Tag Archives: Prepare ye the way

Advent is a good time to remember that the Bible we read is not a peaceful read.  It is a text borne of trauma, displacement, and loss.  The ancient writers who penned sacred scripture — and the vast majority of characters who populate its pages — were not, by and large, history’s winners.  They were the persecuted.  The dislocated.  The enslaved. The desperate.  They lived through periods of famine, war, plague, and natural disaster. They suffered starvation, violence, barrenness, captivity, exile, colonization, and genocide. They were, in countless ways, the wretched of the earth.  Brave, lonely voices, crying in the desert.