Mountains And Valleys…..All Laid Low!

Malachi 3:1-4  Luke 3:1-6 John 3:16

Bring out your Christmas wrapping paper and let the tinsel fall all over the floor.

Blow up your giant inflatable Father Christmas and set it up in your front garden.

Dust off your double CD of Christmas Number ones and start singing along.

Burst through the door of the newly opened Wilkinson’s and come out laden with sparkly shopping.

Let’s run to Christmas as fast as we can and close our ears to these disturbing advent readings.

For they stand in contrast to our much loved secular preparations.

 If we pay attention to them, just for a second, we shall discover this is no quiet time of holy waiting for a gentle child to be born of a gentle Mother.

What is threatened in Advent is devastation and destruction on a massive scale.

No use hiding in church either, for even those who gather there will be subject to a painful purifying and refining – thus warns the prophet Malachi.

Then we find some dire words of the prophet Isaiah transcribed into our Gospel reading. Words which speak of the flattening of everything and the straightening of everything – so that the Lord may come, unimpeded, and by a direct route to claim his kingdom.

What was I thinking of, that words like this be read out in church today, and what were you thinking of when you raised your voice to thank God for them?

There is a book that has been voted the best novel of the decade.

It’s entitled “The Road” and the author is Cormack McCarthy.

It describes a Father and a Son walking in a derelict world – where everything has been flattened like Advent.

But It’s a cold, hard book, because the flattened land is all there is. It describes a pilgrimage without destination and where feelings of love and hope twinkle only sporadically.

Wandering about on the earth with  no hope of a manger, a cross, an empty tomb or yet a spirit filled church. Just the fragile human love of two people who have survived some dreadful apocalypse.

“Every valley shall be filled and every mountain and hill shall be brought low”

That’s the crux of the Advent promise and I don’t like the sound of it.

For I love the mountains you see, and if they are not too steep, and if there are some helpful footholds, I clamber up them with all the agility of a young monkey. My walking companion is left puffing and panting in the foothills.

In those high places, where you can see for miles. There you discover the smallness of yourself and the greatness of God. In the wind that blows you, the horizon ahead of you, the panorama around you, and that stillness, that freedom from the rumble of life which you only get when you come in touching distance of the sky.

And God’s going to come and tear it all down.

Are you a mountain person, who grasps the possibility of God with both hands, and runs after the rumour of his presence in people and places even when the world will not go with you? I pray that you might be!

I fight shy of the valleys though. The descending path that picks its way steeply amongst rocks and crags. I am one who stumbles down the mountainside gingerly believing there to be a stone to trip over at every turn. My walking companion goes jumping on ahead of me, and waits with his hands on his hips on the safe valley floor.

In the valley there is a quietness, but it is so eerie, and there is a flat path but it’s so muddy, and although the sun might be shining on the heights, well, down there it always feels as if night is drawing in. You live in a permanent twilight.

Each of us are valley people sometimes. We cannot help but be.  When things oppress us and scare us and we regard each step we take with suspicion. Well, God says he’s going to come and he’s going to fill those valleys in. I wonder what you think about that.

In Biblical times the valley was the place where wars would be fought and where boundaries between friend and foe would be established – but the valley was also the place where tiny seeds would be planted and there they would grow against all the odds.

In Biblical times the people saw the valleys as the gaps between the mountains – and it might be good for us to think in those terms – the gaps where the presence of God cannot be found – and the Advent promise – God coming to fill those gaps in.

God coming to fill those gaps in – in the person of Jesus Christ our Lord.

The blessings of the highest ground will take hold in the lowest places.

The person who was only aware of his finite humanity will be aware of his capacity for divinity too – and those who thought they alone were holy – will rub shoulders with the fragile and the doubting.

Jesus, it seems to me, taught the people on the mountainside and he healed them in the valleys, so that following him there might be blessing everywhere.

And as he looked to where all this was leading – he said one day “I when I am lifted up will draw all men to myself” all of us will be brought to the same level, and he would do that on his cross.

A cross firmly staked not on a sunny green hill  far away , as Mrs CF Alexander imagines!– but down in the valley of our experience of sin, doubt and fear – right up close to where we are.

So hush the sound of sleigh bells in the snow, just for a while longer, leave the crib figures in their box for a fortnight or more, and stand by for the miracle which is the flattening of everything.

But it turns out to be a flattening for the tenderest intention.

No longer does God have to bend low upon the earth to embrace his creation.

Now he comes within the touching distance of one set of lips upon another.

A virgin will take her son into her arms and kiss him and at that moment the mountains and the valleys can only bow down – and know that their days of separation are at an end.

Our lives joined up with God’s life.

Can anything be more wonderful!

RH 6.12.09