The Second Sunday of Advent - Rev. Aimee Baxter

As a planner, I was really happy to see this week’s gospel reading. My first thought was, “I definitely know how to prepare so this is gonna be a lot of fun to talk about!”

 I love preparing for things. Just this week we have been busy getting ready for our Christmas Eve services and some other fun things we have up our sleeves. It truly brings joy to my soul to get all the things together and organized.

Preparation is one of those things that typically you know it when you see it. You can usually tell when someone is prepared for a talk they give, a test they take, or a football or basketball game they play. After all, Alexander Graham Bell famously tells us, “Preparation is the key to success.” A positive outcome is a good sign of hard work and preparation.

In other words, if you are well prepared, what could go wrong?

Well, that’s what planners and control freaks like me want to believe, but I’m not quite sure that is always the case.

My son, Grant, was recently asked to write an essay for school. The essay asked the question what do grades not show you about a student. His answer got me to thinking in light of our conversation today around preparation.

Grant submits that grades only show you what a student is capable of processing and remembering for a test or assignment. They don’t show you that a student who makes an A on a test in Math really doesn’t like Math and just learned the information for the test. In the same way, an A in History doesn’t fully show the deep love of history that same student has. Grant also reminded us that grades don’t show you who a person is, who they love and what they are passionate about.

In thinking back to preparation, it seems outcomes and performances don’t always show you the work behind something or the amount of time put into it. Failure, or at least our perceived idea of failure, doesn’t necessarily mean you weren’t prepared and that you didn’t put in the work. 

This is important to remember. I have to be really careful because I can get so caught up in my preparing that I forget the whys of what I’m preparing for. My preparation becomes more about what I can control than it is about getting ready.

Sometimes as much as we organize and rehearse and check all the boxes, it just doesn’t go the way we planned. 

We’ve done everything the recipe said, and it still didn’t taste very good.

We practiced really hard, but still lost the game or didn’t make the team. 

We bought a 2020 calendar, only to throw it away in April.

Maybe preparation should look less like getting everything ready and more like cultivating a heart that is ready to receive whatever comes our way. Maybe it’s more about trying to learn flexibility to create a state of being in us that is nimble and able to move through the unknown. Maybe the best preparation is character driven instead of results driven. 

If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that our preparations and plans only mean so much.

As we hear John’s words to prepare the way of the Lord, may we hear his cry to us as a call to tend the places in our soul that need work to be ready when life hands us the unexpected. To help us cope with disappointment or live into our new realities.

When we are able to do this difficult work, these are the places God shows up.

Glennon Doyle in her book, Untamed, writes about the difference in the “seen order” of things and the “unseen order” of things. Doyle suggests that we lie in a world full of the visible order of things – violence, division, a pandemic, deceit and hate. We refer to these things with a sense of resignation as our reality and that this is just the way things are.

She challenges us to tap into what we know instinctively and through the scriptures to be a different way of being. A way of life that is built on vision, imagination and a deep belief in the reality that things can be and are different. She writes, “If we work to make the vision of the unseen order visible in our lives, homes and nations, we will make reality more beautiful. On Earth as it is in heaven.”

John the Baptist is declaring a reality that is yet unseen and he knows it will require imagination from the people to see Jesus as the Messiah. He’s saying, “Wow! Just you wait and see what the one to come after me is going to do!”

The presence of Christ on earth as it is in heaven brings us well beyond our current reality if only we have enough imagination to dream of a different way.

Henri Nouwen puts it this way: “When you have ears to hear and eyes to see, you will recognize the Lord at any moment of your life. Life is Advent; life is recognizing the coming of the Lord.”

Glennon Doyle poses the question, “What is the most beautiful version of this life that you can imagine?”

That answer differs for each of us on a small scale, but as a people who are anticipating the coming of Christ the Messiah, Isaiah and John the Baptist have already cast the vision.

Prepare the way of the Lord. Prepare a way of being where every valley will be lifted, every mountain made low, uneven ground leveled out and the rough places smooth. Prepare a seen reality where empathy and compassion dominate the narrative, justice for the oppressed is sought, and God’s people exist as a shepherds gathering the lambs into their arms and carrying them.

May it be so. Amen.