December 9, 2018
Scripture: Luke 3:1-6
I feel as though I
need to begin by apologizing to our scripture readers this morning for the
great long list of names of people and places in the reading from Luke’s
gospel. I considered cutting the first
verse from the reading to save our readers from needing to read most of the
names; but that list of names ended up being the first thing that really caught
my attention when I looked at the reading earlier in the week.
We begin with a long
list of names of who held the power and where.
If we were to translate this list into 2018, it might read something
like, “In the second year of the reign of President Trump, when The Right
Honourable Justin Trudeau was the Prime Minister of Canada and The Honourable
Blaine Higgs was the Premier of New Brunswick, when Elizabeth II was the Queen
of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth…”
You see where this is going!
So our reading begins
with a list of who held the power and where; but the Word of God doesn’t come
to those who were in power. The Word of
God doesn’t come to the emperor or the governor or the rulers or the high
priests. Instead, the Word of God comes
to John, an ordinary guy from Judea who didn’t live in a palace but instead
made his home in the wilderness.
I don’t know about
you, but I carry within me many memories of wilderness times. Back in northwestern Ontario, one of my
favourite things to do is a back-country canoe trip – the longer the
better. One of my friends and I like to
go out for a week or two at a time. We
carry our food and our tent and our sleeping bags in our backpacks and we
paddle from lake to lake and down rivers, sometimes carrying our canoe around
rapids and waterfalls, or sometimes choosing to run the rapids.
It’s not an easy or a
comfortable place to be. Our canoe has
capsized a couple of times. It’s hard
work, paddling and portaging all day; and then at night we sleep on the hard
ground since there isn’t room for fancy air mattresses in our backpacks. And depending on the time of year, the
mosquitoes and blackflies can be something fierce!
And yet despite all of
this, or maybe because of it, there’s something about being in the wilderness –
away from telephones, away from the internet, away from Facebook, away from
regular commitments. There’s something
about the repetitive action of paddle… paddle… repeat. There’s something about portaging along a
rough trail, canoe overhead and a heavy pack on your back, one foot in front of
the other. There’s something about being
in tune with the cycle of the day from sunrise to sunset with no watch or phone
to track the hours. It seems as though
each time we go out into the wilderness, either my friend or I is struggling to
discern something; and by the time we get back to so-called civilization, an
important decision has been reached.
There’s something special about the wilderness.
In the wilderness, we
need to choose what is essential, and what we are going to leave behind. We need to trust our companions, because it
is only by working together that we will make it to the other side. We need to be fully present in the moment,
alert to both the beauty and the dangers.
All of us go through
periods of time in our lives that feel like wilderness times. Times when everything that has seemed to be
safe and predictable drops away from us; times that feel uncomfortable or downright
scary; times that feel like it is just such hard work to get from one day to
the next.
I wonder if maybe the
lessons from the literal wilderness might help us to get through these
wilderness times in our lives? We need
to decide what is essential, and what burdens can be left behind. We need to choose our companions, and then
work together and trust them in order to arrive safely on the other side. We need to be fully present in the moment
rather than dwelling on the past or worrying about the future.
The word of God came
to John in the wilderness; and God comes to us too in the wilderness times in
our lives. I wonder if maybe these
wilderness times that we face in our lives open our hearts to God’s
presence? Maybe they draw us closer
together, and to draw us closer to God?
The wilderness is not an easy place to be, or a comfortable place to be;
but there is something about being in the wilderness.
The voice in the
wilderness cries out: “The path will be
made easy since the valleys will be raised up and the hills will be lowered and
the twists and turns will be straightened out!
The path of God will be prepared, and all of humanity will see and know
God’s salvation!”
May it be so.
Amen.
(An aerial shot of one of the rapids that tipped our canoe over in the wilderness)
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