For Christians, the season of Advent, which began this past Sunday, is a time of preparation and renewal for the Church. It is a time not to plunge fully into Christmas, but to take measured steps toward Christmas, with hearts and ears open to portions of God’s Word in the meanwhile. One of the readings of Advent comes from the prophet Isaiah: “Comfort, comfort my people!” says your God. A few verses later the prophet says, “A voice of one calling: In the desert prepare the way for the Lord.” Now there is a lot more in the reading than we can explore here, but let’s just look at these words.
Clearly, John the Baptist took these words as his life’s work and, at a place in the Jordan River where there was sufficient water, He was in the wilderness, preaching and baptizing. And lots of folks were coming to him and taking warning from his words, turning from their sin to faith in God the Forgiver. He was the voice of one calling in the desert, “Prepare the way for the Lord!”
On the northwest corner of the Dead Sea lie the ruins of a community called Qumran. At the time of John the Baptist and Jesus Christ, the Qumran community, composed of dedicated followers of a sect called the Essenes, carried on quite an odd lifestyle. They had read Isaiah’s prophecy too, and were convinced it meant “in the wilderness prepare…” And that is just what they did. Amid deprivations of food and sleep and most other creature comforts, they were in the wilderness, preparing. Their lives revolved around the Word of God, prayer, and ritual washings for the sake of preparation and purity. They also read the word of God, in shifts, around the clock. They copied the sacred scrolls. We hear nothing about them in the New Testament, and about the time of the Jewish revolt (70 A.D.) they seem to go silent. We would know almost nothing about them had their ruins not survived, and had not their sacred cache of scrolls been discovered, beginning in 1947, a body of writings called ‘The Dead Sea Scrolls.’
