Second Sunday of Advent

“The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. ‘” Luke 3:3

If we had to look around us to pick out the prophets in our own time, I wonder who we would pick? Who on television or in the newspapers would stand out as being the sort of person who in thirty years time people would say that he or she was a prophet. The painful part of being a prophet is that the prophet’s role is to stand against the rulers and the spirit of the time, it is to look at the society around and to denounce what is wrong and to call people back to the ways of God.

Just think about the news stories of the past week, how on earth do we start to try to take on what is going on in the world around us? The answer is that we don’t. We are not asked to do so, we are asked to prepare the way of the Lord.

We ourselves have nothing to offer the world. It is God who offers people the life they cannot imagine. We are to prepare the way for this God; we do so by doing what people have done since the days of John the Baptist, we repent for the past and we pray for the future.

-Ian Poulton.