Isaiah 40:1-11
2 Peter 3:8-15a
Somewhere around 315 C.E., the Roman Emperor Constantine wrote a document professing his own Christian belief, and granting Pope Sylvester a number of offices, including control over Rome and pretty much the western half of the Roman Empire. Known as “The Donation of Constantine,” it was important hundreds of years later in Catholic claims against the rival Orthodox Christian movement in the east. It made the pope a king just as people like Charlemagne were building post-Roman kingdoms. And it was as legitimate as the resume of former U.S. Representative George Santos.
The same can be said of many biblical texts, at least when it comes to author authenticity. Tradition tells us that Moses wrote the Torah, which is certainly untrue. It tells us that David wrote the psalms, and while a handful of psalms may date back to that era, most were composed centuries later.
In the Christian Testament, the Gospel According to Mark is probably mostly by Mark who was a random dude in the community connected with Peter, and the Gospel According to Luke is probably mostly Luke, full-time physician and amateur historian, but the Gospel traditionally attributed to Matthew was not written by Matthew the tax collector, and the Gospel traditionally attributed to John was not written by John, the brother of James and follower of Jesus.
Some of the letters attributed to Paul contain varying amounts of actual Paul, and some none at all. And then we come to what are called the Pastoral Epistles, a handful of texts wedged in between the letters attributed to Paul and the feverish revelation to John of Patmos, who may or may not be assumed to be the same John or maybe a different John who didn’t write the gospels or the three Pastoral letters with that name.
The Pastoral Epistles are genuine in the sense that they reflect the concerns of early Christianity. But they were not written by James, or John the Disciple, or in this case Peter the Fisher of People, he who denied Christ three times. Not only were 1st and 2nd Peter not written by Peter, they weren’t even written by the same person.
Whoever wrote what we call 2nd Peter had one problem in mind. The first generation of Christians believed they would live to see the Second Coming of Christ or something along those lines, the “Day of the Lord” or the descent of the “Human One.” But they were all dying and that simply hadn’t happened. The author tries to explain the delay, and encourages the people to wait in peace, this week’s Advent theme, co-existent with last week’s theme, hope, neither of which should be confused with passivity.
The author of Deutero-Isaiah, our first reading this morning, was in a similar situation. The author, writing in the tradition of Isaiah, is part of the hostage community in Babylon. Jerusalem had been left a smoldering heap filled with bodies, not unlike Gaza and the Israeli Kibbutzim near its borders. Judah had been a religious nation-state. Now the nation-state was gone and the Temple at the center of their faith had been destroyed. They were in a foreign land with a different language and different customs, and faced pressure to worship foreign gods. In an age when few lived past thirty years of age, they were captive for more than fifty years.
The prophet/author delivers an oracle promising that God will restore the people and their nation. The flock, those held captive and those who had fled to places like Egypt, would be gathered once again. But first, the people had a task to complete.
If you are looking for some holy hocus-pocus, you won’t find it here. It does not say God is going to clear a path from Babylon westward to Jerusalem. It calls on the people to serve as that holy road crew.
Prepare the way. Make a straight highway, which is about the only kind of straight I can do. The text then switches into a passive voice, raising and leveling and smoothing the ground, but this is clearly part of the whole holy highway construction project imperative.
This is where we insert the snarky comment about road construction taking years longer than we were told and costing way more than was in the bid and budget, except in this case, we have no one to blame but ourselves.
The ministry of Ezekiel is about the same place and time, in captivity in Babylon, and he is giving us magical dried bones come back to life, but Deutero-Isaiah is offering a different message. God is going to do great things, but you have a role to play too.
So let’s spend a little time thinking about that work, with advance apologies to our engineers and experienced political leaders.
You cannot build a highway if you do not know where you are going. “Away from here” is not a plan.
Second, you need to have a good understanding of the terrain. The “request for proposals” mentioned hills and valleys. How tall? How deep?
Next, you need to make sure you have the resources to complete the job, materials, funding, and as we know all too well these days, the people. Because building a highway halfway across the desert puts us in a worse position than we’re in now, and we’ve seen more than enough idiotic infrastructure projects in our time. And all of that before we turn the first shovel.
Never mind that a straight highway was neither the best route from Babylon to Jerusalem nor the route we think they actually took, because the straight highway was an idea rather than a reality. The prophet is telling the people to prepare. And they had a lot of preparation to do, literal and theological.
And this is where I make a brief detour, and mention that is was not all of the Israelites in Babylon. The peasants had been left behind, viewed as worthless to the Babylonians. But peasants don’t write the stories, the powerful do, so we’re going to note that the story we are working with isn’t the whole story, that as always, we should listen for the voices we do not hear.
But let’s get back to that highway project. And specifically, let’s start with the ending, and this week’s theme.
What does peace look like? We heard, during our advent candle lighting, the words of Black Elk, a man who fought at Little Big Horn and survived the genocide at Wounded Knee. We are mindful of the teachings of the Rev. Dr. King, who tied peace to justice and to love, and who, shortly before his death, offered that we had a choice between non-violence or non-existence. We recall the aphorism, sometimes attributed to Mohandas Gandhi, an used by King in a 1958 work, that “an eye for an eye leave the whole world blind.”
And we look at the Middle East, and the destruction driven by extremists and war criminals on both sides, and there are extremists and war criminals on both sides.
When the world becomes more tolerant, the intolerant must resort to violence, for hatred, fear, and greed fit in the same glove the wields the weapon.
Some seeking peace have once again taken up the cause for a two-state solution, and Jews, Christians, and Muslims have often managed to co-exist, mostly peacefully, in that land. It is fundamentalists, and bigots operating under the guise of fundamentalism, that pursue slaughter and call it justice. And they, those bigots and fundamentalists, are the hills and valleys that must be removed and covered over as we build that highway to peace. We are not going to get across the desert if someone blows up every bridge we build.
Mainstream media will not tell you that Iranians are becoming more modern, tolerant, and secular by the year, and that this terrifies that county’s theocratic dictators who maintain their control through hate, and so it is in their interest to see not only the slaughter of October 7th, but it is also in their interest that Israel’s retaliation be as brutal as possible. Every dead Palestinian civilian is a win for Tehran.
And, as we know, the hubris and hatred of intolerance and of fundamentalism is not limited to the Middle East, for there were plenty of Americans who call themselves Christian storming the Capitol on January 6th, and a Lutheran pastor from that movement’s fundamentalist fringe has been indicted as a co-conspirator in Atlanta.
For a bunch of smart compassionate people who are willing to do the work, we can be remarkably inarticulate when it comes to our destination. Fortunately, some have less to lose than others, and can stand on the steps of a monument and declare that they have a dream, can “occupy” Zuccotti Park in Manhattan’s Babylon for 49 days, can brave the tear gas of presidential jackboots to declare that Black Lives Matter, can stand up courageously and say that it happened to #MeToo.
Where are we going? To a place where everyone who can work has work, work that respects their fundamental dignity and worth, where no one is ever thrown away or exploited, and where those who cannot work are offered an opportunity to thrive. To an Elmira where it is not the NIMBYs of Maple Avenue versus Elmira’s poor, because there are no poor anymore and we are all in this together. To a world where bodily autonomy isn’t weaponized by science-denying anti-vaxxers and flat-earth believers, but is a reality for every woman in America, every person in America, no matter what box was checked on their birth certificate.
Do we have the resources to do the job? To reach our destination?
We’re sure working on it. But we’re not there yet. Our road crew is not big enough to complete the task, and if we are being honest, we could use some younger folks, which is a challenge, because the economy has not been kind to Gen Z. But they share our vision. They just don’t know that it is our vision. So we have to get out there and let folks know that we are justice construction society, a love construction society, and that we are ready to blast through some mountains and fill some holes if they will only join us.
Don’t tell me you don’t like it here in Babylon. I know that Babylon sucks. God has called us to make a highway. It is time to get to work. Amen.