May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing to you, O God, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

The texts for this second Sunday of Advent , paint for us a kind of landscape. And, I suggest, invite a kind of pilgrimage.

It’s as though you are invited to ascend a small hillside. You know that this patch of land was once lush and green, with countless varieties of plants carpeting the ground, teeming with creatures, and covered by a soaring canopy of trees. A canopy that was dense -- but not so dense as to keep out the light. It was a place of shelter – this was not the refuge one seeks from a storm or an enemy, but the shelter one experiences as welcome and as home.

But as you embark on this short hike up the hillside, your feet trod only on the brown and fibery mulch of once sturdy plans. Or on the black and smoldering embers of a once proud forest. Virtually all life here has been reduced to its elemental carbon form, save for a few patches of brown and the remnants of some trees, whose age and sheer magnitude seem to have wearied the forces of destruction and decay. It’s as though death couldn’t be bothered to waste any more energy
-- or perhaps there was a desire to leave behind a monument, so that future passers by would know what had died here.
In any case, it is hard to gain your bearings amidst such a barren landscape -- any direction appears the same as any other: vast and unwelcoming. Your only point of orientation is the slight incline you’ve been ascending. And so you continue.

A few meters further and -- finally! -- something else besides decay is coming into view. In the distance there is what looks like a mass of rock – a mountain. You can even make out the shape of some figures on that mountain. Figures of movement, and thus of life! And yet, the distance between here and there feels immense and impossible.

It’s not immense and impossible because it is so far away – It is not the objective distance that separates you. It is feeling of being unprepared to enter that new landscape. Much as your heart aches for it, such a return to life would seem somehow – premature.

You continue to climb the hill. As you approach the crest, dotted with an imprecise row of some of those stubborn tree stumps, you are drawn to one which seems to be calling you.

A tree stump that beckons or speaks?
For a generation enchanted by Shel Silverstien’s The Giving Tree, this should not be too hard to imagine.

A closer look reveals something distinctive about this stump. It looks older than the rest. Its destruction seems somehow different from the others. The other stumps on the hill seem to have been toppled with a cold precision – all cut with a straight line, all hacked at the same height from the forest floor. But this beckoning stump would seem to have tensed it’s trunk in a way that thwarted the precision of the blade. The outer edge of its cut was jagged and uneven.

But the tensing of the outer flesh of the trunk seems also to have exposed the core to greater vulnerability – causing it to be almost hollowed out. The bottom end of the felled portion of the trunk – if it had not been reduced to ash – thus would have resembled the tip of a sharpened pencil. The residual stump, something like a bowl with broken edges.

The hollowed out interior of this stump, however, has allowed for a certain amount of moisture to gather. Morning dew has been collecting over time, creating a miniature breeding ground where moss and mold have been forming -- the only visible green in the whole of this devastated forest. And it is not only moss that has begun to form, but a thin and nimble shoot has sprouted and has just begun to peer its head over the outer edge of the stump’s bowl-like form.

As you crouch down for a closer look, first to the bottom of the stump’s crater, and then upward along the length of the shoot, you notice that the tiny plant has come to form the foreground of the exact shape of a tree in the background. On the mountain in the distance stands a massive cedar forest, which has now become visible to you, and the shoot looks as though it has grown precisely within the outline of one particular cedar. This discovery, of course, is dependent upon your perspective, and as you shift your body a little to the left, the shoot looses the aura of the cedar and regains its fragility.

But you know what you saw.

A hope wells up within you and newness seems possible.

So you continue to the crest of the hill, hoping for a better view of the mountain in the distance. But what strikes you instead is the valley that separates you from the mountain. Again, it is not a great distance, and the valley is not particularly deep. But what you see there is – more destruction. The destruction in the valley is not as complete as the desolation of the hillside. For in the valley some trees do still stand. They are not the powerful cedars you’ve glimpsed on the mountain, but they are living trees. And there are even some living creatures. One such creature is quite startling.

There is a man halfway down your side of the valley. He evokes both fear and fascination in you. The fear is obvious, for he has just dropped a large axe from his hands and stands before a freshly felled tree.

Gospel Reader: Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.

Somehow you know that he is not the author of the desolation within which you stand, but his strangeness is disturbing. So, what then is it that fascinates and draws you? It is not his appearance, or his demeanor, but his words.
Gospel Reader :‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’

They are not words of comfort
Gospel Reader: Repent!

They are words that draw you, not so much to this odd creature, but through him.

Gospel Reader: one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals.

And so you look beyond the axe-wielding prophet, scanning the more distant horizon for this “Coming One.”

You are struck, as your eyes catch a glimpse, not of “one” but of seemingly countless other creatures – so many in fact that the base of the mountain is completely covered. Many of them look wearied, poor, and broken. Out of this anonymous crowd steps forward one who utters a word, seemingly meant for you:
Epistle Reader: Welcome one another! Just as you have been welcomed by the Coming One.

Once again, these words both intrigue and frighten you. “If these words are meant for me,” you wonder, “then, certainly he can’t mean that I am to welcome this indistinct and dangerous mass of strangers.”

Again, just as the encounter with the prophet, it seems as though you are called not only by this strange figure – not only to this slew of strangers – but into the midst of and through them. Indeed, it is clear that the mountain cannot be approached by any route other than through and with this pitiful throng.

And so, with trepidation and resolve, you step down into the valley and begin to traverse it. First, crossing before the prophet, and then into the midst of the crowd. The journey through the crowd seems infinite – minutes become hours, days, years, and even generations. Instead of passing through, you tarry. You delay.You plant. You build. You dwell. You welcome and you are welcomed. You see suffering, you see death, You see wars, you hear roumors of wars. You see beauty and you find love. And you hear tell – time and again, from generation to generation – of this Coming One. The most striking story of all: that the Coming One is not only still to come, but he once , himself, entered into the crowd. He lived with and as the crowd. And there remains here – in the planting, the building, the dwelling, the friendship, and the love – a certain residue of his sojourn among us. A certain foretaste of his return.

You yearn to reach the holy mountain, but you do not arrive even at its base.

But you do not feel resentment here, not as long as the mountain is still the shade within which your tarrying has taken place. Not as long as the stories of the Coming One are told, and retold. Your pilgrimage into the midst of the crowd has not sated your desire for the mountain. It has given it form.

The Coming One does live and reign – not as the unjust rulers of the crowd have, but as a friend of the poor – the one whom the prophet has made way for still dwells on the holy mountain where the death and suffering of the crowds is overcome. But your pilgrimage was not in vain. For, without this detour through the crowd, what could redemption mean? For that’s what has drawn you all along toward the mountain: the possibility of redemption.

The justice of the mountain would seem sterile without the hard won glimpses of peacableness that you witnessed amidst the crowd.

Awed silence would be the only way of life on the mountain, were it not for the memories of the crowd. For, as they say, the things that have happened here in the valley, will become the hymns we sing on the mountain.

How remote the unfettered praises of heaven would seem if they had not first been uttered as the cold and broken hallelujahs of the creatures in the valley?

For the journey to the holy mountain is a pilgrimage, not a victory march.
Amen.