Homeward Hearts

What words will bring comfort to a people who have known suffering and exile for too long?

In the depths of the darkest personal and communal nights, how might God reach us?

These are some of the questions at the heart of the passage from Isaiah and the beginning of the Gospel of Mark.

Mark’s sparse Gospel begins with a quote from today’s section of Isaiah, and as we are introduced to the figure of John the Baptist, we are encouraged to see the link between past prophets and John’s proclamation.

Isaiah’s words of comfort are addressed to a people in exile—a people who have been scattered throughout the earth because of war and personal loss—a people who are beginning to lose hope that they may ever escape the hands of their oppressors and once more look upon the home they once knew.

Isaiah’s prophetic call is for them to turn and face home once more, and to believe that the God who created them, freed them from slavery, and did not abandon them even in exile would provide the ways and means for them to know healing and restoration.

God will make a way in the wilderness, even if we can’t yet see one, and God will bring the scattered and the suffering into the communion of their eternal home.

When John began baptizing in the Judean wilderness, no doubt he had this prophetic call on his heart. 

He knew his people’s history and saw how God had been faithful in bringing the people back home, as Isaiah had proclaimed.

But he also could look around at the suffering of his people in the present day—the way the ancient themes of slavery and exile were resurfacing under the harsh imperial rule of the Romans—and the way the physical turning toward home for which Isaiah hoped also touched the interior orientation of everyone.

As John proclaimed his baptism of repentance, he both called on the people of God to remember their roots and the faithfulness of God throughout their generations as well as asking each of them to prepare the way of the Lord in the wilderness of their own hearts and lives.

It’s a call that still resonates with those who long for restoration, wholeness, and home today.

Responding to the prophetic call—Isaiah’s, John’s, Martin Luther King, Jr’s, or Greta Thunberg’s— means getting real about the ways each of us have failed one another and the God who calls us  all children.

And beyond telling that truth and being sorry for it, we have to make the passage from a way of being that keeps us in slavery to the freedom that comes from mutual care and a common destiny.

Like the people of God once passed through the waters of the Red Sea, and the river Jordan, those who were baptized with John’s baptism passed from the slavery of the politico-religious “domination system”[1] of their day into the freedom of a new kind of community.

And even though his prophetic role is important and his attraction is powerful enough to draw the masses to him, John knows that another is coming who will offer a baptism that moves people across the divide of death itself and restores the connection between God, creation, and all humanity forever.

Once the people have turned their hearts toward home and allowed the old snakeskin of sin to slough off through the waters of repentance, then they are ready to attend to the work of rebuilding the world according to the designs of the Good Shepherd.

As we walk through this season of Advent, perhaps with no small measure of uncertainty about what the future will hold, and whether or not the God who calls us home will accompany us as we make our way through the wilderness, it is worth asking personal questions about this prophetic call.

Where am I on the spiritual continuum between estrangement and exile and restored communion and harmony?

Think for a moment about the relationships that you have—with your families, your neighbors, your co-workers, and with strangers.

Are there elements of those relationships for which you might need to repent?

Are there ways that our actions and decisions have consigned us to a kind of exile from which God is calling us to return?

How about your relationship with the earth and the creatures of God who rely on our good stewardship in order to survive?

This Advent time of preparation, especially in light of Isaiah and John’s words, is an opportunity to take stock of where we are with one another and God’s creation, and to take the first steps of confessing any sins that have led to disharmony and degradation.

And since we know the one who came after John, both as the child we await to be born in Bethlehem and the powerful adult prophet who stood up to Pilate and the chief priests with love and truth instead of the weapons of war, we can also use this Advent season as a way of reconnecting with Christ’s grace and light through the power of the Holy Spirit.

To go deeper into the kind of prayer and worship that turns our hearts toward home, that sets our feet to walking together on the pilgrim’s path and opens our hands to helping and receiving help from others.

If we heed the call to turn, to confess, to arise, to gather, to serve, and to love, then we will not only be preparing to receive the child once more on Christmas, we will also be making room for his eternal life to be born in us and flow freely through us.

That is the life that heals the world, that ultimately comforts the long suffering, and that connects us beyond the divide of death itself with our true home in God.      

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[1] John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg use this term in The Last Week.