Straight Way
Isaiah 40:1-11; Mark 1:1-8

December 8, 2002

Yes, we are in the land of the straight highways. Saskatchewan only has turns in the road when it wants to, not when it has to. That’s not completely true, as any highway engineer will tell you, but the roads here are uncommonly straight. And so are we. So straight, perhaps, that a few of us may believe we have no need to change and repent, and straighten ourselves out.

Straight way has an older English usage. A young woman was reading the Gospel in a black Baptist congregation with dignity, but great relish. Mark’s Gospel in particular loves the adverb “immediately” and the King James Version renders that expression “straightway.” Whenever this reader came to the word she would stretch out the syllables and the amen corner would repeat “Straightway!”

Without hesitation: that’s when the command to repent is supposed to take effect. Those who take time to think about that new way of life, that new diet, that different way of spending money, usually keep on thinking and not doing. Make straight in the wilderness a highway for our God, declares John the Baptist, and get on to it, straightway.

Last week we waited, this week we prepare, get organized, get ready. In neither week does anything get accomplished. Everything is still potential - what may be, what could be, what might happen. But the soul must learn to wait, and if you do not prepare, nothing will come of your efforts anyway.

The New Testament lesson read are the very first words in the first Gospel written. The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is with John the Baptist, the strange man from the wilderness who came dressed like Elijah, the greatest prophet of Israel. His strange and terrible message intrudes into our comfort cruise zones. Repent! Turn your life around and change.

Straightway. Turning your life around is seldom a carefully thought-through decision. True, you may have had casual or fleeting thoughts from time to time. But I doubt there are any of you who sat down at your kitchen table (where all the best decisions are made) and calculated the costs and benefits and detriments of various styles of life. Instead, something grabs you from within and you jump, immediately, straightway, and try setting out a straight and different way to the Promised Land.

If you have ever heard a sermon before, you have probably heard several that in one way or another say the same thing. You haven’t been living the way you should; repent and turn your life around; and start walking the straight path and you will reap the rewards. Straight way, that’s simple and straight forward - but intellectually and spiritually misleading, if not dishonest.

Many a preacher and denomination has proclaimed the impossible Gospel that once you have been born again or saved or have repented in proper fashion of all your sins, you cannot sin again lest you go to Hades or Sheol or Gehenna, or even to Hell. Can a good Christian sin after he or she has become truly committed to the Christian life? Yes, and there’s something wrong if you do not.

It’s a straight way through the wilderness only if you are looking down from 30,000 feet up. For every two feet forward you will fall back at least one, if not one-and-a-half. Being a saint is not being perfect; being a saint is struggling with all your heart, soul, mind and strength to live with God and with other flawed and failed human beings.

In one small town there was an old reprobate from the backwoods who would show up every time an evangelist came to town.

When the service was about to come to a close and the evangelist asked people to come forward to accept salvation this man would walk the sawdust trail to the front of the tent, fall on his knees and lift his eyes heavenward and shout - “Fill me up, Jesus. Fill me, fill me up, Jesus.”

Within a few weeks the man would have backslid into his old ways.

But the next time an evangelist came to town there he would be up front eyes to the ceiling shouting - “Fill me up, Jesus. Fill me, fill me up, Jesus.”

Finally, one old woman had had enough. “Don’t do it, Lord,” she yelled, he leaks!”

Don’t we all? Leak, that is?

One of those early monks in the desert heard how the monastery was going to have a trial and judge a fellow monk who had committed a few odd sins here and there. The older monk picked up a bag of sand and carried it with him all around the community. The bag had a small hole in it and so the sand trickled out behind him wherever he went, finally emptying the bag by the time he reached his destination. The elders were alarmed and puzzled when they saw the trail of sand winding its way through the area. “These are my sins,” the older monk explained, “leaving a trail behind me.”

Straightway, you and I begin again this Advent to prepare a highway for our God. We need to do this every year at this time because our sandbag full of sins and weaknesses and omissions are leaking rapidly behind us. Just one Advent is never enough. The highway always seems straight, but along the way there are rises and falls, twists and turns, and you and I do the things we should not do and do not do the things we should do, as a fellow named Paul once said.

The Straight Way is not to be bothered by the sands of sins of our neighbours, nor to believe that we have failed once too often, but to realize that now is another Advent, and we have another opportunity to make God’s road a little straighter in our lives. We are pilgrims and it is the journey, not the destination that measures us.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan