In his 1964 song “My Back Pages,” Bob Dylan asserts,

A self-ordained professor’s tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty
Is just equality in school
“Equality,” I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

Profound words, right? (I’d sing ’em, but they wouldn’t make sense without the guitar.) Dylan is citing someone—a “self-ordained professor,” so someone who likes the sound of his own voice—who’s stating that freedom (liberty) is “equality in school.” Maybe he means that liberty is a human process, whereby we learn equality. I’m not really sure; for me, the important part is the middle eight, where Dylan says “equality” with the same passion that he’d give to a wedding-vow. That’s what God’s done for us, friends—for Jeremiah, for the Church, for humanity, and for all Creation. Through the Lord Jesus, God has granted all of God’s children freedom and equality, because...in Jesus...God has come to Earth to find his Bride. Equality IS the wedding-vow that God makes to us, and with us. Man! That’s so exciting. Are you guys excited?!

I’m gonna talk a little more briefly than usual. I’ll only be addressing the passage from Isaiah 40, and the corresponding text in Mark 1, with a brief reference or two to the Psalm in terms of God’s promised equality and peace. That said, I’d like to point out how both of those larger texts marry God’s sharing of Godself with humankind, with God’s confrontation of human limitation. As is fitting, I’ll start with the Hebrew Scripture, and move us towards its Christian reinterpretation...and then towards the eschatological paradigm, that is, the way it applies to the Last Days and our place therein. Everyone ready?

Today’s Isaiah text is remarkable both in its scope and its density. The first speaker (and you can barely tell who’s who at first) is YHWH, the Lord Almighty. God asks Isaiah (or Isaiah’s listeners?) to “comfort [God’s] people” (40:1) and to comfort Jerusalem, because “she has served her term,” “her penalty is paid,” and “she has received double from the LORD for all her sins” (40:2). Here the imagery of a courtroom, of the legal or judiciary form of judgment, is strong. God has judged the exiled Israelites, and has humbled them in their pride.

Then, in verse three, there’s a strange and poignant break in the subject matter. “A voice cries out: ‘In the wilderness...’” Wait, wait—I thought we were in Jerusalem. Nope: the scene’s shifted to the wilderness outside Zion, the place where John’s going to introduce himself (and Jesus, for that matter). We’ll come back to John in a few minutes. For now, we’re in the wild.

“In the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain” (3-4). The speaker—whoever the speaker is—knows that the wilderness is the place where God is going to show up. God shows Godself in unexpected places, as we know here in Jeremiah. The way of the Lord—the path that the King travels en route to his coronation in flesh—is through the place of plentiful manna and scarce meat, the place of thirst and longing...the place of locusts and wild honey, as the prophets John and Joel know well.

Moreover, the highway for our God is to be straight: I assert that Isaiah refers as much to its character as to its curvature. This is a road of righteousness, friends. People who make crooked paths—the people who deal obliquely with others, like merchants who use dishonest scales—cannot enter onto this road. The ones who walk here—the sort of people John will baptize, and Jesus will welcome in his ministry—are those who want to be straight, to approach the world authentically and without subterfuge or self-deception. People like us, friends.

Moreover, this is a road in a really FLAT place: God and God’s friends can see everything. “Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain made low” (4). EVERY one: no more Rocky Mountains; no Lake District in England; no Swiss Alps or Himalayas. “The uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain.” While the metaphorical content of this poetic conceit is clear—God wants straight dealing from all his people in our engagement with the world—a person with mobility issues, like me, cannot but appreciate the idea of a completely flat surface on which to travel. Man; that would be SO cool. Plus, Bono talks about it too: in one of U2’s best songs, “Where the Streets Have No Name,” he sings, “I’ll show you a place / high on a desert plain / where the streets have no name.” Bono too desires a place where class does not exist, and where people are not divided by which side of the nameless street they live on.

Then comes the best part! “The glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all people will see it together.” God says so. One might say—and some, like Origen, have said—that this means universal salvation: everyone gets into the Kingdom of Heaven. I’m not certain of that, but this I do know: the speaker states that everyone will see God’s redemption, whether or not everyone gets to participate. God’s hand will guide the world in its spin towards love, justice, and peace.

Isaiah also deals with human contingency in the face of the coming Day of the LORD. A voice asks Isaiah to cry out. “Okay, but what should I say?” People are about as permanent as grass and flowers, says God in response: our earthly selves will disintegrate at some point, but God’s Word stands forever. Both of these things are true. Human beings are constantly moving, changing...and getting closer to death. Our loyalties change, our energies flag, and our bodies just plain get tired. We can’t avoid these things, but Isaiah points out a saving grace for us: we can latch onto God’s Word—Jesus, God’s incarnate Logos (Word, Reason, or Creativity)—in order to stay secure. Jesus was born, and lived like us...and he died so that we need not. “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see! / Hail the Incarnate Deity! / Pleased as one of us to dwell / Jesus, our Emmanuel.” (The reason I love Charles Wesley most is his enthusiasm.)

And the last part is one of Isaiah’s numerous glimpses of the LORD’s Day in terms of action: God is coming for God’s people with a gentle and strong right arm, and he’ll take care of his people like a shepherd. Isaiah explicitly evokes God’s peace through this symbol of the shepherd: God loves God’s people so much that he will “feed the flock” and “gather the lambs in his arms” (10-11); he’ll even carry the lambs next to his heart, and guide the ewes from place to place. Unlike some shepherds in his own day, Isaiah’s shepherd will be a kind and tender leader.

So, in light of everything Isaiah says, what does this mean in terms of Advent? Well, for starters, Advent—the celebration of Jesus’ coming to Earth as a human being—is about comfort. The exiles don’t have to mourn, because their exile is over. “Blessed are you who mourn,” says that One who has come, “for you will be comforted.” Second, Jesus’ birth doesn’t take place in the wilderness—he’s born in a little Palestinian town called Bethlehem—but it may as well, because Bethlehem, and his later hometown Nazareth, are as far from the centres of power as one can get.
Third, Jesus’ birth is a symbol of human equality: he and his earthly father were teknai, manual labourers, and so they came from the working-class. Sure: Jesus may have spoken Greek, but he was also a refugee from the army of a Jewish tetrarch, he scorned the Temple taxes, and he spent literally months eating with other people during his ministry. Moreover, Jesus talked to women (which was unheard of in his day), he touched lepers (a really bad idea, given Ptolemaic medicine), and he ate and drank with tax collectors. Most Jewish peasants probably wanted to burn down tax-collectors’ houses, but clever Jesus made one of them a close disciple. Jesus took all sorts of people from all walks of life, and showed them the flip-side of classism. In his Incarnation, Jesus creates the divine equality where valleys are raised and mountains made low.

Most significantly, in Jesus, the glory of the LORD is revealed in several ways. First, Jesus reveals the glory of God because he is God’s Son who took on flesh. Second, Jesus reveals the glory of fully human life: in his life, ministry, death, and Resurrection, Jesus models a servant’s orientation towards the needs of others. He takes the lowest place, he empties himself of power,
and he subverts oppressive laws and rules. The Jesus we see in Mark and Luke has a LOT to say to our culture: he advocates for peace, and he asks at least one rich fella to leave EVERYTHING he has to follow him. Jesus is the Good Shepherd that Isaiah evokes in the end of this poem: he knows his sheep, and we (his sheep) know him. We who love God can go in and out of Jesus’ presence—God’s presence—to find pasture. Plus, Jesus offers the guidance that human beings need: he will “gently guide” us, says Isaiah, in a world gone mad. We need Jesus to counter a cultural paradigm of two-for-one deals, blowout Black Friday sales, and the advent of the iPhone 6. In Jesus, God’s glory dwells in the land, and righteousness makes a path for his steps, just like it says in the Psalm. In fact, in Jesus, righteousness and peace kiss each other (85:13).

Third, Jesus reveals God’s glory in weakness and in strength. He’s the One whose body was broken for the life of the world on the Cross, and the One who will return in the Last Days (according to John, at least), to completely transform the Earth from its current contingency into the kaleidoscopic beauty of the LORD of the Universe. Jesus is the One who sits, unseen, between the federal forces and the protesters in Ferguson, Missouri. He cries with every widow who flees the city of Aleppo in Syria. He longs to comfort every Liberian child whose mother has the Ebola virus, and to give new life to everyone in the world who has AIDS. Jesus is the offer of God’s material and spiritual abundance, so that there need be neither disease nor poverty. He is the Prince of Peace, who will return in glory to confront the war-makers. Through Jesus, God will offer peace to all God’s people, as Isaiah and the Psalm make clear.

Okay. So we think that Isaiah is pointing straight at Jesus’ Incarnation in chapter 40. What effect does that have on Jeremiah, on our friends and our neighbours? Well, I think Isaiah’s message for us is pretty literal. He’s talking about our role as comforters in the midst of the world’s affliction, and about our witness to the equality of the Incarnation. We can offer our neighbours God’s comfort when they suffer from a lack of affordable housing, and when our bellies are all crying out with hunger. We can point to the guidance of Jesus, Good Shepherd and Prince of Peace, when we feel heartache, when we struggle to free ourselves from various addictions, or when we despair at the prevalence of militarism in our culture. All people will see the Advent of fully human and fully divine life in Jesus.

Furthermore, I mentioned equality again: we in Jeremiah participate in a new-monastic pioneer ministry under the aegis of the Anglican Diocese of Toronto. By making known our stance for people who are dispossessed and vulnerable in this neighbourhood—in the wilderness, so to speak, relative to the centres of power on Queen’s Park and Bay Street—we proclaim the equality of the margin with the centre. We say, in the Eucharist, that “all are welcome at this table.” For me, that all means what it says: everyone who wants to can come and be a part of God’s work in our community. All of us who are used to having our voices silenced are welcomed here, to this table. And we live out God’s peace—the peace of gentle guidance as a shepherd guides sheep—when we share the Peace of Christ with each other. We come to God’s table knowing our brokenness and our limitation; in this place, feasting on Jesus’ broken body and shed blood, we can feel God’s wholeness supplement our tired bodies and our easily-upset minds. When we are in God’s presence, we know our equality, and we learn to love each other from the One who put his station aside to wash his friends’ feet.

What about Mark? Mark repeats Isaiah’s claims about the One who comes to bring God’s equality and peace to humankind, and reinterprets them by applying them to Jesus. He starts out with a bold claim about Jesus’ significance: Jesus is God’s Son, who brings the Good News of salvation to all people (1:1). We’ve already talked about what that Good News is, and we’ll address it again. Mark demonstrates the fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy about God’s righteousness coming to the wilderness (1:3) by examining John the Baptizer. John’s centrality in the Gospel contrasts sharply with his marginality in the world he inhabits: he wears clothes made of camel-hair and leather (6), eats locusts and wild honey (ahh, proteins!), and hangs out in the Judean countryside (5). People exit Jerusalem, and the surrounding cities, to see and hear him, and to be baptized (5)...

And yes, John baptizes people in the river Jordan (1:5). That’s the same river that Naaman, commander of Syrian armies, refused to bathe in (2 Kings 5). Why are people being baptized? John’s asking them to repent of their sins in preparation for Jesus’ coming (Mark 1:4). In Luke’s Gospel, we learn that John asks rich people to give to people who are poorer than they are, soldiers to refrain from extorting money from civilians, and tax-collectors not to take more than is required (Luke 3:11-14). Plus, as he reorients people to the coming Reign of God that’s about to EXPLODE into their midst, John says something weird. “There’s this guy: he’s stronger than I am, and he’s going to do bigger things than I’m doing with you now. I can’t even hold a candle to him! Remember that I’ve washed you with water? He’ll immerse you in the Holy Spirit” (7-8). Today’s text stops just short of Jesus’ baptism, which inaugurates his Spirit-filled ministry.

What does Mark mean in terms of Advent? Just as the people of Jerusalem and the surrounding Judean countryside come to John to seek the forgiveness of their sins—the complete erasure of all the ways that they’ve hurt each other and displeased God—so we too can come to God, to receive God’s life. All human beings can turn to Jesus, and be oriented to a peaceful life, a life centred on service rather than selfishness. We can affirm human life and the life of all Creation through our worship of Jesus and our attempts to be like him. We can see in Jesus the straight path, the counter-cultural path that leads to real and lasting freedom and wholeness.

Plus, Mark’s import for Advent—at least, the way I see it—is contained in John’s enigmatic last words. What does it mean to be “baptized with the Holy Spirit”? In terms of the Incarnation, it may mean that God enters into and redeems all flesh. God sanctifies all kinds of human bodies for God’s own redemptive purposes when he creates a vessel for himself in Jesus. Jesus is more powerful than John (1:7), because he is what Paul Tillich idealistically calls the New Human Being. God dwells in, and works through, the body of a first-century construction worker. ☺
Let’s look at another meaning of the word “baptize,” too: it doesn’t just mean that Jesus will be submerged in God’s ecstatic creativity. It means that Jesus will drown in a pool of suffering before being reborn. Much later in Mark—in chapter 10—James and John, two of Jesus’ closest friends, ask him to give them divine power in his kingdom (10:35-8). Jesus sees right through their request: he knows that they misconstrue his mission of peace and equality, and so he asks, “Can you guys be baptized with my baptism?” Can you suffer what I will suffer? If you can, then sure. You can have God’s power. Thing is...as we know...God’s power is made perfect in weakness, not in strength. God’s influence is not about military might or supreme executive power: it’s about loving other people so much that you will die for them. Which Jesus does.

That’s also what Jesus calls us to do in Jeremiah. I assert that the meaning of Mark’s text for the Jeremiah Community is threefold. First, we are to follow John in making God’s paths straight in this neighbourhood, this city, and this world. We are to continue to plant container gardens, to jam on guitar and drums with our friends in this building, and most pivotally, to break bread and drink soup with them. And we are to speak out when we see those who deal crookedly with the world hurting our friends! When we do this, we will see the Lord’s salvific power.
Second, we are to offer our locusts and our wild honey—the bread and wine of Communion, amongst many other gifts—to all who genuinely want to turn from self-deception and lifestyles destructive of human and created life. God calls us, through the Advent of Jesus, to pool our resources in order to provide the Spirit with raw materials for a glimpse of God’s Kingdom. We can do so much more together in C/communion than we can on our own.
Third, God calls us to a promising and painful discipleship. As we walk in John’s and Jesus’ footsteps, making the straight path, a veritable cruciform Camino de Real, for our God, he calls us to assume his suffering as well. When we enter into the baptism of John, this prelude to Jesus’ baptism, we prepare to be immersed in the labour-pangs of the world’s suffering...

And we look forward to the Kingdom of peace and equality that waits on the other side of that stinging, aching confrontation with the world’s powers and principalities. As we create, and walk, God’s straight path, we can take solace in the One who leads us onwards. The One who comes in the name of the Lord shows us how to walk. We create the path by learning to love. Go on in that love, dear friends, to embrace all who are afflicted. Be the hands and feet of the Prince of Peace—of the one who comes in the name of the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. Amen.