By Jim Perkinson, a sermon on Luke 3:1-6 for St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Detroit, MI (December 8, 2024)

So, we’ll begin way out in left field.  The indigenous teacher my wife and I have been frequenting for more than 12 years now—half white, half Native, growing up among the Pueblo folk of northern New Mexico, adopted into, trained by, and living among the Tzutujil Maya of Guatemala for more than 10 years before being sent back to the States to keep their traditions alive as the civil war there was destroying their culture and indigenous ways—wrote a book a few years ago called The Unlikely Peace of Cuchumaqiq: The Parallel Lives of People as Plants: Keeping the Seeds Alive.  In it, he—Martín Prechtel— recounted his experience of the Feb. 4, 1976 earthquake in Guatemala whose 7.6 rumble on the Richter scale killed more than 22,000 people and displaced some 1.2 million. 

Curiously, Prechtel begins that book with stories of Native kids running 15-kilometer races in area high school competitions, through the canyons near the Pueblo, which they almost always won, but refused to win as individuals.  Rather they would wait for each other before crossing the finish line, so only the entire Native group of kids, not an individual, would be crowned winner.  Or not. Running wasn’t about winning.  It was about running.  Being magnificent in your movement.  Interesting, but why begin a book on a mega-earthquake experience by talking about running?  We’ll get to that later.

So the big question for today’s word is, “To what do we attend when our world is ending?”  That question is obvious from the gospel, right?  No?  Just another Perkinson wild card, right?—old man increasingly going off the rails!  Well, this sermon will qualify.  But stay with me.  Let’s sneak up on it.

The Gaza debacle continues.  44,000 dead officially.  Unofficially, many, many more. Famine and starvation unfolding daily, whether or not the news bothers to mention it.  Ethnic cleansing ramping up in the West Bank. Here and there a bit of hope—the ICJ pronouncing on the likelihood of genocide; the ICC issuing arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant.  But none issued for Biden or Blinken and Co.  And of course, so many other places we look, we see similar decimation in recent years: 61,000-150,000 killed in Sudan (7 million-plus displaced), 10,000 Rohingya killed in Burma, the debacle in Ukraine, gang control proliferating in Haiti, Columbia, Peru, Mexico, even Brazil, continuing decimation in DRC, and now MAGA and Project 2025 and the murderous vision of the newly released book, Unhuman here (don’t get me started)!  Bleak!  Dire! 

Sort of like what the Jews of Roman-occupied Palestine faced in the first century.  A country effectively locked down with foreign control.  Languishing since the Assyrian and Babylonian exiles from five and even seven centuries earlier, such that even after some of the elites taken captive were allowed to return, most people—small farmers and animal-tenders living close to the land—were struggling continuously, and facing ever-more elaborate oppression rooted in the city-centers hosting the absentee Jewish landlords and their foreign colonizer cronies living there.  And the country officially only existing as a marginal backwater of various empires—first Persia, then Greece, then Rome—never allowed to run its own show or decide its own fate.

So, Luke takes up the earlier report of Mark’s gospel and gives it his own distinctive spin.  After narrating a few events from the childhood years of John the Baptist and Jesus, he launches into the beginnings of their respective ministries.  And does so by giving us a list of all the Roman and Jewish powers-that-be, the political rulers in office and social authorities presiding in Temple and synagogue alike throughout Palestine who reinforce the on-going economy of extraction that is devastating people and land relentlessly.  Since the birth of both John and Jesus, there have been periodic revolts that have been brutally crushed with high death rates.  So draconian is the regime of surveillance, that any gathering in public of more than 2-3 folks is suspect and may be subject to infiltration by Jewish spies ready to rat to Roman authorities and occasion disappearance and death of the “suspects.”  A scene ravaged. And quaking with terror.

So, in such a strait, where does the word of God come in?  Yes, it comes to John, but in what condition and context?  Where it always does.  In the wilderness.  In the outback. Where it is always has been. Because that is its home.  Not a sometime perch or occasional altar. No. It comes there because it is there. That is its body—and like our human bodies, its residence there, its “presence” is multiple, multi-faceted, a network of entanglement and interaction.  A reciprocity.  A mutuality.  A multi-species incarnation—part dove, part water, part mountain, part tree, part stone, part rain.  And yes—late in the day, late in the unfolding of this Great Mystery called creation, or evolution, or the “universe”—part human.  Such at least is the witness of the biblical text if we actually pay attention and do not read over what is actually said.

But anyway, the word comes to John in the wilderness and then the gospel writer paraphrases—not entirely accurately—these words, as he emphasizes, from chapter 40 of the book of Isaiah the prophet:

“The voice of one crying in the wilderness:
Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight.
⁵ Every valley shall be filled,
and every mountain and hill shall be brought low,
and the crooked shall be made straight,
and the rough ways shall be made smooth;
⁶ and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”

If we keep reading, John will go on in the text immediately to confront the elites who are coming out seemingly to embrace his ritual and appropriate his message—and oh, by the way, also do surveillance on his movement—with sharp and uncompromising repudiation.  “You brood of vipers”—he names them to their face! And he will also immediately counsel everyone else to return to a gift-economy way of living and circulating of goods.  “Those of you who have food share with those you have none and do the same with the clothes in your closet!” 

So, yes, resistance.  But also, we are here deep into a riddle about wild nature.  Think about it for a minute.  But we also need to do a bit of investigation. 

If we go back to Isaiah chapter 40, verse 3 actually says, not “a voice crying in the wilderness” but “a voice cries, ‘In the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord.’”  The wilderness was not just the place where the Voice temporarily hovered.  It was the place of the Way.  Such was the case when Abram and Sarai first walked out of Harran.  And when Moses and slaves exited Egypt.  And mountains were wild places of encounter with the Great Sacrality of Divinity.  Israel from the beginning represented a “back-to-the-land movement,” led by herd animals.  A pastoral nomad movement, in which humans had to learn how to live off of, and be schooled by, the natural reciprocities found in undomesticated terrain still populated by wild forms of biodiversity.  Mountains were places where clouds hovered, thundering and raining, and providing the “living water” that birthed all of life downstream.  And their herd animals—the cows, goats, sheep, and camels that they followed out of situations of urbanized domination—were their primary providers and teachers. 

And indeed, if we read on in Isaiah 40, asking how Divinity is described in this particular passage, the only concrete image we are given is “YHWH as shepherd” (Is 40: 11) caring for a pastoral-people who are part-and-parcel of their herds. 

(And it will get even deeper as the gospel writings, about how God is incarnate for this people, will not only insist Divinity takes shape as a kernel of wheat or blood of grape—as in “Eat my body and drink my blood”—but as a herd animal, a lamb. We want to reduce God to what is human—“Jesus”—but the witness is much broader than that if we pay attention. Jesus is not just “Jesus the Human.” But don’t let me get sidetracked here). 

So that is the first part of the riddle: the wilderness not as terrain of adversity from which you need to escape as soon as possible, but as place of revelation, decolonization, initiation, and re-formation, in which herd animals play a key role.

But the riddle proper is the next part.  “Every valley filled and every mountain leveled.”  Huh??!! When you think of being caught in a vice-grip of oppression, beleaguered on every side, locked into struggle against powers hell-bent on extraction and decimation, you immediately conjure a vision in your head of a world completely devoid of mountains and valleys, right?  “Ah, my problems will be solved if only the Earth is completely level, a big plain, no topographic features at all, no rivers, no heights against which clouds can hit and drop rain, just a great big smooth concrete expanse called a highway, ending in a parking lot, right?”  No???  That’s what our society does imagine.

What is this image all about?  Yes, Isaiah in chapter 40 is a prophet looking at the Babylonian captivity of some 20,000 Israelites who after 48 years of Exile long to walk home 650 miles back to Palestine.  But that route is not itself beset by a lot of mountains and valleys.  It will track along a major river—the Euphrates—and then traverse the King’s Highway—an ancient well-traveled trade route.  So, what is all this business about mountains leveled and valleys raised? 

I would suggest we have to bump from chapter 40, claiming the name of “Isaiah” but clearly writing somewhere around 538 BCE or so, back to the original “Isaiah” who wrote some 200 years earlier about 749 BCE.  Our best understanding is that the book named “Isaiah” actually pulls together writings penned over the course of more than three centuries, memorializing the impact of the first Isaiah figure who wrote during the Assyrian invasion of Israel/Judah.  And that Isaiah was apparently deeply affected by an event that took place when he was a kid. 

An earthquake devastated much of the area from present day Lebanon down through Israel and Judah to the Negev desert around 760 BCE in the days of king Uzziah in Judah that left its chaotic signature behind especially in massive urban rubble—broken walls, collapsed houses, ruined temples, etc.—that archaeology today has carefully examined along with the sedimentary evidence of the landscape.  It would have registered somewhere between 7.8 and 8.2 on the Richter scale—an upheaval shaking for some 90 seconds, matched in modern times by the 8.0 Sichuan quake in China in 2008 that killed nearly a million people. 

Somehow, Amos apparently predicted its advent some two years ahead of time, foreseeing destruction ranging through a geography as wide as Hazael and Hazor, Gaza and Gilead, Tyre and Ammon, Ashdod and Ashkelon, Edom and Teman, and inclusive of Israel and Judah and Jerusalem (Amos 1-2). Micah played out its consequences of molten mountains, cleft valleys, and down-pouring waters, after the fact in 740 BCE, as directed especially against the “high places” of Israel and Judah—namely the cities of Samaria and Jerusalem (Micah 1:3-6). 

And Zechariah was still referencing its effects 230 years later in anticipating a similar splitting of the Mount of Olives in the end times that would precipitate terror and fleeing as did that Great Rumble during Uzziah’s reign (Zech 14: 5).  Josephus will even note more than 700 years after the event that it occasioned a collapse of mountain sides that destroyed roads and filled in the king’s garden as well as creating a sun-flooded crack desecrating the Temple wall in Jerusalem that the writer associated with Uzziah’s sudden-appearing leprosy, incapacitating him for the rest of his reign. 

The event became legendary under the scribal meme “Day of the Lord” which thereafter populated prophetic writings warning of overwhelming retribution for political malfeasance and economic predation.  And Isaiah recorded his own initiatory encounter with the event in his Temple vision “in the year of king Uzziah’s death” wherein he suddenly saw—as if transported back in time from 739 BCE to the 760 BCE quake-event itself—the thresholds shaking, and the temple falling down in dust and smoke.  Indeed, that terrifying spiritual epiphany provoked his own vocation, promising the devastation of cities, the ruination of houses, and the ravaging of agricultural fields until all that was left was a single lone tree stump, housing the former “temple holiness” now returned to its original wild form as “seed” (Is 6). 

So, let’s go back to today’s text.  Arguably what we have is “leveled mountains and filled valleys” as the imagination of a seismic event marking a Sacral Advent.  But here the riddle gets even murkier. 

In a situation of political desperation, the prophets invoke this Natural Occurrence, this Wild Comeuppance, as . . . what?  Why?

A quick revisitation of the Isaiah 40 passage and then a story to make the point and conclude.  The entire chapter of this later Isaiah rumination is quite mysterious when we listen closely.  Three distinct voices show up.  Verses one and two begin: 

Comfort, comfort my people,
says your God.
² Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
    and cry to her
that her warfare^[a] is ended,

Clear enough that God is initiating, but then verses three and four and five get enigmatic:

³ A voice cries (unidentified):
“In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,
    Make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
⁴ Every valley shall be lifted up,
    and every mountain and hill be made low; etc.

Who is speaking here?  We’ll come back in a minute.  Because then verse six says:

⁶ A voice says, “Cry!”
    And I said, “What shall I cry?”
All flesh is grass,
    and all its beauty is like the flower of the field.
⁷ The grass withers, the flower fades,

Is this voice here saying “Cry!” then a third voice?  Or the same unspecified voice of the previous three verses?  Not sure, but in any case, the prophet finally then weighs in with his own voice lamenting the futility of pretending to say something or do something that indeed matters.  Why bother?  “All flesh is grass”—which is actually literally true.  One way or another all meat in this world is ultimately beholden to and composed of consumed plant matter—green leaves, yellow stems, brown roots, etc.  An entire sermon—or really an entire lifetime worth of teaching—in itself!  But here the key is this threesome of voices: “God,” Something Other, and human.  Who or what is this unidentified interlocutor?  Maybe an angel?  Maybe Nature or “the Wild”? Or maybe that’s what the angelic realm actually “is”—the Natural World when it speaks as “Messenger”?

In any case, God is saying, “Comfort!”  The human rejoinder is saying, “What’s the use—it is all going to wither anyway!”  But the middle voice is saying, “Earthquake!”  “Even mountains will come down and valleys be raised up!”  And curiously if we read through this entire passage in Isaiah 40:1-31, asking, “What is it that humans are being told to do after all of the back-and-forth, all of the “framing” and jousting of non-human voices and actors, there is only one admonition after more than 25 verses commanding, “See!” and one approbation after more than 30 verses enjoining, “Wait!” 

The entire counsel here is a message about time and timing.  After all the characterizing of things not human it just says, “Wait and see.”  In the face of fierce oppression.  And confoundingly, laughably, damnably, the Middle Voice, the Wild Natural “Angelic” Voice is saying (among other ways of interpreting it), “In the time scale of rocks, in the lifecycle of stone—yes, even mountains will eventually, a few million years out, become level and valleys become mountains.” 

But that Voice is also hinting, “But be aware, every once in a while, unannounced, mountains may suddenly quake into valleys and valleys pile up with stone discarded by mountains”—such as indeed did happen when the Uzziah Earthquake (as it became known) sent the rock of the heights of the city of Samaria (both natural pieces of mountain and masoned pieces of buildings) pouring down into the surrounding valley.

Ok.  So there it is. The message for Advent. For a time of struggle in the face of political opposition and economic exploitation and social exclusion.  For the era of Roman savagery.  Of MAGA stupidity.  Yes resist.  Yes, speak truth to power.  Yes, create gift-economy alternatives—share food and clothes, circulate what you have, care for those who have not. 

But also remember the Earthquake.  It shall come.  And go.  And it is bigger than you.  And bigger than all things human.  You are on a planet you didn’t create.  And it is big and mysterious and moving.  Even rocks are running—as Prechtel’s book so poignantly goes on to point out (which is why he began it with a story about races).  And have their own life, their own journey, their own timing.  Stay open to the immense beauty and grandiosity around you.  You didn’t begin as you. And you won’t end as you. 

You are a tiny part of an immense magnificence that is continuously experimenting, making this into that, and that into something else, and something else into “you,” and then you into an unforeseen eloquence and improvisation of yet another creaturely being, in a future not yours to control.  Don’t let the inane ugliness and insipid ridiculousness of human wealth-mongering and power-grabbing warp you into its image.  Honor earthquakes.  Sprout eagle wings (as Isaiah 40 will go to say) and fly anyway!  Indeed, some molecules of you will probably end up in an eagle wing at some point!  Run!  Walk!  See!  Delight! Fly! Even as you weep and scream.  The universe will not be tamed.  Earth will not be incarcerated.  And you will not disappear.  Just be changed into something else of mystery and magnificence.  In spite of what the control-mongers threaten! 

The word of God came to John in the wilderness.  And the way of God is in the wilderness.  And God is wild.  So are you.[1]

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[1] The promised story has to do with Prechtel’s life-changing earthquake experience.  But as that would require elaborating in some of his own words, it can only be intimated here as a whiff awaiting another sermon, another time.  Or your own investigation of his book . . .