Planting a garden takes preparation. That preparation begins immediately after the harvest ends. When you’ve picked the last vegetable and brought it inside, the next step is often to pull up all of the old plants. I haven’t always been good about getting that before winter comes, but I did manage it this year. Once those are gone, then it can be helpful to till up the ground and perhaps add some leaves or compost or something to provide the ground with the nutrients it needs for next year’s crops. Then, for us, comes the planting of the garlic. Since garlic has to overwinter, we have to try to get the cloves planted by late October or early November. Then we cover them with grass clippings. Come December, the seed catalogs start arriving at our house, and by January we try to get our order placed.

Selecting and ordering the seeds we want is one of the most fun things we do when it comes to gardening…at least for me. I love looking through all of the vegetable options. We will undoubtedly select some of our staple seeds like green beans and swiss chard and radishes. But I always like to look for things we’ve never tried. Last year, I purchased seeds for a tomato called an Evil Olive Tomato. Sadly, the plants didn’t survive. But I plan to try again next year. Once we get all of those seeds we ordered, then we will set up a shelf in the basement with grow lights on it, fill cups with soil, plant seeds in them, label the cups, water them, and place them under the grow light. Hopefully, by April or May, we have some strong plants to put in the garden. We will, of course, buy some other plants locally to plant alongside them, but once we’ve got everything, we will till the garden again so we can start planting. Before I plant, I like to map out in my head exactly where I want each type of plant and seed to go. Then we plant.

Preparation for planting a garden, or for anything else, takes seeing and it takes acting. We must think ahead and make plans. We have to look and see what needs to be done, what challenges we might face, what our goals are. We have to think about the supplies we’ll need and how we want to implement the plan. As I mentioned last week, I’m not usually much of a planner. But if you don’t plan very well for a garden, you won’t produce as much fruit. I’ve learned that the hard way.

In our passage from the gospel of John, we read once again about John the Baptist. In John’s telling of the story, people come to John and ask him who he is. They think maybe he is the Messiah or Elijah or a different prophet. But John says, “I am not.” So they ask him, “Why then are you baptizing if you are neither the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the prophet?” And John says to them in response, “I baptize with water. Among you stands one whom you do not know, the one who is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandal.” John is the preparer. He is setting the stage for someone else, someone better. He could have just simply waited for Jesus to come and let Jesus do his thing. John wasn’t Jesus. He wasn’t the Messiah or Elijah or the prophet. He was just John. But instead of simply sitting around waiting for the one who was the Messiah, he decided to prepare. He saw the Lord a-coming and he felt called to prepare the way for him.

This week has been an exercise in preparation. With sickness in our house, we had to make plans for multiple possible scenarios. April was originally supposed to be preaching today. But her sickness made a shift in our preparations necessary. We’ve even talked through what would need to happen if I was the next one to get sick and it happened to keep me home for Christmas Eve. Those preparations required two things of us.

First, they required us to see. We had to look at the possibilities. What could go wrong? What back up plans do we need in place? What are the worst case scenarios and how do we avoid them if at all possible? When I was growing up, my sister and I always made fun of my mom for being a big What If-er. Whenever we would go somewhere that was out of the ordinary, she would have a million What-If questions. What if you get a flat tire? What if you run out of money? What if you get in an accident? So many What-If questions. As teens, it drove my sister and I nuts. But looking back on it, I see those What-Ifs in a different light. She wanted me to be prepared. And I don’t think it was even so much that she wanted me to actually DO anything about it. She simply wanted me to see the possibilities. She wanted me to be aware of what could potentially happen so I wouldn’t be blindsided and not have any clue what to do. Though it annoyed me then, I see the wisdom in it now.

Isaiah saw what needed to be prepared for. Isaiah knew that a big change was coming. And in the section we read for this morning, we see what Isaiah saw as the possibilities. He said, “The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn; to provide for those who mourn in Zion— to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.” What do we see as the future that we need to prepare for? So often we think about all the bad things that we need to be ready for: famine, war, terrorism, violence, hatred, destruction. But what about the good things? What about preparing for the positive change we want to see in the world?

Martin Luther King Jr. in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech is doing exactly that. He is painting a picture of the positive change that he is preparing for and that he is calling the people to help him prepare for. John the Baptist is preparing for the one who is coming, who he later calls the “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” John is preparing the way for positive change because he sees a future that is better than the present. God sent Jesus to earth, to be born as a baby, to grow up as a meager carpenter’s son, to become a teacher in the synagogue who the masses followed, to give his life on a cross for us, and to be raised to new life. God saw that a better life was possible for us. God saw a brighter future and prepared a way for that to happen. We begin our preparation by seeing the possibilities.

But then we must act. Isaiah presents for us the ideals that God desires for God’s people. That good news of freedom in Christ would be shared with the oppressed, that the broken hearted would by healing, that the captives would be set free, that restoration would come, and that those who mourn would find comfort. That is what Jesus came to live out, which he did. But when he left and ascended to heaven, he entrusted that work to us. We are the ones called to share good news with the oppressed. Do we do that? If we were to do that, what would it look like? Perhaps it would look a bit like Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on the bus. Or Alice Paul protesting against the laws that didn’t allow women the right to vote. Or maybe it looks like providing food and clothing and shelter to immigrants and refugees who are seeking a better life for themselves and their families.

We could ask ourselves what it would look like for broken hearts to be healed, or for captives to be set free, or for restoration to come to that land, or for there to be comfort for all who grieve. And what are we to do to prepare for those things to become reality? These are all really big issues that we may all have different ideas about. But no one of us is going to achieve these things by preparing for them alone. It requires us all to work together. We may each have our own task or our own role to play, but we are all seeing the same future.

John the Baptist saw the future that was coming. He saw that one who was greater than him was coming to do things that he (or anyone else for that matter) could do. And so his role became preparing the way for Jesus’ arrival. And he was doing that through baptism. John’s baptism was for repentance. The Greek word for repentance literally translates as “afterthought” or “change of mind.” Those who came to John for baptism were looking for a change. In the waters of baptism, they found new life and changed minds and hearts. John knew that he himself could not change the world. But the one who was coming could. The one who was coming had the power to save the entire world. John saw that. And he could have left it at that. He could have seen the coming of Jesus as justification for not doing anything himself. But he didn’t.

I saw a really cute Calvin and Hobbes comic the other day. In the comic, Calvin and Hobbes are building a snowman. Calvin says, “I should be doing my homework now. But the way I look at it, playing in the snow is a lot more important. Out here I’m learning real skills that I can apply throughout the rest of my life.” “Such as?” Hobbes asks. Calvin replies, “Procrastinating and rationalizing.” When we are prepared to see the future that could be ours, we can respond in a few ways: we can be overwhelmed by it and do nothing, we can rationalize all the reasons why we don’t need to worry about it right now, or we can take action to prepare for that future. I would wager that many of us, if not most of us, often fall into that second category, the category that Calvin had adopted.

But like John the Baptist, we have been called to prepare the way of the Lord. So, let’s consider the What-Ifs, let’s see clearly the way of Christ that we are to follow, and let’s prepare the way for Christ to bring freedom and hope and peace and joy and love and healing and strength to all the hurting, broken, oppressed, or just lost people of this world. And may the Spirit of the Lord be upon us as we do so. Amen!