Prepare the way of the Lord
When we live in God’s grace, the distinction between wilderness and city collapses.
A week ago, I saw the Milky Way galaxy. I don’t mean that I saw a picture of it. I literally saw the Milky Way, so dark was the sky. It looked like a very long, thin swath of clouds running across a sky full of bright stars. Our tour bus had taken us to a desert wilderness area in southern Jordan called the Wadi Rum, to watch the sunset and have a Bedouin dinner and learn about Bedouin culture. After dinner, we lay down in the sand next to a group of camels and looked up at the night sky. As our eyes adjusted to the darkness, the Milky Way came into view. We saw a couple of shooting stars. The camels breathed next to us. It felt so vast and peaceful. It felt so different from the city that I’m used to living and working in.
Being in the Holy Land taught me something about desert wilderness. During Advent, we hear John the Baptist cry out from the wilderness: “Prepare the way for the Lord.” Perhaps I’m romanticizing it, but after spending a week in Jordan’s wilderness areas I’m thinking it’s a lot easier to prepare the way for the Lord in a vast, peaceful, unpopulated desert land than it is in our cities where there’s overcrowding and light pollution and racism and homelessness and political strife. If I were Jesus and planning to come back to the earth, I know which location I would prefer.
But the city is exactly where Jesus chose to be. I don’t mean literally, because he spent some of his time in the wilderness as well as in cities and villages. But what I mean is that when God became incarnate as a human being, God entered all the strife and muck and craziness of what it means to be a human living in close proximity to other humans. God didn’t choose the wilderness option, hovering like a divine spirit above a pristine landscape of pink sand and star-filled skies, apart from the pain of humanity. God chose a stable in a town that was so crowded there was no room in the inn. God chose a group of fishermen who had to deal with the ramifications of leaving behind their families. God chose a culture in which there was so much religious fighting and political tension that Jesus would end up hanging on a cross.
