Word geeks will know that acronyms are a subset of the larger category of abbreviations. An abbreviation can be any shortened word. The “Dr.†before the name of your physician, therapist, or literature professor is an abbreviation for “doctor.†An acronym is an abbreviation formed in a very particular way, by taking the first letter or letters from multiple words. Our government is full of thousands of acronyms, like the infamous three-letter agencies like the FBI, CIA, and NSA, letters that carry full meaning without needing to be spelled out, and programs to address childhood poverty like SNAP and CHIP. Sometimes an acronym becomes a word in its own right, like scuba, which actually stands for self-contained underwater breathing apparatus.
The first iterations of the internet had very low bandwidth, so everything had to be as abbreviated as possible, giving rise to an internet and messaging culture of acronyms. Today, when someone posts something funny, I “LOL,†or if it is super funny, I might even “ROFLOL,†which stands for “rolling on floor laughing out loud.†And when they post something stupid or racist or cruel, I “SMH,†which stands for “shake my head.â€
When we are posting online or sending a text message, acronyms and abbreviations might be in all caps, though there are often no caps at all, with everything in lower case, since caps means an extra press of the fingers and might slow us down. Speed texting and tweeting can be a bit of a problem, and not just because people often respond before they think and the internet never forgets.
Depending on familiarity and skill, it might be hard to decode a text message that is all lower case, acronyms and emojis. Emoji itself is one of those “new words†of our internet age and only coincidentally similar to the english word “emotion†since it is actually Japanese for “picture character.†Though you have to wonder about Takeshi Kishimoto and his employers at Google, who, as they created a cross-platform emoji standard, chose to include the poop character that originated in an anime series.
So in our texts and tweets we can have smilies and other emojis, , tons of abbreviations and acronyms, and some caps or no caps, but all caps is always bad, is always considered shouting. This is semiotics in real time, the evolution of symbol and meaning in our own lifetime. Go offline for a week and you might miss a new way of communicating.
Acronyms have been a part of Christian life since the beginning of our movement. The fish symbol used by early Christians was a visual form of the acronym derived from “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior,†which happened to form the word for fish in Koine Greek, IXTHYS, a nice coincidence considering the gospel call for the disciples to be fishers for humans.
Another common acronym, seen even today in Christian iconography, are the letters INRI. The I, also found in IXTHYS, might throw you off, as words do not always translate or transliterate smoothly between languages, then as well as now. Jesus is actually Aramaic for Joshua, both starting with the tenth letter in the Hebrew alphabet, Yod. This letter becomes Iota, what we think of as an “I,†in Greek and in Latin. The remaining mysterious letter is the R, which stands for Rex, for king, though for most of our lifetimes we have seen the female form, Regina. INRI, then, is an acronym for Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews, the sign famously placed above his head when he was crucified as a slap in the face of his Jewish accusers.
INRI is in all caps. But then again, everything was in all caps. You think it is hard to decode a text message that is all lower case and filled with acronyms and abbreviations, try an ancient biblical manuscript in Koine Greek, all caps, no spaces, no punctuation. You couldn’t always tell where one word ended and the next began. With no printing press, manuscripts were produced by hand, often dictated, and many words sounded the same, so there was ample opportunity for what we might generously call scribal error, and that before we even get to the act of reading and interpretation.
Today’s text gives us a window into this confusion. The gospel according to Luke refers to John the Baptizer with language drawn from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, and specifically drawn from Deutero-Isaiah, the second layer of text written during the Babylonian Exile, more than a century after the work of the eponymous prophet, Isaiah Bin Amoz. This middle layer of the Hebrew text imagines a return from Exile, a literal highway across the wilderness from Babylon to Jerusalem.
But if you read the text in Isaiah and Luke in a scholarly translation like the New Revised Standard Version, you will find that they do not match. The reason is that we use Bibles translated from the best accepted manuscripts in the original languages, the Masoretic Text for the Hebrew Scriptures, and the Textus Receptus for the New Testament. But Luke was not using the Masoretic Text, or any text in Hebrew for that matter. Like other New Testament authors, Luke was working with the Septuagint, an imperfect Greek translation of the Hebrew produced a couple of centuries before Jesus, with all of the aforementioned challenges, all caps, no spaces, no punctuation.
For us, it comes down to the problem of where to place the colon.
Is it “A voice crying out in the wilderness: make straight a highway?†Or is it “A voice crying out: In the wilderness make straight a highway?†Which is in the wilderness, the voice which is to say the prophet, or the highway?
It may seem like nitpicking, but context is everything when it comes to interpretation. John the Baptizer, the voice Luke has in mind as he writes, was in the wilderness, at least down by the River Jordan, 25 miles outside of the city, and they didn’t have cars. Few even had donkeys. Those faithful, including some Pharisees, who were drawn to John’s repentance baptism, had quite a hike to get to the locust and honey-eating prophet.
But the prophet behind Deutero-Isaiah, whoever she or he was, and some suspect it was a woman, was not in the wilderness, at least not literally. The Exiles were the elite of Judahite society, and the Babylonians put them to good use. The folktales around Daniel’s role at court probably reflect a reality, that the Jerusalem elite were held captive in and around the capitol, where they could be of use and could be monitored.
The author of Deutero-Isaiah envisions the return from Babylon to the Promised Land, to Jerusalem, as a new Exodus, as a journey through the wilderness like the one Moses led out of Egypt. The straight and level highway is to be built through that wilderness, a divine construction project to make it easier for the lost to return home.
That the Exiles were only 20% at most of the population, with the rest still in Judah, gets lost in translation. And since the country and its capital had been mostly destroyed by the Babylonians, those left behind were in a wilderness of their own.
What is the wilderness for us? Are we to understand that the one who is speaking for God will always be far from the halls of power, out in the wilderness? That is certainly the case with most of the prophets, with John the Baptizer, with Jesus.
Or are we to understand that the work that needs to be done is out in the wilderness, out in the places that are forgotten by those with power, places where there needs to be tremendous energy expended to make things level?
Maybe the answer is both. Or maybe Deutero-Isaiah is simply anxious to get home and wants the fastest route possible. Like a Holy Hand Grenade, a divine bulldozer can clear obstacles, whether it is the Rabbit of Caerbannog or the Golan Heights.
And what, pray tell, does that level highway through the wilderness look like for us in our time and place, for the Babylon that holds us captive is not a foreign nation, nor is it a far off place. The Babylon that has stolen God’s people is of our own making. And here we are in Babylon, speaking of peace, the theme for this second week an Advent.
What can you see of that straight and level highway when you are forced to the back of the bus?
It was 1955, and Rosa had acted up, had resisted injustice. As the Montgomery Bus Boycott shook that unjust and racist city, a preacher had something to say. He said that “True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.â€
The American Baptist preacher the Rev. Gardner Calvin Taylor would describe the context in biblical language, as recently quoted in The Christian Century. In the form of Luke 3, he declared from his pulpit:
“Dwight D. Eisenhower being president of the United States and John Patterson, the governor of Alabama, J. Edgar Hoover the omnipotent autocrat of the FBI, Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peele, the high priests of middle America, the word of God came to Martin Luther King in the wilderness of America.â€
We could easily update that list, though we might need to change the constituency of the current Graham, naming him the high priest of white nationalist America.
Do voices still cry out? Are there still prophets? Are there still highways to make straight and level? Was Brother Martin speaking a truth? Was he yet one more in a long line of imperfect humans called by God to name something we did not wish to hear named?
You see, terrorized people can be very peaceful, whether the terror is in the form of violence or the threat of violence or in the form of manipulation, bullying, and abuse, whether it is a closed fist or an open letter. There is no fighting in a police state or in an abusive household. Silence does not mean peace, though we often choose the easy path of silent complicity. There is a peace that is not good, is not Godly, but that is pure evil. There is peace when the good people give up and the bad guys win.
Like less-than-perfect Martin, less-than-perfect Thomas, our third president and a slaveholder, said that “All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.â€
What does peace look like in scripture? I know that the announcement of peace on earth by divine beings in the sky was terrifying to the shepherds. It tells us right there in Luke. They were so afraid! We sing it in la-di-da carols, but they lived it, and it wasn’t very la-di-da, less peace on earth and more supernatural invasion. Everything about the first coming was disruptive and disturbing, and everything scripture says about the second coming is disruptive and disturbing, and we are called to make a highway, straight and level, through the wilderness of our hearts, but we’d prefer cocoa and tinsel.
There is nothing wrong with a little cocoa and tinsel, time for warmth and friendship, but there must be time of the work of the gospel, the hard work of making straight and making level.
Level, like a level playing field that would allow every child an opportunity to thrive and achieve their full potential no matter where they were born, no matter the color of their skin, which is a noble sentiment we can get behind right up until we decide we want to give our own children every advantage, a leg up to borrow from the equestrian world, which then means the playing field isn’t level at all if the rich kids get a better education, see better dermatologists and orthodontists, have better connections. It is pretty darn uncomfortable, this word of the prophet, this call of the gospel, the words of Jesus.
The Jewish elite were far away from where they wanted to be when Deutero-Isaiah imagined this massive construction project in the wilderness, 718 miles across rugged and unforgiving terrain. John was 25 miles outside of Jerusalem when he cried out for repentance, denouncing all that was crooked among his people, among the powerful, among those who colluded with Rome and those who simply failed to love.
And there is Jesus, this God-with-us for whom we prepare our hearts this Advent season, on dusty roads, on a hillside teaching with a whole lot of hungry people, in the worst places touching the unclean. Love as I have loved you. Go and announce the kingdom. It is here, like a treasure hidden in a field. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Let the children come to me.
And in that powerful parable, the sheep and the goats: When did we see you hungry? Sick? Imprisoned?
What you have done for the least of these…
Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places plain.
May we be fillers and levelers, hearing the voices from the wilderness, doing the work in the hard and rugged places. May we work to create a just peace, a kind peace. May we hear the good news with joy and with trepidation. May this be an Advent of celebration, inspiration, determination. Prepare the way of the Lord.
Amen.