Photo by John Towner on Unsplash

“To the world we dream about

And the one we live in now”

Hadestown

This upcoming season of Advent is one where church lectionaries engage with apocalyptic, the great unveiling, texts to point to Jesus’s movements both now in the world and in the ages to come. While many might consider these doom and gloom, it is important to remember that they were specifically written to provide hope in times of oppression and upheaval. Hope, in this form, is located in the sense of seeing with greater clarity God’s interaction with creation both now and in the days to come.

In the second week of Advent, we read texts from Luke 3:1-6:

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah,

"The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:

'Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight.

Every valley shall be filled,
and every mountain and hill shall be made low, 

and the crooked shall be made straight,
and the rough ways made smooth; 

and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.'"

In the midst of Empire and oppression, John the Baptist reminds us of the voice crying in the wilderness—the one saying this is our work to do. It’s interesting to me that John the Baptist reminds those he proclaims to of other moments of upheaval by quoting from words marked during the time of Exile in Babylon. Isaiah 40: 3-5 speaks to both the topography of a people returning home through mountains and crooked paths, and the difficulties that lie after years of cultural eradication and separation.

Recently, with the shifting of powers at the turn of the election, there has been another upheaval—one that will continue for quite some time. And, there have been many a hot take or calls to hope or even shareable words that reflect on the outcomes of what has been and what is to be.

In this waiting time of Advent, where things that were veiled are shown more fully, there is the invitation to share in that cry in the wilderness, to embody John the Baptist and Isaiah’s prophetic words.

In Walter Brueggeman’s writings, he speaks to our collective work of prophetic imagination. Ultimately, Bruegemann articulates that God is at work in hidden ways to uphold the world in faithfulness and to keep it from self-destruction. But what shows of this hidden effort is that God recruits human agents, those of us crying in the wilderness, to do some of that work.

He writes that prophetic imagination has two functions: one is to critique the world in its present distortion so that we do not think it normative. The other is to hint at alternatives or a reshaping of the world according to the purposes of the creator. Those tasks are unchanged, even though they require new inflections.

The task is a tricky one when there are voices calling—saying where is your God now? Why does the sparrow still fall despite God knowing it exists? Or as Rich Mullins sings, “Will those who mourn be left uncomforted, while you're up there just playing hard to get?”  

It is here, in our wilderness, our separation, our grief, that the promise found in the apocryphal texts speak to our hearts’ cries.

This moment of Advent, our recent unveiling to see our nation as it is, calls us in the wilderness to an ancient practice of prophetic imagination. To join with Isaiah and John the Baptist in calling a new world into being.