian writings, and not just on the Internet. If you are a good writer, turn that discernment into articles, letters, blogs, video testimonies. You might not go viral, but even if you can only reach out to ten or twenty other people, you can make their lives better, closer to Christ.
We cannot grow closer to Christ and His church unless we work to clean up our personal act, work toward being pure and blameless. Start off, I suggest, with a meaningful confession of those things in your past that are not pure and blameless. Get yourself forgiven and then move forward. I don’t like to say it, but when I preach on moral topics I start off admitting that I’m the biggest sinner in the room. I know what Christ has saved me from, and I thank Him for that. But we can’t be filled with the fruits of righteousness by Christ unless we are clean vessels for Him to fill. Ask for the grace to admit your faults and adopt a righteous walk.
If that is our way of life, then praise will be the way we constantly pray. Don’t pass up the opportunity to give praise and thanksgiving. That’s why you shouldn’t need a rule to pray with your church community at least once a week, and on the Lord’s Day, Sunday. You should make that a rule of life, just like all the other habits you’ve formed over your lifetime. Praise out loud in song, but also praise in the silence of your heart. Personal prayer is a habit that will undergird all your other pro-God and pro-life activities.
We stand here expecting the return of Christ in glory. That will be a prayer meeting to literally end all prayer meetings. Why not now? St. Paul tells us elsewhere that what appears to be a delay isn’t that at all. It’s a result of God’s mercy and forbearance. God desires all to be saved. That’s God’s fundamental goal for humanity. When the trumpet, or whistle, or whatever sound accompanies Christ’s glorious return is heard on earth, the game is over. There will probably be a great number of folks at that moment who are not living pure and blameless lives, full of love of God and effective love of neighbor. They don’t get an extra inning. There’s no overtime play in God’s game book. So in His mercy, He gives additional time. But it won’t be eternal. That means our decision today, our change of lifestyle today, could be the last chance to secure our eternal future. Let’s make that decision, and live from now on as pure and blameless witnesses sharing the love of God with everyone we meet.
