One of the things that happens or at least should happen as we grow older is we realize there are very few choices in life that do not have both positive and negative effects. The things we do that are in one sense good can be in another sense bad or at least less than desirable. In economics this is known as a trade off. If you want the technical definition, it is a situational decision that involves diminishing or losing one quality, quantity or property of a set or design in return for gains in other aspects. In practical terms this means to gain something we must lose something. So, for example, if I decide I want to buy a new pair of pants the money that I spend on the pants will not be available to spend elsewhere, like giving it to someone in need. In such a transaction we weigh the desirability of the new pair of pants against the desirability to help a poor person. Now I do not bring this up to make everyone feel guilty for owning pants, I bring it up to point out that getting one thing may require losing something else.
And this discussion of economic trade offs brings us naturally to John the Baptist, who incidentally did not own pants, but according to Mark’s Gospel, was clothed with camel’s hair, and had a leather girdle around his waist, and ate locusts and wild honey. Which would probably not get him on Vanity Fair’s best-dressed list. But back to what John did. John comes and using the words of the Prophet Isaiah says the following about the coming of Jesus, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.'" It sounds pretty nice, we are going to see the salvation of God by preparing the way of the Lord, making paths straight and smoothing out the rough places. Handel even set it to some bouncy Baroque music. But this niceness only lasts until we start to think about what is required to make a path straight and a rough place smooth. We are so used to paved roads and freeways these days that it may be difficult. But producing such things requires a fair amount of brute force. To make a path straight you have to go through a landscape that does not necessarily want a pathway, let alone one that is straight. Pathways require cutting trees, removing rocks and boulders, bulldozing hills and so on. Similarly to making a straight path, smoothing out something, which is rough, takes a similar amount of brute force by forcefully removing of a lot of things that are not smooth. You can’t make a path straight or a rough place smooth through happy thoughts are asking a tree to politely move. It is rough and difficult work. Which leads us naturally to the question of what does this image mean on a more personal level, because I am pretty sure that John was not talking about a New Deal work project when he spoke these sentences. Rather he meant them as a personal and societal call, a figurative smoothing out and straightening. And so what exactly does this mean that we are supposed to do?
Before going on I need to say that there is always a temptation, especially in sermons to have runaway metaphors. That is we professional sermonators will go on way too long and try to connect every dot when in reality it was meant to simply be a literary device. So I don’t want to try and equate rough places and crooked pathways with something specific within us but rather want to talk about those harsh things we may encounter that can lead to change in ourselves which are, at the same time, painful and difficult. In the movie the Shadowlands, which is about C.S. Lewis, the character of Lewis says this, “I suggest to you that it is because God loves us that he makes us the gift of suffering. Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world .You see we are like blocks of stone out of which the sculptor carves the forms of men. The blows of his chisel which hurt us so much are what makes us perfect.” As best I can tell the real C.S. Lewis never said this, but it is in the spirit of something he might say. So let’s think about this in the sense of the economic trade off that I started the sermon with. In this case we want something, that is we want to be perfected so that we can see the salvation of God. But there is a tradeoff in order to see this salvation we will have to deal with what Lewis calls the chisel blows.
I certainly realize that such an understanding is probably not the most popular, for we live in a time that does not like tradeoffs. We want to have our cake and eat it too, as it were. Even though I have really never quite understood this expression – I mean is there another reason that you would want to have cake besides eating it – perhaps make it into a lawn decoration, but back to my point. Trade-offs are not terribly popular. Decisions, if the advertising industry is to be believed, are not supposed to have consequences. We would like to be perfect without any difficulty. If you don’t believe me just look at fad diets, which promise things like “eat all the chimichangas you want and lose forty pounds a week.” But deep down we know such promises are not true. And just like real life, Christianity does not deliver a pain free, wonderful existence. Christianity as a consumer choice should not tell you that our journey towards God will be without incident of difficulty. But is that a reason to avoid the call of John the Baptist? Is it right for us to ask why would we sign up for Christianity if it involves blows of the chisel? Perhaps if we frame it like this it might not be but I would argue that this is framing things in the wrong way. Because the fact of the matter is that blows of the chisel are going to come and the question is not how can we avoid them but rather how do we use those to perfect ourselves, to make our paths straight, because no one escapes this world unscathed.
This past week we lost our 41st president George H.W. Bush (who, as you know was a good Episcopalian). He was a man who by all accounts lived a charmed life. He was born into a wealthy family, attended all of the right schools and eventually ascended to the highest office in the land. However, when reading about his life you saw that even someone of his status did not escape this world without a few chisel blows. He lost his daughter Robin to leukemia when she was just three years old. The loss of a child is something no one should have to suffer. And we know that this loss that stuck with him to the end. He is reported to have said on the day he died that he would now get to see her again.
No matter who we are we are going to encounter things that are less than pleasant. The character of C.S. Lewis in Shadowlands argued that this came from God. And I know some people do not like such a view and honestly I am not sure we have to go this far. Certainly, if we want to see the difficulties of this life as God testing us we can, but we also can see them as the work of Satan or we can simply see them as just a collection of random events. What matters in all of this is how those events shape us. How do we use those events to make the rough places smooth and the crooked paths straight? Shakespeare said, “Let me embrace thee, sour adversity, for wise men say it is the wisest course.” We can go through life and suffer wrongs and difficulties and learn nothing or we can embrace them, using them to smooth off the rough places, to make the crooked places straight so that at the end we are turned into something, which is beautiful and wonderful. It will be then and only then that we may be God’s forevermore.