Wilderness voice?

A voice cries out in the wilderness, “prepare the way of the Lord,
   make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

Our Advent carol service last week started in the choir vestry. The Church was pretty busy but the first piece of music happened slightly outside. My someone referred to it as “singing from the cupboard” but that aside I am sure the idea comes from this voice in the wilderness – a voice apart from other voices coming from a place of solitutde and strength.

Wilderness in the Bible is a common theme a quick consordance search reveals 347 mentions of the word in Old and New Testaments. Wilderness is both geographical and spiritual, it is that which is set apart from other, that which is set apart from ordinary dwelling. In the Old Testament the great patriarchs and matriarchs encounter God in the wilderness, the people of God are called to forty years wandering and later, Isaiah promises an end to wilderness in the passage which is quoted in this mornings Gospel.

To go back to the forty years wandering. It is not some cruel trick of God that the people of Israel are brought out of Egypt and then apparently dumped – they themselves reveal this angst to Moses – have you brought us out into this wilderness to die? But Wilderness turns them into a people who have to learn to be led, to trust and to be reliant on God. Of course, this was not a totally successful process, the deep angst recounted in places like Psalm 95 reveals the rebellion which remained in the people – they have not know my ways, complains God.

John the Baptist comes out of wilderness. He may well have been coming from the great Essene tradition of poverty and ascetisim. Essenes may have had some settlements but the Jewish historian Josephus recalls that they were in large numbers in every town, although not in the cities. John eats basic and found food, he weatr rough clothes and almost certainly looks a bit different to most of the folk around him.

If I mention Greek punctuation it is likely that some of you will assume that this is getting very boring very quickly – but when I looked back at Isaiah 40 which is where this quote is from I noticed one little comma was in a different place. It says:

A voice cries out:
‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,
   make straight in the desert a highway for our God.' Not “a voice cries out in the wilderness,” but rather “A voice cries out, colon, “In the wilderness.....”” Greek, of course, does not have punctuation like we do so sometimes we are a little at the mercy of guesswork when figuring out clauses and sentences.

Why does this matter – well in one sense, of course it doesn't, but it did strike me that for our present time moving this comma might help John the Baptist to set a very good scene in which to fit our Christmas. Because what it John the Baptist was not a disembodied voice shouting in essence from a cupboard, what if he was not detatched and away from people but wilderness was for him as much about being a stranger in his own familiar land as it was about being away from human society?

I don't want to push the point too far but when we read these very familiar words it is always worth listening to what God might be saying through them this time. The comma reminded me that we live in a time and place which can often feel like the worst aspects of Wilderness – a society which is often isolating and demanding. It is a real temptation for many of us to think that real wilderness would be a good and easy existense compared to the one in which we actively engage every day. Isn't that why TV presenters like Bear Grylls are so populat – if only I could escape beyond this, we think to ourselves.

Of course, within the Christian tradition there are those who have retreated to wilderness. The Desert fathers and mothers, very early on, showed a way of self-denial and prayer from which the Church mines many of its spiritual treasures. But, it is interesting, that although the life was often quite solitary, it was not a life of avoidance but of encounter and change.

The western monastic tradition showed and shows much the same reality – that living in small community is often more challenging than living in abstract urbanity – even when everyone is apparently facing the same direction.

Times of wilderness are useful for all of us. Times to regroup, re-centre, re-mind. Times when we ourselves make space for God, allow encounter on God's time and not our own hectic lifestyle. In many senses a daily prayer space can be a time of wilderness, a time of openess and emptying out – and emptying out time is not wasted time – even though our mind may guiltily wander to the shopping list or the garden – we can always come back in, God waits patiently.

Then there are those unavoidable times of wilderness, those times when bad things happen bereavements, job losses, illness and so many more. Those times when we feel something like the Israelites must have felt with the Egyptian army behind and the huge Red Sea in front and no apparent way through and God spoke – but remember they did not cross into the land of milk and honey, their salvation was to journey in trust, not to sit and eat and God usually turns up in the most unexpected places.

Christians may well describe modern Western society as desert. Starved and wandering as we may be seen to be by those around us this is not the reality at all. This is wilderness. This is a place where we listen and discover God and where God meets us in cloud and fire. But too often we, as the Church, are complaining that at least we had food and drink as we rub our hungry bellies. “Make straight the way of the Lord,” calls Isaiah, “prepare a highway for our God,” that is hardly a call to a destitute people and perhaps some of the priviledge and expectation which the Church had built up around herself was, if not Egypt, then at least Babylon.

At the end of the day, whereever you put your commas, the voice of the Church is not one which is distant and disengaged but it has to be at the heart of humanity, engaging on every level with human life and this is exhausting if we are spending our time frantically turning over every rock to find God. God is here for us, always and everywhere.

The psychiatrist and author Ian McGilchrist notes that when we go explore as far as we can ito subatomic structure we find a lot of empty space between things – a whole lot of nothing, he says. But a whole lot of nothing is not how the Bible sees space, wilderness is not empty but a pregnant pause in God's creation – full of the expectation of encounter and in this Advent season, full of birth and life and Incarnation.