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Sermon deliver by Roger Ferlo
St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral

Minneapolis, Minn.

♦ December 6, 2015 ♦

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

I don’t think I am the only person who upon hearing this Scripture text will spend the rest of the day with the tenor solo in Handel’s Messiah burrowing like an earworm into the deepest part of my brain. But Handel’s librettist was not the first person to quote these lines from the book of Isaiah. It helps to remember that Jesus quotes Isaiah more than any other Scripture. Luke makes sure we get the point right at the start:

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.

Unsplash Bryce Canyon Natl Park Drew Hays WEB

As familiar as these metaphors may be to people who love Handel’s Messiah, I wonder if any of this strikes you as odd. What’s wrong with mountains and hills, really? One of the most important moments of my life was a hike down the winding mule path that hugs the wall of the Grand Canyon. It was like a hike into Deep Time, each different colored stratum of rock face separated from the next by perhaps a million slow years of storm and erosion. Who would want to fill that valley?

Over the Thanksgiving holiday I visited my daughter in Portland, Oregon, on one of the clearest fall days in memory. From the top of the cliff near the medical center we had clear views of not one but two mountains in the Cascade range—Mount Hood in all its snowy glory, and Mount St. Helens, squatting there with truncated peak. Who would have wanted to see that mountain completely leveled when the volcano blew not that many years ago? Who would trade the glories of Cascadia for the boring flatness of a dusty prairie?

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

Well, Palestine is not western Oregon or central Arizona. In the days of the prophets, hills and valleys were dangerous places, rugged, harsh, places where the enemy could hide, places where false gods could be worshipped, rugged terrain to be conquered in or to escape from. But it was not only the physical danger that preoccupied Isaiah. What was at issue here was human solidarity, human unity, what the prophet calls shalom—the peace that passeth all understanding uniting otherwise wildly different peoples but also uniting wildly different peoples with the one loving and creating God.

For Isaiah, to fill every valley and to level every mountain, to make the crooked path straight and the rough ways smooth, was to create a level playing field, to break down the barriers that divide us, to unite all the peoples of the earth, every family, language, tribe and nation, in a community of faithfulness to a God who liberates us from all oppression, including our own oppressive selves.

And it’s that vision of human community in diversity that animates Luke’s Gospel, and Luke’s memories of Jesus. In Luke’s vision of Jesus’ Gospel, the Spirit of God levels the differences that divide us—the valleys of the oppressors are made plain, the mountains of the marauders are made low, the crooked paths of the wanderers are made straight. In other words, everyone—all God’s creation—is invited to come home to God in safety, everyone has equal access to the throne of grace, if only we would open our eyes, if only we would repent, turn around, and see.

But what happens if, like me, you like mountains and valleys? What happens when you have an aversion to sameness? What happens if you’re a Mariners fan and you find yourself stuck in Minneapolis? What happens if you, in fact, like or prize who you are. If you do not or cannot separate yourself from the particulars that define the given-ness of you—your ethnic heritage, your sexuality, your family history, your deepest sense of self? Is it sinful to hang on to these? Is there a tension, a contradiction, between the universal inclusiveness of the Spirit that transforms us, and the tangible immediacy, the once-and-once-only whatness of who I am? To accept John’s call to repentance, do I have to repent of me?

I don’t think so, although many Christians and so-called Christians have sought to preach this bad news over the centuries. Repentance does not mean denying who we are. Repentance means acknowledging—accepting—who we are, so that God might restore the image of God in us. To acknowledge and accept who we are, I admit, can be painful, and always risky. It is to acknowledge our weaknesses and sinfulness as well as our strengths, our power to hurt others as well as our power to heal. But to take that risk is what we mean when we celebrate an incarnate God, a God-made-flesh, a God-among-us and God-with-us. God cares about human particularities, cares enough, in fact, to share them. God’s grace is not an abstraction. It has a local habitation and a name. It is to be found in the what and when, the light and the shadows of our lives as we live them.

This is the Gospel’s deepest paradox. God will seek us out, leveling every mountain, filling every valley, making every crooked path straight and plain, and in this brave new world all are welcome, as we are, in all our sinfulness and stubbornness. What is universal can only be made visible in the particular—in the flesh and blood Christian for whom there is no cause to become someone or something else.

In Christ we are invited to become our true selves again, and in so doing to become as Christ was and is, living not for ourselves alone but for all God’s beloved creatures, in all their diversity and difference from us. Who you are and what you are, now, here, in the flesh, is enough for God to work with—God who took flesh in a particular place and in a particular time, in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod 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.

It is no different now, in this particular place, in this particular time, in the seventh year of the Obama administration, Mark Dayton being the governor of Minnesota, and Paul Ryan being the Speaker of the House, and Betsy Hodges the Mayor of Minneapolis, during the high priesthood of Michael Curry as presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, and Brian Prior his brother in Christ as bishop of the Episcopal Church in Minnesota. Here, even here, God’s incarnation in Jesus the baptized and anointed one, son of Joseph and Mary, brother of James—even here God’s incarnation can be seen and felt and tasted, not only at this altar, but also in who we are and above all in who we are for others—for the poor and the weak, the orphan and the homeless, the refugee and the captive, even, as Jesus teaches us, even for our enemies and those who wish us harm.

In perilous days like ours, these are not just pious words. Some of the new would-be powers-that-be—some by vile rhetoric, some at gunpoint—insist on our accepting an oppressively homogeneous definition of cultural normalcy, tempting us to embrace a divisive, self-protecting fragmentation of the common good along the lines of race or sex or social class or ethnic loyalty or fanatical belief.

So repent. Accept God’s grace in you and in the world around you. See clearly the Christ who seeks embodiment in you. Do not let the mountains obscure the view. Do not get lost on the crooked path. Do not drop from sight in the valley. Our redemption is at hand. Prepare the way of the Lord: in our hearts, in our lives, in the lives our lives will touch. May the Divine Image be restored in all of us. May all flesh see it together—see the salvation of God in the glory of Jesus Christ.

Repent, and prepare the Way.