It was a 150-year period of dislocation, and as long as the exile lasted, the Israelite people never stopped yearning for home. Isaiah 40 is addressed to these exiles — and to people in all times and places who have experienced intense feelings of dislocation and anger about the way things are or about what they have suffered. Isaiah begins with “Comfort, comfort my people,” and then proclaims: “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.” In other words, there will be a way home, even when there seems to be no way.
What intrigues me is how Isaiah names the problem while announcing the solution. The prophet assures the exiles that God is preparing a way home, but the metaphors used also expose the problems that have led to their plight: a deep valley, a mountain, a rough and twisted road. These images represent human dilemmas that need to be named in order to see the way forward.
Flannery O’Connor, a razor-sharp observer of the human condition, captured this existential reality with a journey metaphor of her own. In her classic short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” an overbearing grandmother on a family road trip insists that they take a disastrous detour down a forlorn dirt road. Along the way, the car swerves off the road and lands them in a ditch. When a man stops, presumably to help, she delivers one of her most memorable lines: “We’re in a real predicament here, a real predicament.” Alas, the man turns out to be an escaped convict and the story does not have a happy ending. It is an apt description of the human condition — for all of us, at some time or another, have found ourselves stuck in a ditch of some sort, meandering or lost on paths that lead nowhere, or obstructed by seemingly mountainous obstacles. We find ourselves in real predicaments, for any number of reasons.
Many of us, for example, know what it is to be stuck in a ditch — trapped, perhaps, by fear due to traumas that have paralyzed us and crushed our sense of worth. In his book “Jesus and the Disinherited,” Howard Thurman tells a story from his childhood of a pitiful dog in his neighborhood who had been so abused that even the threat of violence (such as raising one’s arm with an imaginary stone as if to strike it) would evoke a sharp, quick yelp! So also for many of us. Trauma and fear can be debilitating and can shut down connections to family and friends, making the ditch even deeper.
Or perhaps mountains are in our way, as we find ourselves faced with what seem to be insurmountable obstacles, or buried by overwhelming circumstances within our families, our workplaces, our social and political world and by the anger they evoke. For instance, as extreme weather events and ravaging wildfires wreak havoc on communities, we may well find ourselves enraged by our seeming inability to grapple constructively and collectively with the overwhelming reality of climate crisis that threatens both our present and our future. Or perhaps we live with an immobilizing sense of rage at our nation’s ongoing failure to confront the reality of racialized violence and grapple with its original sins.
Or perhaps we are afflicted with the existential dilemma of interminable meandering. Maybe we have never found a clear sense of identity and worth. We wander, without a clear sense of where we are going or what we are looking for. As we say to the salesperson in the department store, we’re “just looking.” We may have a yearning deep inside of us – a yearning to love God, others and ourselves that springs from the image of God we bear – yet we continue to meander, in exile from the love God intends for us.
In short, we are in real predicaments — for any number of reasons! As theologian Wendy Farley has noted in “The Wounding and Healing of Desire,” Julian of Norwich likened our condition to falling in a ditch; bruised and confused, we are unable to see God’s “infinitely consoling and tender love just inches from our face.” But the good news of the gospel is that we are not left to our own devices. God has not left us in the ditch, obstructed or buried or meandering in exile. In Advent we ponder the mystery that God draws close to us with a human face to lead the way to our true home — to draw us into participation in the very life and love of God.
God’s coming close was impressed upon me during an anxious moment on one of my hiking vacations. My wife and I took an out-of-the-way hike in the backwoods of British Columbia in the Mount Robson Provincial Park; we even had trouble finding the trailhead. But after finding something resembling a trail of sorts, we hiked for four hours through dense woods and up a fairly sizable mountain. However, on our way back down the mountain, we came to a spot where the trail suddenly came to a dead end. We backtracked a bit and found another trail that seemed to be heading in the right direction and followed it downhill for a while, but it also dead-ended. For almost an hour we searched in vain for the trail. Ominously, the thickets all around us were teeming with wild berries — and bears love wild berries! We were lost and feeling vulnerable, even a little bit frantic. But then something caught our attention: the footprint of a hiking boot, deeply imprinted in a shallow marsh that was about 20 yards long. When my wife saw the imprint, she climbed to the top of a rocky area to see what was on the other side of the marsh and spotted the path that would lead us back to the trailhead. And the interesting thing about that footprint in the mud is that it was pointing in our direction — as if it was headed toward us! Here is what may sound like a crazy idea, but it is the gospel truth: The God of the universe cares enough about a fearful, angry and wandering people to search the breadth and depth of creation, to uncover every stone until each and every one of us is found! In the incarnation, God takes on a human footprint and meets us in the thickets – the predicaments – of our lives.
There is one final, truly remarkable feature of this text from the prophet Isaiah. Note its description of how we encounter the God who is searching for us: We encounter God together! This is how Isaiah puts is: “Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together.” In other words, we are not alone in ditches in which we find ourselves; neither are we obstructed, buried under or meandering alone. We share a common human predicament, and it is together that we wait in Advent, pondering the mystery of an incarnate God who meets us where we are, who binds us to Godself and to each other and leads us home. In a hyper-individualist culture where “go it alone” is the mantra, Isaiah presents an extraordinary, and countercultural, communal vision.
So hear the good news of Advent, in whatever predicament you find yourself – in a ditch, obstructed or buried under insurmountable obstacles, or meandering without a clear sense of direction – God in Christ is headed our way to join us in those places. Valleys will be lifted up, mountains and hills made low, uneven ground leveled and rough places made plain, as the God of Advent prepares to lead us home.
As you ponder Isaiah 40, here are some questions for your consideration this week:
1. Have you ever found yourself stuck in a metaphorical ditch on your individual journey or on the collective journey of your community of faith? Describe the experience to another and invite that person to share their experience of the same.
2. Have you had the existential sense (as an individual or as a congregation) that you were obstructed by or buried under a mountain of some sort? Describe the experience to another and invite that person to share their experience of the same.
3. Have you felt that you were meandering, wandered aimlessly on your individual journey or as a community of faith? Describe the experience to another and invite that person to share their experience of the same.
4. What was your experience of sharing these reflections with another — of articulating the challenges you have faced in your individual or communal journey of faith?
5. In what ways have you discerned God at work in your life (individually or communally), preparing a way home?
6. How has your community of faith accompanied you when you have found yourself stuck in a metaphorical ditch, obstructed by or buried under a mountain of some sort or wandering aimlessly?
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