December 6, 2009
Mowing Down the Mountains - Luke 3:1-6
Pastor: Luke Maybry
DownloadWhen my older brother was in college at Clemson, he brought a friend of his home with him one day. We lived in beautiful Campobello, South Carolina, right in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. My parent’s front yard had a beautiful view of those mountains. I love those mountains. This friend of my brother’s was from Orangeburg, South Carolina. You could take a bowling ball in Orangeburg and roll it, and it would not stop until either it hit the mountains somewhere, or ran into the Atlantic Ocean. The wonderful people in Orangeburg are not blessed with purple mountain majesties. So this friend of my brother’s was standing in our front yard and he commented to my father about how pretty it was there. And then he looked over at my father and said that the view could be improved by taking a bulldozer and running over those mountains.
I thought about that when I read this text from Luke. John tells the people there that the Savior is coming, that God is coming. So therefore, he told them and us to repent, you know, to turn around, to rethink our lives in light of the Gospel. I like that. Who would possibly disagree with that? But then he quoted Isaiah, who basically said what my brother’s friend said. “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled up and every mountain and hill shall be made low.” Israel was in exile in Babylon when Isaiah said this. For forty years Israel was homesick and wanted to go home. But in order to go home, Isaiah implied, they would need to prepare the way of the Lord, which specifically meant making a straight path from Babylon to Israel, which specifically meant, as my brother’s friend so rashly said, getting a bulldozer and mowing down those mountains.
Now to be fair to Isaiah and my brother’s friend, admiring those mountains from afar and traveling over them are two different things. I learned that lesson one day a few years ago on a bike ride up the Saluda grade. I can certainly see then how a straight highway, as Isaiah says, would be easier to cross than a mountain. Be that as it may, though, mountains and valleys, nooks and crannies are part of God’s good earth. If you don’t like riding in them, then take a plane. Besides, even if you could convince me that mowing down the mountains would be good, we don’t have the capability to blow up the Appalachians.
Well, actually we can blow up the Appalachians. It’s called Mountain Top Removal. I’ve seen it: Miles and miles and miles of beautiful mountains whose tops have been blown off, and whose valleys and streams have been filled up with debris and sludge, just to fill our gluttonous appetite for coal. Five hundred such mountain tops in West Virginia alone have been blown to bits. Those once gorgeous mountains will be wastelands for millennia. So yes, I suppose that we can mow down some mountains, but I certainly don’t believe that we should.
Of course, neither Isaiah nor John meant that literally, right? These here mountains are figurative. Well, I don’t even like that idea. And, just to make this clear, those figurative mountains really are impossible. John compares blowing up those mountains to repentance, to eliminating all the things in our lives that separate us from God. Furthermore, John seems to precipitate our repentance to God’s presence. Mow down all the mountains in our lives in order to prepare the way for God to come. At least that’s how it seems. Well, if God’s presence is dependent upon me doing that, then I’m in real trouble. I may have a few otherwise good things that need to go in order to truly repent.
I met a pastor recently who is a retired Chaplain in the National Guard. I made the mistake of telling him that I had thought a lot about being a chaplain myself. I spent four years on active duty in Fort Hood, Texas. I was not all that crazy about the army, but do think that I would be a good chaplain. In fact, I essentially was a chaplain in some ways as a regular officer. I know what it is to be a soldier, and to deploy away from home for a long time. I know the pressure those guys are under, which has only grown as they are now on their third or fourth deployments. All of this, by the way, comes at a time when the army is critically short chaplains. Only 30% of chaplain slots are full. Soldiers meanwhile are committing suicide at alarming rates. Military families are falling apart. I am badly needed there. I have felt God calling me to be a chaplain.
But I also have two, beautiful little girls who are from God, and a wife from God, and we have another baby coming in April from God, and I’m serving a congregation which is also from God. Now when I get deployed for a year at a time (it is a question of if and not when), you would miss me, but you would be okay. My wife would miss me, too, but she would be too mad at me for signing up to miss me that much. My children would really miss me. I would probably miss the first year of my youngest child’s life. I would very likely spend more time away from them in their childhood than I would with them. They would probably get over it, but it would be very hard on them. I would never get over it. I cannot leave my children for a year at a time. Those mountains are just too beautiful for me to leave. To be brutally honest, that’s a price that I refuse to pay.
What do you think John would tell me to do here? What would repentance mean here? Jesus tells us that if we don’t hate our mothers and fathers and sons and daughters for his sake, then we aren’t worthy to follow him. What would John tell me to do? What would John tell you to do? Everyone of you has some kind of thorny question like that. What are you doing about it? The Church has all kinds of thorny questions like that. Pat Hart, Richard Moss, and I were at a Presbytery meeting this past Tuesday morning. Sam Roberson, the general Presbyter, preached at the worship service there on this very text. He basically said that it’s time for all us Presbyterians to repent. We have really missed the ball, Sam said. We pastors have been complacent. You lay people are comfortable in country club churches. It is time to repent and to change, or we will die as Presbyterians. As best I could tell, that was basically the message.
The only problem is, what exactly are we supposed to change? It doesn’t take a prophet to figure out that we, like every denomination in America, are in unsettling times. That Charlotte has grown exponentially in the last ten years while the number of Presbyterians here has shrunk is a good indicator that something is awry. We don’t need Isaiah to tell us that. But how, exactly, are we supposed to “do” ministry today? How are we supposed to worship? What are we supposed to keep, and what should we throw away? I’m all for repenting, by the way, but I’m not sure what it means in this context. And even if we did know what it meant, even if it was clear as a bell, we wouldn’t do it anyway. I was supposed to meet a friend of mine at 5:00 on Wednesday morning to run. I woke up, got there at 4:55, waited in my car (with heat blasting away), until 5:05 and I flipped open my phone and saw that he had called the night before to tell me that he wasn’t going to make it. I thought I would just run by myself since I was already there, but I cracked the window and stuck my finger out and felt just a tiny drop of rain, and convinced myself that a hurricane was coming, so I turned around and went back to bed. All of which is to say that will power is a joke. I don’t run that early in the morning because I have will power. I run then because I’m too embarrassed to stand my running buddies up and have them think that I’m lazy (even though I am).
John is telling us to repent, to mow these good-looking mountains down, to build a highway to our God. I for one don’t have the wisdom or the will to do that. If God is waiting on me to do that, then it’ll never happen. None of that is to say that we should just give up and not worry about it, but I could never do enough. I know me (and us) enough to know that there will never be a straight path from me to God, at least not one that I create.
I preached a lot while I was in seminary. This is my 8th Advent preaching. Observing Advent every year can seem artificial. We read about John and how he told us to repent and prepare the way for the Lord, and mow the mountains down and so forth, and yet, we know that in three weeks, the Savior comes. That’s sort of how the cycle works. We know that Christmas is coming. We know that God is coming. Maybe that’s the amazing thing about it. There is not much record in the Bible of many people actually coming to John and repenting. And yet, Jesus came. They didn’t mow down all those mountains. They were too high, and too pretty. We may, in our arrogance, look back and say that had the Pharisees just chilled out, then everything would have been fine. But they didn’t. In fact, the Savior came anyway, and they didn’t even recognize him, and they killed him. And yet he still came back.
We see the world through a very dim glass right now. We of course have things in our lives that prevent us from receiving God’s grace, and we should take those things seriously. And of course, the Church needs to repent. There has never been a time in the Church’s history when we were there, when we did not need to repent. And we need to change, but there’s just no magic bullet. We’re not going to go to a conference one weekend and figure it all out. So we read our Bibles and pray and live our faith together. I know us well enough to know that we will never do an adequate job of that. I know history well enough to know that someday our grandchildren will be reading about us and wonder what in the world we were thinking. The good news, friends, is that God comes anyway. We don’t clear the path in order for God to come. We clear the path because God already has come, and God is coming again. So have some peace. We have our mountains and valleys, and the path we create for God is anything but straight. But the path that God has made to get a hold of us, well, that one, by God alone, is straight, very straight. So may we live and act accordingly.
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
