But the point remains: Luke lists here the worldly leaders and the religious leaders, the ones responsible for keeping the peace at the time when Jesus was coming into the world. Here are the ones with recognized and formal power. Here are the ones who could make your life pleasant, or make your life miserable, in very real ways. Here are the ones who were in control. Into this vision of leaders and power came John the Baptizer. In the Gospel of Mark, we learn that John lived out in the wilderness, near the Jordan River. He lived on locusts and honey, and he wore camel’s hair, rather than the customary robe. (Mark 1:6) Clearly, John had none of the trappings, the evidence of power or prestige. He was a man on the outside: outside of the usual social structures, outside of prosperity, outside of….just about everything. And he, this outsider, was the one claimed to be the fulfillment of Isaiah’s words: “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord!’” John is the one to alert folk that Jesus is coming. John is the one to tell people, “You need to examine your life and consider whether you are following God’s ways as you should. You need to prepare.” What an interesting choice! You would think that God would pick someone influential, that people would naturally listen to. Why the outsider? Consider: would you have listened to John? This strange man, staying out in the wilderness, away from the cities and villages, subsisting on bugs and what he can find…this odd man telling you to clean up your act, to straighten up, stop sinning, and follow God’s ways? I think most of us would have dismissed John as some kind of weirdo. Precisely because he wasn’t like anything we have been taught to revere or respect. Why would you listen to someone who, frankly, looked like a loser? I think God used John precisely because he looked and lived the way he did. God wanted, and I think still wants, for us to understand that God’s ways are not the ways of the world. As Isaiah wrote, “My ways are not your ways, and your thoughts are not my thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:8) God has called and continues to call us not to weigh our choices by the world’s scales or standards. God asked, and continues to ask, that we approach our lives differently, that we approach reality differently. We aren’t to define personal success by how much money we make or have, or by how many toys we can afford, or by how easy we make our lives or by how many people we can push around. We are to define personal success by how much we notice those around us; how much we care about others’ experiences; how much we care for and respect others. In a similar vein: we are not to achieve peace in the way that the Romans did back in Biblical times – by killing or imprisoning those we deem enemies, or by squeezing every penny from those we dominate or control. That’s a very worldly, very human vision of what peace means. Something reduced to the absence of war. That is not God’s peace. As the passage from Isaiah says: “every valley shall be filled….every mountain…shall be made low.” Every low place – every slum, every ghetto, every place without clean water or secure shelter – will be raised up to what is sustaining for those who live there. Every food desert will become an oasis of fresh, nourishing food. Every obstacle that stands in the way of people becoming fully who they are will be removed – whether that obstacle is misogyny or stereotype or prejudice, whether it is a refusal to use people’s requested pronouns, whether it is a derision of people’s gender identification, whether it is a slighting of the shape and type of their family – all those obstacles will be removed, as if a moral bulldozer plunged through all that dismissal and derision. Peace will not be achieved through control and hierarchy. Peace will come when we all have what we need. And that path to peace is ours to build. We can end the food deserts. We can end the slums and the homeless tent cities. We can stop demanding that people fit into a traditional but limited understanding of gender. We can listen to black and brown people tell us what their experiences are and then do something to better those experiences. We can celebrate family in all its forms. We can learn, and change, and transform. God has told us what we need to do. It’s now up to us to do it. It is up to us to build a world in which all can thrive, not just some. Our path to peace is one of equality, equity and celebration of the beautiful diversity of all on this earth. “Every valley filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low.” (v. 5) May we have the compassion, the courage and the will to build that peace.