Isaiah 40:1-11

         I loved living down town when I was renting a house on 18^th Ave.  I could walk back and for the to church. I could walk down to the Farmer’s Market. I enjoyed walks across the Capitol Campus and around the lake. Now that I’ve moved out to the ‘burbs I have to drive everywhere.  When I come to work, I join the long line of state workers who are heading their cars in the same direction at the same time.  We move very slowly. Last week I was driving from Tillicum to Olympia at about 5:00 PM.  I don’t think I travelled above 25 miles a hour until I reached the Nisqually exit.  What is the deal with the traffic passing by JBLM?  Didn’t anyone plan for this?

         I’m sure my daughter feels the same way each morning as she travels from her home in Renton to her job in downtown Seattle.  The I-5 and the 405 have overfilled their capacity for decades. Just close your eyes and imagine yourself on the 1-5 travelling to Dupont  at 7:30 any morning, or on the 405 any day and today’s scripture “Make straight in the desert a highway…Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain be made low, the uneven ground shall become level and the rough places a plain” may speak to you in a different way.

         Today’s text marking the beginning of Second Isaiah (Chapters 40 – 66) is addressed to Jews who are in exile. They are not living at home. They were in a cultural and religious desert in Babylon. Out in Babylon, the captors try to talk Jews out of their own perceptions of reality. They define life exclusively in imperial Babylonian terms. God’s people out in Babylon were told that they were privileged to live in one of the greatest, most noble, most beautiful civilizations ever devised. God’s people out in Babylon were in a wilderness. Psalm 137 laments the desert place of Babylon, where the Jewish people couldn’t even sing anymore.  They hung up their harps on the willows and when taunted to sing by their captors, they cried: how can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?

         Just to sing about God was to be reminded that they were not at home, they were in exile.  But there must have been some 6^th century Jews living in Babylon who did not perceive themselves as exiles. They had settled in, and made themselves at home, and learned Babylonian songs to replace the Jewish ones. They had established comfortable lives there. But empires rise and fall, and Cyrus of Persia came to threaten Babylon. Cyrus was thought to be more tolerant of the Hebrew exiles. There was hope for a new beginning. In Isaiah 40:1–11, the prophet speaks to persuade the exiles to go back to Jerusalem.

         To persuade the Israelites that returning to Israel was the will of God required two things; convincing them that they were really forgiven for the sins that lead to exile, and convincing them that they would be able to survive the journey.

Let’s take a moment and think about our own wilderness. Naturally I only know the geography of my own wilderness, and I know I am guessing at yours.  Some of you are in the wilderness of illness. You’ve undergone continuous treatment for cancer, each day bringing new levels of exhaustion and nausea. You’re tired and scared.  You wonder what your future holds. Some of you are in the wilderness of recovery, where each day of sobriety is a triumph, and each failure is filled with shame. Some of you are in the wilderness of a bad relationship. Perhaps you’ve worked on making it better, but you continue to find yourself in those old familiar and miserable places.  Some of you are in the wilderness of dealing with separation from your teen-aged children.  They are preparing for departure for college after this year, and you are trying to work out how you will all be without them. Some of you are in the wilderness of poverty. Due to this significant recession, you don’t know how you are going to meet your expenses this month. You’ve lost the home you love, or your job. Some of you are in the wilderness of grief and loss.  You are entering this “most wonderful time of the year” and it isn’t so wonderful. You can’t imagine dragging through the same old holiday parties and expectations with the crushing sense of loss that you feel.

     The wilderness is like being in a foreign land.  We never expected to find ourselves in this place. Most of us, when we find ourselves in a wilderness, just want out.  We don’t want to travel endless miles of windy roads and narrow ledges to get out; we want to escape “as the crow flies.” We want to take the most direct route, above it all.

Friends, that is the good news from the prophet Isaiah: God is creating a new geography, raising valleys and lowering mountains, smoothing the path that leads out of the wilderness the back to the promised land.

The Promised Land, hope awaits us. Hope is right in front of us. Hope.

Why are we stuck in the wilderness?  Are we like the Jews in Babylon who intermarried, learned the new songs, took up the new religion and made themselves right at home?  Have we made ourselves so comfortable in the wilderness that we’ve forgotten who we are?

Perhaps we are like our fellow Wasingtonians on the I-5, or the 405 who are stuck in an epic metaphorical traffic jam.  May be our lives are so mired in congestion and frustration that we are just plain stuck in some sort of spiritual gridlock.  Or, it could be that we are just on the wrong highway all together. God may not be found on the roads of consumerism and materialism that we are travelling. Perhaps the reason that we are in this jam is because we are on the same road as everyone else. It’s time to get off this road and on to another.

Or, it might not be the road at all. It may be the travelers on the road.  We don’t need better roads; we need to be better travelers.  Perhaps we need to get rid of some baggage.  There may be something more significant than long lines at Costco at the heart of our Christmas woes, or something more significant than the lack of money at the heart of our financial woes; or something more significant than a lack of time at the heart of our feeling hurried all the time, or something more significant than a lack of entertainment at the heart of our boredom.

In these and many other ways, we tend to seek solutions through our American genius for efficiency: the straight, smooth, level highway philosophy applied to life in general.  We seek the effective bail out strategy, the perfect stimulus package, the better job, the new relationship, the right medication. And we often succeed, at least for a while.

But this isn’t what Isaiah was talking about. God makes the way. God builds the road. We don’t have to bridge the valleys or level the mountains or smooth the ground. God does these things, because God is merciful, and God calls us to the promise. Isaiah is not calling the Jews of his day to an arduous highway building plan: he is announcing the good news that God will make their journey easy.

Think back on your own wilderness place.  If the road is rough and impossible, if you are struggling and working so very hard to move along, I believe that this passage calls you to wait. God will make the way out, and you will know, because the road will be smooth and the path plain.

Friends are you happy in your wilderness?  Are you stuck in traffic, suffering in spiritual gridlock?  Are you on the right road?  Do you have too much baggage?  Is the road too hard?

God makes the journey easy.