Perhaps you still cannot relate to the idea of exile. The opening fantasy did little to excite you. The talk of Babylon seems irrelevant to your life. But exile is not so strange a concept as all that. Perhaps you are like one of the older members of this congregation who talks about how much Houston has changed in the last 50 years. "It's not the same place it used to be," she says. "It's changed beyond all recognition." It is possible to live in the same place your whole life and still be living in exile.
I sometimes feel an urge to return home. The problem is that home as I knew it no longer exits. I drive by the house where I grew up at 640 7th Avenue, Morton, Mississippi. The house is still stands but my family doesn't live there anymore. I walk over to the old high school gym. It is abandoned. I walk over to church I grew up in and everything has changed. There is a new pastor. The faces are unfamiliar. I walk over to my first grade playground. The slide that seemed 3 stories high when I was a First Grader now stands just a couple of feet higher than my head. The slide is the same but I am different. I look around the empty playground. Where are my childhood friends? They don't live here anymore. I go home only to discover that my childhood is gone. And so is yours. I have some idea of what it means to live in exile and so do you.
Search engine giant Yahoo.com released their 2009 list of Top 10 Searches. With all the news about the economy, collapse of the world's reserve currency, a massive stock market decline, the subsequent largest bear market rally in history, geo-political tension, terror threats, health care, cap & trade, and tea parties, this year's list may come as a surprise to some.
1. Michael Jackson
2. The Twilight Saga
3. WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment)
4. Megan Fox
5. Britney Spears
Roughly 80% of Top 10 queries on the internet are related to the entertainment industry, with sports fans (Nascar and WWE) driving the remaining 20%. It's official. No one really cares about reality. The majority of the population seem to be lost in the wilderness of mindlessness.
Others of us are searching for answers. Google's proprietary keyword research tool gives us a glimpse of how many people out there are looking for certain types of information or products. The 'searches' amount is based on Google search queries initiated in October 2009.
Unemployment Searches:11,100,000
Health Care Searches: 11,100,000
Inflation Searches: 2,240,000
Survival Searches: 3,300,000
Economic Depression Searches:40,100
To those searching for answers to such questions God speaks tenderly. A voice cries out: "In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up. Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed."
God is coming to find us—in the wilderness. So get ready for action. The earth must be terraformed to prepare the super highway. The valleys must be built up with dirt. The mountains and hills must be leveled out. The swamps must be bridged. The potholes must be filled. For God is coming to the wilderness. And He's not coming alone. He's coming with the armies of heaven.
There was a time when our nation was living in a wilderness. The time was 1861. The occasion was the Civil War. A woman named Julia Ward Howe visited a Union Army camp on the Potomac River near Washington, D.C. Here is the song Julia Ward Howe wrote that morning in the early days of the Civil War:
He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,
He is wisdom to the mighty, He is honor to the brave;
So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of wrong His slave,
Our God is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Our God is marching on.
We may be wandering in the wilderness of mindlessness or hopelessness but God is coming to find us in the wilderness. Advent is the time of anticipation of God's arrival. Advent is the time to build a super highway for God—a highway that runs from heaven to our hearts. But Advent is about more than that. Advent is a season when we anticipate the time when Jesus comes back to earth. And this time he won't be coming as a baby in a manger. This time he'll come as God's judgement upon the unrighteous and as God's redeemer for the righteous.
Why do we have trouble believing Christ will come again? We seem to have no trouble believing that the God who created the world loved us so much that God humbled Himself and took the form of a fetus in the womb of a Jewish woman in Palestine 2000 years ago. We have no trouble believing this baby was born to Mary, named Jesus, worked as a carpenter, taught with authority, healed the sick, raised the dead, took upon himself the sins of the world, suffered and died on a cross. We have no trouble believing that no the third day God raised him from the dead and that he is now seated at the right hand of God in heaven. Every Sunday after the sermon we stand up and say we believe he will come again to judge the quick and dead.
So why do we have trouble believing that Christ will come again to judge the world? After all, the second coming of Christ will be a gravy train for Christ compared to the first coming. Because this time he's not coming to sow he's coming to reap that which he has already sown. His second coming will be bad news for the unrighteous but good news for the righteous.
This is the new deal. Christ is coming to the wilderness to save us from our mindlessness and hopelessness. Christ is coming to us in the wilderness to set things right. See the heavenly armies marching toward us in the wilderness. When Christ returns, it won't be as an obscure baby born out in the sticks. When Christ returns it will be as the king of glory.
When Jesus Christ comes to earth this time everyone will know who he is and why he is here. Everyone will know the game is over, the curtain is coming down. Everyone will recognize that this is the last act of history. The unrighteous He will judge. The righteous He will reward. It will be plain as day. Everyone will understand. And every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.
Isaiah describes the end result: "Then the glory of the Lord will be revealed and all eyes will see it, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken." Universal. Revelation. Guaranteed.
- - -
-Dr. Jon Burnham preached this sermon from Isaiah 40:1-11 on December 6, 2009 (Advent 2C) at St. John's Presbyterian Church in Houston
