The Cathedral Church of the Nativity
Bethlehem Pennsylvania
The Very Rev. Anthony R. Pompa
My father loves a parade. In fact, the love of parades seems to resonate through my entire family. A family tradition of late is to attend the Memorial Day parade in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania where my father lives. Careful preparations are made to attend this parade. The necessary comforts of watching a parade are carefully placed into our vehicles, food, a soft chair, cool beverages. We then navigate the small town of Gettysburg working around a carefully prepared parade route which my Father has investigated with care, driving long ways round carefully carved off streets in order for the parade route to be clear and those in the parade ease of movement. We park our cars and with great excitement wait for the parade to begin to journey over hills, and plains, around the town circle and unimpeded down the cleared off parade route in front of the many gathered to receive them!
My father loves a parade, and the truth is I think most of us do. We in Bethlehem love a parade. I know more than my share this year that planned carefully to brave the confusion and congestion of New York City to attend the Thanksgiving Day parade. Now that’s some planning! Talk about careful planning to make a path straight in that city, to clear things out in such a way that those parading can parade!
Walter Bruggeman, Old Testament scholar, suggests that in ancient times, parade routes were established to create an ease of passage and opportunity for excited greeting of kings and great warriors. Paths would literally be created in the roughest of places! Hillsides would need to be lowered, crooked paths would need to be straightened out, and rough places on the road would need to be smoothed out, so that the easiest and straightest path could be created for the passage of these important figures!
Such is the imagery the prophet Isaiah uses to offer a word of hope to the people of God in the 5th century living under the occupation of the Babylonian Empire.
Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord! Make the paths straight, lower the hills and smooth out the rough places! In essence, let’s have a parade! People get ready for Yahweh has not forgotten you, hope is to be expected.
Living in a time of lost hope and despair, families of Israel have been split apart, many loved ones separated as craftsman and skilled workers are exported to places in the Babylonian empire where their skills could be put to good use. Those who remained home living under the direction and rule of an occupying government would fine a loss of freedoms, and little regard for their religious customs. The people of Israel wait having lost their hope and questioning deep in their being if in their losing their way, they also had led to their losing their God?
Into this reality Isaiah speaks a word, with a preamble that reflects literally the pastoral heart and of God with words of Comfort and promises of Care, Isaiah says, "Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord! Prepare for the arrival of God’s Hope anew."
Certainly we resonate with this theme of Advent, this theme of preparing for and expectantly waiting for a word of hope to crash in particularly when challenging times seem to cry out for it.
A few centuries from the time Isaiah’s words of expectant hope are delivered, John the Baptist is heard delivering a word again to a people living in desperate times under an occupying force. John, son of Zechariah, a priest of the temple, takes on the family business as it were, and proclaims from the desert Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord! One has to wander really how Zechariah may have felt – how he might have envisioned John’s life. If he ever could have imagined John’s ministry would have become what it did, an itinerant preacher with strange mannerisms zealously calling a community of believers into a dramatic relationship with a hopeful God by shedding themselves of hills and valleys, the twists and turns that would interrupt their relationship with their God. One wonders what his Father thought, yet it is John who announces a new word of hope and invites people to take their place on the parade route. He offers a wakeup call for the arrogant, a call for the despairing, and hope for all who would listen.
Well, isn’t this the God you and I rely upon! The God we look to and hope for, the God who bears present in life’s circumstances where redemption can happen at all times and in all circumstances.
The preamble of Isaiah’s message of hope is found is the words of Comfort! Comfort, Comfort Ye my people! Those beautiful words that will come to life this very night in this very place as Handel’s Messiah is offered to us. The beautiful message of hope in the midst of despair, redemption in all things.
Handel himself knew of this hope even as what has now become a valued and assumed treasure of art, it was not always. The beauty of this work came in the midst of one of the darker hours of Handel’s life. What was once a glorified professional life, full of accolades, success, and reasonable financial security, had been challenged by the time Handel was composing this piece of music. Once a prolific composer of opera, the companies Handel was associated with had closed, he himself has suffered a stroke, and in the late 1730’s and early 1740’s he found himself depressed and in debt. Handel found himself holding his breath, wondering if such despair could be transcended, transformed, redeemed, and probably without knowing what was happening to him, the Duke of Devonshire consented to sponsor a new style of music for Handel, and Charles Jennen had written the basis for the story of salvation that Handel would take 24 days held up in Jennen’s cottage to produce what would become what today we hold as the moving musical portrayal of God’s salvation history.
This second Sunday of Advent, we welcome an invitation to prepare the way of the Lord, in our lives, in our community and in the world. We light a second candle this day, a candle of hope, a hope that is powerful enough to smooth out the roughest of life’s circumstances. We set about the business of making room at the table, in our hearts, in our institutions, in our workplaces, and in our families for what God may do with those things that hold us down or hold us back from living into the full joy of knowing God’s presence in our lives. We hope against hope, for God fullness in our lives.
Frederick Beuchner speaks of this hope in this way, he says, “hope is ultimately hope in Christ”. The hope that he really is what for centuries we have been claiming he is- that is the hope that despite the fact that sin and death still rule the world, he somehow conquers. The hope that in him and through him all of us stand a chance of somehow conquering them too. The hope that in some time unforeseeable and in some way he will return with healing in his wings!
Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord! Let’s have a parade!
