The Punctuation of Advent

When I do premarital counseling with couples, we spend a lot of time considering the dynamics of their family of origin.  I ask each partner, “If I could take a time machine back to the era of your childhood and visit your family home, what would I see?  How did your parents interact with one another?  Did they fight a lot?  Did they show overt affection for one another?  Did they favor one child over the others?  How did they discipline?”

I do this because we are all the products of the households in which we were raised.  As adults, we either unconsciously express the patterns of behavior we witnessed in our parents or consciously strive to act and live differently.  Either way, adult life is a constant emotional interaction with the life we saw patterned in childhood.

This affects us in ways large and small.  Some people had parents who withheld affection.  Some had parents who were way too indulgent.  Some had parents who helicoptered and bulldozed so that they now have trouble fending for themselves.  We all had something.  And me?  Well, I had that trickiest household of all, one that continues to haunt my every verbal and written interaction, one that sometimes strain relationships and steals time: My mother…was an English teacher.

How does this affect me in adulthood?  I am obsessed with punctuation and grammar.  I cannot abide a split infinitive.  Apostrophes used to indicate the plural make my eye twitch.  A sentence-ending preposition drives me to distraction.  I fret to the point of panic over correctly using the words “lie” and “lay.”  My sweet mama ruined me.

Except that, occasionally, the imprinting of an English-teaching grammar mom is a true gift.  And today is one of those days.  This is the Second Sunday of Advent, one of those rare Sundays in which we read the same passage from both the Old and New Testaments.  First, we read Isaiah 40:1-11, and then we read the first eight verses of Mark, which quote Isaiah at length.  And when we read these side-by-side, the inner imprinting of my English teacher mother empowers me.  I want to scream, “Wait a minute!  Though the words are the same in these passages from Isaiah and Mark, the punctuation is different!  What the heck is going on here?!?”

Look at the passages again. Notice very carefully where Isaiah places quotation marks and commas, and then where Mark does so.    

Isaiah says, “A voice cries out: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.’”

Mark says, “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’”

Do you see the difference?  Do you see why it makes this son of an English teacher furrow his brow?  In Mark, the voice that cries out is in the wilderness, but in Isaiah, the voice is not in the wilderness.  The wilderness is the place the voice says we are to prepare for the Lord’s coming.

So, which is it?  It’s actually neither, or both.  You see, in the Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New Testament, there is no punctuation.  Really.  In the original texts, words simply flow one into the other, paragraphs simply run on.  This is one of innumerable reasons that there is a disingenuousness in our Fundamentalist brothers’ and sisters’ insistence on a literal reading of Holy Scripture.  Even making sentences out of the original text—even inserting periods, or, commas, or quotation marks—is an interpretive choice.  In the original, punctuation isn’t there.

In today’s case of Isaiah and Mark, this presents a distinction with a difference.  Is the voice out there, in distant wild lands, calling to us in here, in our civilized comfort, saying “Prepare the way for Jesus?  Or, is the voice in here with us, saying, “Your soul is the wilderness.  Your inner life is the parched, disordered, crooked, hard-to-navigate place.  It is there that needs to be prepared for Jesus.”

I actually met John the Baptist.  Truly I knew him, in the form of the Reverend Dr. Will Spong.  Will was the less well-known but arguably much more consequential brother of noted (or notorious, depending upon who you ask) Episcopal Bishop John Spong.  Will was my pastoral theology professor in seminary, and he looked and acted for all the world like John the Baptist.  Will’s hair grew long and wild.  He had a glass eye from a childhood baseball injury, which was always just unfocused-enough to give the impression that Will was looking both at you and off into the middle distance, as if for the coming of the Lord.  The only thing that obviously distinguished Will from John the Baptist is that he wore a starched open-collared shirt and blue blazer.  (Granted, he wore these with Birkenstocks.)  All that is to say that Will’s very existence seemed to be both of the wilderness and of the civilized world. 

The Reverend Will Spong

Will preached prophetically.  He was also my Clinical Pastoral Education advisor, which meant his job was to poke, prod, and ask uncomfortable and sometimes searing questions of me about who I was, what I desired, what I prioritized, and whether I was being honest with myself about my motivations in life.  It was as if Will was John the Baptist come to town, relentlessly insisting to my classmates and me that the true wilderness is not out there but within, where we rationalize, and self-delude, and avoid, and so often create a desert of the soul where God wants nothing more than for our souls to flourish with abundant life.

I cannot read these passages from Isaiah and Mark without thinking of Will Spong, and how much he indicted and challenged me, and how much I loved him for it.

So, how do we best punctuate these passages?  Is the wilderness out there, where John the wild man lives in the desert and eats locusts and honey?  Or is the wilderness in here, where our souls need preparing, cultivating, made ready for Jesus to enter in?  The wonder of God’s inspiration is that it is both. 

First, we must look inward (and oh, how I wish we all had a Will Spong to help us!) and ask with steely-eyed honesty how and where our souls have become parched and barren.  Each of us must ask—I must ask, and you must ask: Where have the paths within your soul become crooked?  Where have you strayed so far from God that love has withered?  The Season of Advent is set aside as the very time for us to ask these questions in prayer and then do the work to cultivate our souls so that, come the Nativity, we are ready to receive Jesus.

And second, the world out there is surely also often a wilderness.  The voice that cries out—the voices of too many to count that cry out—yearn for a world that resembles God’s Eden more than a desert.  And we are to prepare that world, too.  The hungry, the sorrowed, the desperate, the good but abused earth: For all of these, we as Christians are called to find a way through the world’s wilderness until it isn’t wilderness anymore.  But we cannot do that, until we have watered with God’s grace the wilderness within.

The voice of one crying out: In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord.

The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord. 

Within and without, we are to prepare God’s way, until our souls rejoice in the coming of Christ, until the world around us looks more and more like Christ’s kingdom.