As the beauty of the sanctuary around us suggests, it’s easy to marvel at the amount of energy we put each year into Christmas. And not just those of us in the Church, either! The majority of people around us are knocking themselves out about now, planning menus, buying gifts, decorating, and worrying about expenses. Who is going to rescue us from all this? What exactly are we hoping will happen in the next several weeks? Not to sound Scroogey, but is it really likely that we will come out of this different in any way, besides being tired?

Today we begin a one-year journey through a new Gospel, and Mark begins in his characteristic fashion: an abrupt introduction to John the Baptist. We recognize John right away: he’s always been a bit of an odd duck to invite to a holiday party! When you think about it, who is John, with his hermit-chic sense of style and his vegan diet, to tell us anything about Christmas?

Fair question. We wouldn’t be the first people to ask this about John, either. But when the word of God came in the days of the Bible, it was usually through people who were not famous, who had little power or influence, but who had learned to do one particular thing well: listen to God. Divine inspiration came to people like John – people who were holy dreamers, and whose dreams led them to live very differently from the society around them. They were seen as weathervanes, who would point to God when the time was right for people to awaken to God’s dreams.

By the time of John, it had been almost 400 years since Israel had heard God's word afresh. Four centuries the people had been waiting and hoping for divine guidance. By then they were living without holy dreams, doing what directionless societies do: substituting celebrity fads, economic schemes, and empty nationalism for the knowledge of what God wanted for them, and intended to do in the world with them.

We might reasonably ask: how are we, today, doing at discerning God’s dreams for our time? Well, based on surveys you might think 2009 would be a time for holy dreaming: according to Gallup pollsters, 98% of Americans pray, and 96% of us believe in God. (Kind of makes you wonder who or what the other two percent are praying to, doesn’t it?) 94% of Americans expect to “go to heaven when they die” (whatever that means to them); 93% of those surveyed own a Bible. TIME and Newsweek regularly feature Jesus and topics like faith and religion on their covers, and they see their newsstand sales go up every time they do. Fact is, the term “spirituality” is popular with folks of just about every generation these days.

So are we on the cusp of a great awakening? A closer look at the data may suggest otherwise! Yes, 93% of us own Bibles, which is great, but over half of us cannot name the four Gospels or name even half of the Ten Commandments (not so great!). Six out of ten of us do not attend worship on anything like a regular basis, and just a bit more than that - 61% - do not believe in the Resurrection of the body, which Paul seemed to think is a baseline for Christian faith. Lastly, my personal favorite: one in ten Americans thinks Noah's wife was named Joan of Arc! So in spite of our seeming thirst for a Word from God, our people are not reading the Bible, not embracing the witness of the Church, not obeying God’s commandments about fidelity or generosity or neighborliness, nor even coming to worship the Being they claim to believe exists.

What is in style is not so much hearing the word of God, but yearning for it. Atheism has just about folded up its tent, these days, but in its place is a soft, undisciplined, self-guided seeking, an agnostic’s daydream of finding God. Coupled with this at present, perhaps like no other time in generations, is a wish for something to count upon, a hunger for a compelling dream that is worth committing to, an answer to the collapse of the false dream that says if you work hard, you’ll be fine and your children will have a life of opportunity beyond what you had. That false dream’s now on the ropes, and accordingly there’s a risk of giving in to cynicism and bitter fault-finding in the absence of something truthful to believe in. Deep down, people want to believe.

I think that’s why we knock ourselves out at Christmas, and will do so this year, even if there’s less to spend. We’ll pass the time with family, appear at the parties, let Wal-Mart’s version of The Little Drummer Boy put us in the mood to shop. But in all likelihood, none of it will change anything for us. It never has before. It never will.

If ever there was a relevant moment to hear John the Baptist, surely it is today. Who has an authentic word from God? What would it sound like? As John began to speak God's Word, we are told that great crowds formed. Mark suggests it reminded them of the prophecy of Isaiah that someday someone would come who’d be "the voice crying out in the wilderness, 'Prepare the way of the Lord.’”

The wilderness – have you ever been there? That’s the barren place, the empty space where people have to go to hear God speak, because otherwise there’s just too much noise around them that drowns out God's voice. Some folks avoid the wilderness at all costs – they’ll dial up the noise their whole lives just to keep away from it. Evidently John spent a lot of time in the wilderness. That was no accident. If you really want to experience the word of God, you too have to withdraw from noise. That’s why we in the Church keep inviting you to worship. Here you can hear sounds the world doesn't make. Here you can begin to listen to the heartbeat at the center of the universe, calling you into communion with itself.

In fact, the wilderness is close by, but first you have to clear a path to get to it - so John says. We have to make straight the way for our Savior to travel, every valley filled in and every mountain made low. This is something that VDOT does all the time, of course! But in the olden days, when a king was going to enter a city, the people who lived there would go out and construct a special entrance, straight and smooth. We’re not just guessing about that: a recent archeological dig in Israel is at Beit Shean, a great Roman City, where you can see the royal entrance, a wide, straight, smooth road, with magnificent columns on either side. Anyone traveling from Galilee to Jerusalem would have seen this particular grand entryway along the route – John the Baptist almost certainly saw it the way you and I see the Hollins exit go by. Everyone knew that a smooth, straight road was what you needed to make when a king was coming.

Well, it’s Advent. The purple season that means a king is coming. His name is Jesus Christ, and John is here to tell us to prepare the way for his arrival into our lives. John says we each need to do some major grading of the damage done in our hearts by hopelessness. He is telling us that we have to risk allowing God into the permanent construction zones inside us, the places we have gotten used to being disordered by addictions or old grievances or unholy habits. The crookedness he speaks of that needs straightening out, that’s part of the geography of our hearts, the parts we’d just as soon nobody ever sees. The only way to get our lives straightened out is to bend them toward the coming Savior. A vague search for God isn't going to do it. We all search – but what our land needs are people who have found God, those who have a deepening relationship with the Lord.

The way to do that is to confess your need for him. Don't overlook the potholes, the washed-out bridges, the under-construction zones in your heart. Don't act as if you can fill them in with Styrofoam peanuts, patch them with a few fleeting moments of spiritual uplift in your holiday. Those fixes will not last, for we cannot save ourselves. Confessing your need for a Savior is the best preparation you can make. Let’s get started on that now.

Lord Jesus who has come, who is coming, give us the courage to be silent in these weeks ahead, even as the world around us rushes on. Silent long enough to confront the truth about our need for salvation, our need for a transformed life we haven’t sufficiently imagined yet, until at last you have made our hearts highways for our God. Amen.