By the Rev. Dr. Pamela Dolan
What voices are you listening to these days? I have a habit of carrying my phone around the house listening to podcasts and audiobooks while I do laundry or prepare dinner or just hang out on the sofa. I don’t always use headphones, though, so my family gets the somewhat dubious pleasure of hearing voices coming out of my pocket, some recognizable like Barack Obama or Bishop Michael Curry, some more obscure; some are discussing the finer points of incarnational theology, while some are sharing recipes for banana bread or talking about permaculture and the importance of fungi to soil health.
My family will attest that you just never know what you’re going to hear when I come walking down the stairs in the morning!
I first started listening to audiobooks not just as a way to pass the time or learn new things, but because it seemed like good training for a preacher. Preachers put a lot of work into the words we say and sometimes even into how we say them, but our focus on becoming adept at public speaking is not always joined with an equal emphasis on becoming good listeners.
The preaching classes I took tended to concentrate more on content and structure than on delivery, and I’m not sure we ever really considered how hard it can be to listen to a single voice for 10 or 15 minutes at a stretch. I decided I wanted to learn from actors and comedians, from the very best storytellers out there, what skills I would need to acquire to make my preaching as effective as possible, or at least to keep it from being a deadly boring mess.
In the process, I learned from experience that listening is a skill, too, one that requires a lot more from us than simply sitting still and keeping quiet.
John the Baptist, it seems, had no trouble getting people to listen to him. Even two thousand years later, John comes barreling off the page, more like an Old Testament prophet than a nice, respectable mainline preacher. One way we know his voice was effective is that people came from all over to listen to him, undeterred by his odd penchant for living in the wilderness, not to mention his strange diet and dress. John may have been a voice crying out in the wilderness, but he was nonetheless a voice people heard and heeded.
In the passage we will hear next week, John’s Gospel portrays John the Baptist in a similar way, calling him a witness and a man sent from God to testify to the light. The fourth Gospel actually puts Isaiah’s words directly into John’s mouth, having him say to the religious authorities who interrogate him: “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord.’”
When we turn to the passage from Isaiah that is referenced in both of these Gospel stories, we encounter some of the most beautiful poetry in the whole of ancient literature. It is a passage replete with voices, full of utterances, of nouns and verbs centering on speech and all forms of verbal communication—and at the heart of it is a declaration of assurance, the profound unshakeable promise that “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.” This is the comfort that is offered to the people, the comfort that lifts up the citizens of Jerusalem, reminding them that, in spite of all they have suffered, they are loved by God, the God of all creation, whose kingdom and whose lovingkindness will have no end.
Now, when we get to the famous line in verse three that begins “a voice cries out,” we would do well to slow down our listening a bit. We’re all accustomed to hearing that John the Baptist is the voice crying out in the wilderness—in other words, John is calling to us from the wilderness. Isaiah, by contrast, tells of a voice that cries out…
“In the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord
In the desert, make straight a highway for our God.”
Do you hear the difference? The prophetic voice in Isaiah is not located in the wilderness, rather it is calling to those who are.
As I read it, the difference between these two passages is not merely a difference of grammar or punctuation, but of location and perspective. John the Baptist is a voice located in the wilderness, crying out to the Judeans and all the people of Jerusalem, in other words settled and possibly even complacent people.
He is calling people out of their safe places and into the challenges and hardships of discipleship. He is preparing people to follow Jesus, no matter where it might lead.
Isaiah’s prophetic voice, on the other hand, is calling to people who are already in the wilderness, people who are scattered and in exile. His voice, a mouthpiece for the Lord, is calling them home, calling them into the safety of a loving and sheltering God.
One is a voice from the margins, longing to be heard by a people who will find no room for a new encounter with God in their lives unless they repent and change direction. The other is a voice calling to the marginalized, reassuring them that their time of suffering and hardship is nearing an end. One is a voice of challenge, the other of comfort. Both are voices that we need to hear along the way on our journeys of faith.
These are not opposing voices, but complementary ones. We need the voices that help us to change, help us to recognize ways that our life falls short of the mark. And we also need voices of comfort, reassuring us when the road is treacherous and the journey is long that rest and renewal are possible.
In the end, both prophetic voices are asking us to prepare for something that is to come, which is the breaking in of God’s eternal Word, the indwelling of God among us and within us. What better way to prepare than to learn to listen deeply and with an open heart?
Perhaps Advent could be a time when we focus on listening, the deep listening that lets our lives become places of transformation. The waiting we are called to do is not a passive thing, but a time when we watch, listen, and learn, when we strive for repentance and new life. While we wait for a new heaven and a new earth, while we wait for righteousness and peace to embrace, while we wait for signs of the coming of God, let us listen, listen to the voices of the marginalized and the voices of those leading us out into the margins, where God’s presence is already very near. Amen.
