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A friend conveys the story of his childhood misconception about finding his vocational way in life. From his earliest remembrance his goal in life was to own a grocery store. The idea surfaced when he made his first lasting friendship, at the age of six, with a child named Larry. Larry's father owned the movie theater in their small hometown. Every Saturday, he and Larry would go to the children's matinee and they would not have to purchase a ticket. Larry's father allowed them to walk right in without paying. Then, in the lobby, Larry's father would open the glass door on the popcorn machine and the children would each reach in and take a free bag of popcorn. The obvious conclusion my friend drew was that if you own something, all you have to do is show up occasionally and take what you want. Since you own it, you don't have to pay for anything. The way is prepared for you. Armed with that logic, it seemed to him that the best thing to own was a grocery store. You could then show up when you wished and take all the candy you wanted off the shelves without ever paying for any of it.

Never did it dawn on him that someone had to work long hours of preparation, cleaning the theater, popping the popcorn, winding the movies, and putting in much unseen labor and personal finances to keep the place going. Likewise, he assumed that the stock appeared on the shelves of a grocery store by magic and the managers just opened and shut the door in between, taking what they wanted off the shelves. This facile notion of property was quickly dispelled in his teenage years when he secured his first part-time job as a stock boy in a large grocery store. After that he began to focus on any career but owning a grocery store. Behind-the-scenes preparation can be an eye-opening experience, as all of us perhaps realize. There are few, if any, free rides out there in life. The powerful owner must also be the gentle and responsible shepherd of his goods.

In this regard, today's text (Isaiah 40:1-11) can be a tricky one to probe. Its mood is one of hopeful anticipation. Israel has apparently accepted her inability to save herself. She has served her sentence in Babylon, and a voice in the wilderness cries that a new way is being prepared for her. Yahweh will flatten the hills and lead all the long-exiled Jews in a glorious homecoming. Yahweh will move at the head of this triumphal procession as a conquering God. Yahweh's silence has ended. This God who seemed to be defeated by the Babylonian gods will march along the way in a show of unrivaled power. The macho God or the supreme feminist has determined that a hoped-for but unexpected release from prison is to be effected. The owner of humankind is ready to open the door and wave through God's special people on a new way that runs from Babylonian exile all the way to Jerusalem. Here is a people being led by one who should resemble an oriental despot returning from silence and exile in regal power.

Yet the rhetoric is quickly reversed. The God who moves at the head of this powerful and joyous procession is as caring and gentle as a shepherd. The Divine Warrior is also the caring shepherd who watches over the vulnerable sheep.

The ethical responsibilities of a shepherd are enormous. Sheep are the most helpless of creatures. A mother sheep will not move over a few feet to allow her bleating lamb to nurse. Often the shepherd must physically lift the lamb and carry it over to its mother to nurse. Sheep are so easily frightened that they will not drink from a flowing stream because of the noise it makes. The caring shepherd must dip from the stream and fill a huge tub with the water. The Psalmist is simply stating a fact in asserting that the shepherd leads his sheep beside still waters. Sheep will only drink from still waters.

What a contrast is presented in the text: a Divine Warrior who leads as a shepherd. Here is a foretaste of what is to come in the Christ experience. The messianic perspective merges with the suffering servant motif. Israel's understanding of her journey along the way prepares her to embrace a messiah who serves or a servant who is also the deliverer. The tough, triumphant liberator is one who purposefully humbles himself as a caring, tender shepherd. Since Israel's vocation is to make known her God, the walk on the way for her symbolizes not only a triumphant return but a new understanding of her role in life. She not only has to experience some kind of magnified warrior but prepare herself to respond in kind to the same type of tender care that is shepherding her. Personal regeneration and social concern are fused into one vocation as early as 2,500 years ago. She has to walk in the same way in which her God walks. There is a strong ethical meaning in the very process of her redemption. Her tradition of chosenness and redemption is now set in the direction of ethics.

This effort to bring together salvation with ethical responsibility has always been the stumbling block for Christians and the church. Messiahs and shepherds do not appear to mix. The faith versus works argument seems to run throughout the deliverance message of Isaiah.

The crux of our faith is the radical belief in the entrance of God into the human condition through Jesus Christ. How that was accomplished seems to matter less than the fact that it was. In Jesus of Nazareth, the Old Testament concept of the suffering servant is united with the Old Testament concept of the Messiah. The human shepherd and the Divine Warrior are united. The human identification is extremely important. It places an ethical demand on us. Jesus wept as we weep. Jesus lived as we live. We see a tired and weary Jesus Christ sitting beside a well, asking for a drink of water. He is tired and thirsty. We often overlook this factor in our visible attempts to catch a glimpse of Jesus. In television, movies, paintings, in legends and stories about him, and in children's books about the boy Jesus, quite often the divine side is visible and the human side acts as a drapery around the divine core. The human part somehow never seems quite real. But that is not the Christ of Scripture. When he sits beside a well, a tired traveler, asking for a drink of water, he is not pretending. He is not faking the human emotions. He does not masquerade as human to catch the woman off guard. He is as fully human shepherd as he is Divine Warrior. When, in his teachings, he says that those who mourn are to be congratulated because they shall be comforted, he is speaking of a condition he is able to experience. In the garden of Gethsemane, he experiences his loneliest spot in the loneliest of hours. He prays. He is not pretending. He is not running madly around to hire lawyers to represent him at his coming trial. Nor is he looking for an army of angels to defend him with swords and spears. The shepherd is in agony. He is sweating. He is bundling up his guts and laying them in prayer at the feet of God and saying, "Help me!"

If we want to walk on the Way God has prepared through our earthly wilderness, we must prepare to have faith in the Divine Liberator and a resolve to take on his role of shepherd. This demands all the Advent preparation we can muster.

Excerpts from The Doctrina show that "the Way" is a term which had come by the end of the first century to have an exclusively ethical meaning. There had been efforts to develop Christianity along nonethical lines into a mystical "spirit" to the neglect of morals. The apostle Paul had to fight off a boastful band of false prophets in Corinth who maintained that the gifts of the spirit delivered one from bondage to an evil world. As such, those who possessed the knowledge of this Divine Warrior need not concern themselves with the fleshly obligations of a shepherd in an evil world. What emerged from this battle with Gnostics, perhaps hardy forerunners of today's New Age proponents, was a clear Christian belief that no amount of knowledge was the Way of the Christ that was not also evident in a person's own way of tenderly caring for the other brothers and sisters on the planet. The hardy antagonist of heretics, the author of First John, struck a blow for ethical Christianity when he wrote: "By this we may be sure that we are in him; he who says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked."

What is this Way? Not sentiment but sharing; not benevolence but caring; not a macho or supreme feministic power to liberate alone but a shepherd's tender care that the pain of another is our pain as well.

The words are familiar: "Prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the wilderness a highway for our God." Behind-the-scenes preparation can, indeed, be an eye-opening experience. "Prepare the way of the Lord." These words bring to us the atmosphere of Advent, of John the Baptist, and of the expectation of the birth of Christ.

Sometimes on figures standing at street corners in big cities, on billboards by the highway, or on posters stuck around sports arenas we can see the placard inscribed: "Prepare to meet thy God." Indeed, but what kind of God? If God is as much tender human shepherd as divine liberator ready to intervene from the outside, then part of our Advent preparation must be arranging to be where that shepherd is most likely to be found. When we feed the hungry, touch and let ourselves be touched by the AIDS victim, clothe the naked, welcome the stranger, assist the homeless, and shepherd the defenseless among us, we soak ourselves again in the thought and language of the Bible. We prepare the Lord's road; we build God's highway through this desert of human exile for so many of our brothers and sisters. We move out of our old highways with their deep valleys and lumpy hills, rough surfaces and dusty corners. And as we fill up our world's valleys and work on its dangerous corners, we not only create great arteries for others, we also prepare the way for the deliverer/shepherd to come into our own hearts. The Warrior and the Shepherd are one. So be it!