November 30: Prepare the Way of the Lord
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Day 2 - Monday, November 30
Title: PREPARE THE WAY OF THE LORD
Scripture: Isaiah 40:3
The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Poetry:
From “Progress”
by Fanny Howe
The moods of strangers
determine your day.
Will the driver be kind?
Please God let him be.
This is poverty, not just
second childhood
in a divided city.
But my thanks to the soul-heat
of the one who works the register
and shakes the bag.
PREPARE THE WAY OF THE LORD
Progress, according to our poet, Fanny Howe, is hoped for in the mundane interactions on our complex lives lived out before, with, and toward strangers, with a prayer ‘Please God…’ For many of us in these crooked COVID times, even those interactions are hidden behind masks, making the strangers’ mood strangely hard to read. For many of us our lives have become more like deserts, even in built up urban and suburban areas. Our communion has dwindled to a small bubble, buttressed by the ever-buffering stream of zoomed virtual meetings. When the ordinary is made crooked we are set on edge. Cornered we clumsily and impatiently trip over those close to us, or we cling needily and greedily to the smallest communication if our normal has become isolation and loneliness. We are parched, thirsty for the oasis of what our memories tell us were the good old days. Days when Advent would be a preparation for a gathered celebration with extended family and local church of the Lord’s coming at Christmas.
But now we experience this hope as those in the desert. Isaiah tells of one who will cry in the wilderness ‘Prepare the way of the Lord.' This is what we proclaim to one another this Advent. And we do so in the wilderness of a pandemic. ‘Make straight in the desert a highway for our God.' Whatever crooked - twisted - never getting anywhere - locked down - opened up - safe at home - when will this end - will I be safe - I couldn’t even say goodbye – path we are on as we wonder what thriving might again look like, there is hope in the progress of our God. We look forward.
Alongside Handel’s Messiah, in our other musical offering Propaganda raps to us:
Life is not a comic book
There are no perfect victims or villains, just us
[…] May we be crooked champions
[…] My crooked soul covered in blood stains
[…]Yeah, hoping in salvation
Waiting for the day He make the crooked way straight
We march on a crooked road
And we raise our eyes
And we raise our eyes
Justice is going to roll
Like a river wide
Like a river wide
Glorious state of our soul's gentrification
But the purchaser ain't put us out, he paid all our mortgages
And repaved the streets and found homes for the orphans
Advent in a pandemic brings to our mass attention the crooked reality that is always the reality of our fallenness. Yet, for many of us who are free to read devotionals online, our communication consumption only fleetingly awakens us the suffering under crooked systems of injustice and inequality that might put us out of our homes into the wilderness, might call in our debt to leave us in the desert of homelessness, or simply deprive us of family leaving us abandoned.
For comfort, we are tempted to see the beauty of the desert highway disappearing as a straight path into the horizon beyond Shiprock Mountain, Navajo Nation, New Mexico. But we should see the highway’s straightness not as just the quickest route through the desert but also the perfect righteousness of the one who comes even into the desert of our crookedness. In our diseased and dislocated condition this Advent, we are put on notice by the prophet that our God comes to straighten out our twisted world by entering into our wilderness in his awesome majesty. This is sunrise, not sunset. We look forward to the day, and don’t just look back. God is bringing truth to light in judgment at his coming. And the prophet’s call is a personal summons – ‘Be ye’ - to be prepared by submitting our cherished hopes and plans of progress to the oncoming divine gift - firmly bulldozing the best path, not as an ideology, political policy, or self-realization, but in the person of the Son of God coming to indwell creation as one of us.
Prayer:
Lord, as you invite us to prepare the way for you, we confess our crookedness, our readiness to grasp small relief in health, safety, employment, or recovery, while failing to have our eyes lifted to your coming. We pray from the wilderness of lives that your highway would catch us up in the progress of your good news this Advent. We ask that our preparation will allow you to use us to declare the rightness of your Way that we know in Jesus, for whose coming again we long.
Amen.
Andy Draycott
Associate Professor of Theology and Christian Ethics
Talbot School of Theology
Biola University
For more information about the artwork, music, and poetry selected for this day, we have provided resources under the “About” tab located next to the “Devotional” tab.
About the Artwork:
Sunset Above Shiprock
Color Photograph
2016
Photo: Nick Fox / Alamy Stock Photo
Shiprock Mountain is a volcanic rock formation rising high above the desert plains of the Navajo Nation in New Mexico. Today’s Scripture of the voice in the wilderness refers to the itinerant preacher, John the Baptist, who foretold of a coming Messianic figure. During his ministry, John the Baptist lived much of his life in isolated obscurity in the harsh and unpopulated Judean Desert, much like the remote, desert area of Shiprock Mountain. There in the desolate lands of Judea, people were confronted with John's powerful message of repentance, urging people to repent of their sin and to prepare for the arrival of the promised Messiah.
Music #1:
“Made Straight” from the album Crooked
Lyrics:
Made Straight
So self-sufficiency dies hard, right?
But when rightfully humbled, God shows up in burning bushes
May we step into the fray like "I got something to say"
May we hold no armies, no weapons, no ceremonial authority
Just a walking stick of an old-timer and not an ounce of fear
May we have a faith birthed out of a revelation of promise
A reflex caused by what you know to be true of God
Life is not a comic book
There are no perfect victims or villains, just us
We are smog-laced oxygen tanks tossed to capsize murderers
Resting on his power of deliverance and the integrity to accomplish it
May I stand in the belly of what Babylon is biting
In the vein of the best metaphor of what love exists for
May my legacy be permanently associated with those hated
An exodus from Exodus with zero concern for what Pharaoh thinks
May we be crooked champions
And we are not those without hope or hoping in hope alone
Resurrection shows that this land is not our home
We are sojourners living out what a past action bought us
With the knowledge that we have yet to see the fullness of what it got us
All of creation groaning, labor aches and pains
Like the crushing of a planet's moon could make Saturn's rings
My crooked soul covered in blood stains
Blessing is a perspective, the ironic gift of cancer
If I could bottle the feeling where every morning's a blessing
'Cause every breath could be your last one man, that's the answer
Be patient with one another, be gracious 'cause our time is short
Remember you too were once in darkness 'fore he brought forth
Christ the hope of glory sealed our eternity
Purchased permanently, by only Him worthy
But my mouth has yet to catch up with what my heart knows
And my heart is still lightyears behind my library, it's scary
There's no plaques on my wall
'Cept the influence I had on those with plaques on they wall
It could leave a man salty like "when it finna be my turn?"
And a lower me is leaning towards an attitude beneath me
And I am just like them, a systemic participant
Longing for escape and hoping in salvation
Yeah, hoping in salvation
Waiting for the day He make the crooked way straight
We march on a crooked road
And we raise our eyes
And we raise our eyes
Justice is going to roll
Like a river wide
Like a river wide
Glorious state of our soul's gentrification
But the purchaser ain't put us out, he paid all our mortgages
And repaved the streets and found homes for the orphans
Once under the thumb of an unbearable slumlord
Dumb son of a gun said rescue could never come lord
And we all believed him and took matters into our own hands
And made a filthy mess of our own homelands
And crimes of survival, they were proof of a flawed system
And we only got ourselves to blame, our cheating little hearts
But the hope of trans-cultural love and acceptance
That erased racism and sexism, the blessed
Day we don't look down on the poor like we ain't like them
And they not us and gender ain't [fought off a suicide?] among us
The already but not yet, so we look for it with joy and anticipation
For when the time keeper comes soon and make the crooked way straight
We march on a crooked road
And we raise our eyes
And we raise our eyes
Justice is going to roll
Like a river wide
Like a river wide
I'm really starting to enjoy my alone time as I'm getting older
I've started to notice I'm becoming more introverted
Tryna declutter
Finding I don't need a lot of stimulus to get me over
And you can turn the track down
I like it when the level's even in my head
Sometimes I find the volume is peaking in my brain
Stays in the red and it's not sustainable
Help me to remember peace of mind
Despite what would be happening
And hold on to the quiet
Remember the quiet
Help me remember the quiet
Remember the quiet
Performers/Composers:
Propaganda and Audrey Assad
Lyricist:
Jason Emmanuel Petty (b. 1979), better known by his stage name Propaganda, is an American Christian hip hop and spoken word artist and poet from Los Angeles, California. He has released four albums as an independent artist and one collaborative album with the rapper Odd Thomas. He dropped Crooked, a project that asked serious political and social questions, in 2017. Propaganda has traveled the country on several tours, including the "Unlimited Up" tour with Murs; the "Spotlight" tour with Sho Baraka in 2016; and the "Tension Tour" with Kings Kaleidoscope in 2017.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_(musician)
Audrey Assad (b.1983) is the daughter of a Syrian refugee, an author, speaker, producer, and critically lauded singer/songwriter and musician. She creates music she calls “soundtracks of prayer” on the label Fortunate Fall Records, which she co-owns with her husband. Assad’s music has always been drawn from a well of deep personal experience and discovery. With each new release, she gives listeners an honest look at the seasonal highs and lows of what has turned out to be a layered and complex spiritual journey. A multiple Dove award nominee, she has never shied away from writing her wounds and struggles into her songs; instead, she seems to face her greatest trials armed with the knowledge that true healing can only take root in the soil of vulnerability. The result is a bravely authentic, confessional approach to writing songs about God, a style which has never been on brighter display than with Assad’s newest project, the 2020 release of Eden.
http://www.audreyassad.com/
Music #2:
Messiah, HWV 56, Pt. 1: 2. Comfort Ye, My People
Lyrics:
The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness,
Prepare ye the way of the Lord,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Messiah Performers/Musicians/Lyricists/Composer:
Unless otherwise noted, all Messiah performances are by Margaret Marshall, Catherine Robbin, Anthony Rolfe-Johnson, Robert Hale, Charles Brett, Saul Quirke, the English Baroque Soloists, and the Monteverdi Choir conducted by Sir John Eliot Gardiner. Biographical information for the performers and musicians can be found by clicking here.
About the Poet:
Fanny Howe (b. 1940) is an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and studied at Stanford University. Howe has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Council for the Arts, and the Village Voice. In 2008 she won an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2009, presented annually by the Poetry Foundation to a living U.S. poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition. Howe’s collections of poetry include The Needle’s Eye (2016), Second Childhood (2014), Come and See (2011), On the Ground (2004), Gone (2003), Selected Poems (2000), Forged (1999), Q (1998), One Crossed Out (1997), O’Clock (1995), and The End (1992). “If someone is alone reading my poems, I hope it would be like reading someone’s notebook. A record. Of a place, beauty, difficulty. A familiar daily struggle,” Howe explained in a 2004 interview with the Kenyon Review. Howe taught for almost 20 years at MIT, Tufts University, and elsewhere before taking a job at the University of California at San Diego, where she is now professor emerita.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/fanny-howe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanny_Howe
About the Devotion Author:
Andy Draycott
Associate Professor of Theology and Christian Ethics
Talbot School of Theology
Biola University
Andy Draycott is a British immigrant scholar living in Southern California with his family. He is a lifelong Charles Schultz’ Peanuts fan, enjoys reading novels and social history, cycling, running and baking. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of Theology and Christian Ethics at Biola’s Talbot School of Theology. He counts God’s blessings in Christ, in local church, in family life, and in delightful work colleagues. His teaching and research on John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress can be sampled at ProfessorPilgrimsProgress.com.