Voices from the Edge

Isaiah 40:1-11    

Mark 1:1-8

I remember one day in kindergarten when the teacher gave us a coloring sheet and instructed us to color it in completely. She wanted nicely, neatly colored pictures from her classroom full of five-year-olds. I was then, as I am now, a rule follower. I made it my job to color in and cover over every speck of white within the lines of the picture. Teacher could count on me to do it right. I colored just as hard as I could – but I ran into a problem. The harder I colored I began to inadvertently push the color right off the page. The pressure of the crayon in my hand was making flakes of colored wax flick right off the paper. Naturally, I panicked. I colored harder, but that only made it worse. Finally, exhausted and out of time, I had to surrender. I just wanted to do it right but, in my mind, I had failed.

I couldn’t see at the time that our teacher’s concern was probably about helping us develop fine motor control. I couldn’t see that she was most concerned about those kids who would hold a crayon in their fist and roughly scribble over the page. The little rule-following people-pleaser that I was just wanted to do what the teacher said I should do. I thought of that last week in our weekly Advent coloring gathering.

I guess it seems kind of strange to some people that a bunch of adults meet in the church every week to color. But it’s really about prayer, using the process of coloring these mandalas, or prayer circles, to guide our prayer. And there is a suggested series of steps to follow. Usually, you start in the center and work your way out to the perimeter of the circle – the edge. In the center, we focus our attention on God, or the intention of our prayer time. But, like anything creative, there isn’t necessarily a right or a wrong way to do it, and I was reminded of that last week in our gathering.

One of our pray-ers/color-ers told me she started on the outer perimeter and worked her way in. She began with all the thoughts and concerns that are at the periphery of life, and slowly moved toward the center. This is the way that she needed to do it; this is the way that seemed right to her. Even if it was uncomfortable for me – someone who has always colored in the lines and followed the directions – it was the way that seemed right to her.

And the scriptures for this week seem to agree. Even in this season of sparkle and festivity and perfection, the scriptures for this day are sending us out into the wilderness, the rough places at the edge of the world. Even though we just want to get to the baby in the manger, the place we feel we ought to be, Mark and Isaiah are sending us out into the wilderness.

The voice of the prophet Isaiah calls out: “In the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord.” Out in the wilderness we must go to make these preparations, into the wild and untamed places, the forgotten and neglected regions.

And the evangelist Mark echoes these words to us, saying, “There is a voice crying out in the wilderness – this is John the Baptist. And he is crying out for us to prepare the way of the Lord.” The people of Judea who hear John’s voice come out to see him, far away from the power centers of religion and society, out here on the fringes where the niceties, the rules of etiquette are pushed aside. Out here in the wilderness, where John wears camel’s hair and eats locusts, the people are brought face to face with all the things they might rather not see.

Yet something draws them out here to this stark and honest place; perhaps it is the lure of a fresh start, the hope of forgiveness. It may not be pretty out here but at least it’s real. So they step away from the normal channels, the pharisaic law and temple sacrifices, to take a walk on the wild side. This is, according to Mark, the beginning of the good news.

This is how Mark wants to start out the story, right here. From Mark, we don’t get angels bearing tidings of great joy; we don’t get irenic Madonnas; we don’t get the soft light of the manger. From Mark, we get a journey into the wilderness. This might not be the place you want to go right now, but we are here: on the edge.

And it’s actually a good place for us to spend some time during this busy season. Out here on the edge of things we might be able to see more clearly what God is up to. We might be able to see more fully what the world needs God to be up to.

Out here in the spiritual wilderness, we need to know who Isaiah was talking to. The people of Israel were a people in exile. They were out on the edge. They had been sent into exile by the Babylonian army, but actually, they put themselves there. They got there by failing to hear and heed the warnings of the prophets of God. They got there by their careless disobedience – in the ways they handled privilege, power, wealth, favor. They got there by choosing to turn the law of God into something small, something that would be used to define who was in and who was out. They got there by their failure to practice loving-kindness, as their God showed loving-kindness toward them. They got there on their own; they alienated themselves from their God. This is what the Old Testament wants us to know.

And once they were there, they realized how much they had lost, how much they had given up. The found themselves out on the margins, and I wonder if they realized: exiled, marginalized, they were in essentially the very place they had long relegated the poor, the needy, the unclean to. God sent them out to the margins, maybe so they could see what it feels like.

This is the story of Israel. But we must know that the story of Israel is our story too.

We have actually seen a fair amount of conversation, and quite a lot of crying out, in the margins this year. We have seen unfolding a still-growing list of powerful people who have been charged with harassing, exploiting, or even assaulting people who have little or no power. There is a reason why it is happening all at once. When one voice from the edge speaks up, another might feel the courage to speak up also. And when enough voices speak up, then people finally listen. When people finally start listening then, you can be sure, more voices will have the courage to speak up.

This year we have seen new conversations take place in which people with power are listening to people without power, and even beginning to see the world from that perspective. It doesn’t always happen that way – the voices from the edge are not always listened to and believed. Some call them liars, opportunists. No doubt there are a few of those among them, as there are in every stratum of every group. But, more and more, people are seeing that those who have historically been marginalized see and live life from a different point of view.

It is a good thing when the ones with power begin to listen to the ones who are powerless. It is important for the ones with power, the ones who are at the center of things, to move out to the margins and find out what life is like there.

John the Baptist lived on the margins, by choice, and he drew many more people out there. Jesus began his ministry out at the margins, on the edge of society, and he never got too far away from the people who lived there. He listened to those voices from the edge. In fact, Jesus was a voice from the edge. He spoke for the poor, the needy, the unclean, the least, the last, the marginalized.

When I color in my mandalas, I try to do it the right way, following the rules. I start in the center, because that’s where God is – at the center of everything. But God is just as much at the edges. Perhaps I need to spend more time at the edges this advent – watching, praying, listening.

Crime and Punishment and Forgiveness

Matthew25:31-46

Many good reads come to us by way of recommendation, and that is the case for me this week. One of the members of our roundtable talked about a lovely story called The Trouble with Goats and Sheep. So enthusiastically did she speak of it, and so apt it seemed to be this week, with our text, that I decided to move it to the top of my reading list.

It’s a story about two little girls in a small English village who decide to spend their summer break searching for Jesus. Their village has been going through some difficult times, and the girls are at an age where they understand enough of the grownup conversations to be troubled by it, but not enough to really comprehend it. A woman has gone missing. The girls gather that there is a story behind it, something all the adults in their street are in on, but they don’t know what it is.

One of the girls, Grace, is mulling it over one day outside the local church. When the priest approaches her, she asks point blank: why do people get lost. She means it quite literally, but he hears it as a metaphorical question so he tells her people are lost when they don’t have God in their lives. They are in need of God, who is a shepherd to all lost sheep. Grace takes his words to heart and sees only one thing she must do: find God. She and her friend Tilly will go out in search of God, in the form of Jesus, so he can save their little community, finding the lost and bringing them back into the fold.

Uncertain how to go about this, they start their search at the home of the most pious family in town – it seems a natural place to find God. But once inside the door they begin to see things they would not have seen from the outside of this immaculately tended house and garden. Inside they see the hidden unhappiness, the subtle abusiveness, the old unforgotten secrets.

And this becomes the pattern of their journey this summer. In search of God they find all varieties of unhappiness, old grudges, and unconfessed sins. They discover that there is a little bit of goat in us all, even the whitest sheep among us.

It was quite a dramatic lesson for these young girls, the beginning of an understanding that the world is not all clearly outlined black and white, well-defined lines between the sheep and the goats of the world, but rather that crime and punishment and forgiveness are smeared over everything.

The parable that we call the separation of the sheep and the goats, is one the girls heard in church. It has made a strong impression on them – not surprisingly. The parable is at the same time both a strong, clear directive and an unanswerable question. We like to think about the clarity in the words of the king: Whenever you did as much for the least of these who are members of my family, you did it for me. Whenever you fed or clothed or comforted the neediest among us, you did as much for Jesus himself.

Therefore, the message we have drawn from this is clear, if not easy: do not fail to pass by some poor, weak, neglected person. If you do, you might be passing by Jesus. The lesson for us is to seek always to see Jesus in the eyes of anyone you encounter. Wouldn’t it be a much better world if we all did that?

The more complicated aspect, though, is the question of who Jesus is actually talking about in this parable. When he refers to all the nations is he meaning everyone in all the world or just the Christians? When he speaks of the least of these is he referring to all the needy in the world or just the Christians? The words he uses suggest that he might be talking about his followers alone. But if that were the case, wouldn’t it be fairly easy to know when you were serving Jesus? Wouldn’t it be relatively easy if we just had to concern ourselves with taking care of the Christians?

Well, I imagine you might be thinking, look around at the state of the world. See how we care for one another, or fail to care for one another. Even limiting it to Christians we would quite likely have a hard time of it. But at the very least, we probably wouldn’t have to say on the day of judgment, “when and where did I do that, Lord? Or, conversely,  when and where did I fail to do that, Lord?

In the story, The Trouble with Goats and Sheep, the girls continue their search for Jesus until one day they find him. They find the image of Jesus on a drainpipe. Yes, in the great tradition of Jesus’ face appearing in unlikely places – a cheese pizza, a piece of stained plaster, or a Walmart receipt – the Lord appears in a stain on a drainpipe.

The people of the village flock to the site, filled with excitement and hope. When they see the image of Christ’s face on the drainpipe they all make the same observation: He doesn’t look very happy, does he? Should anyone be surprised? If he has come to judge between the sheep and the goats, perhaps there is little for him to be happy about. Nonetheless, the people want to be in his presence. Every day they pull up their lawn chairs or sit on the grass, making a little congregation. Those who don’t have jobs to go to, sit there all day. What they are waiting for, I don’t know. I don’t think they know. But, inevitably, after a while they begin bickering with one another.

Two of the women get into a heated argument about which one of them is more worthy to sit close to Jesus. They begin slinging bible verses each other like spitballs. They criticize each other for their apparent sins. Each of them feels more sheep-like than the other; each of them believes that the other is really just a goat. Each of them sets herself up as judge over the other.

In fact, everyone on the street is doing that – setting him or herself up as judge.

The real trouble with sheep and goats is that we really don’t know which category we, or anyone else, falls into.  Grace and Tilly begin by assuming that the people who live in their neighborhood are all sheep – you know, the good ones. But the more they explore, the more goat-like qualities they find: people who care more about covering their assets than caring for others, who are often angry when they should be sympathetic. And it isn’t that Grace and Tilly were wrong about their neighbors; it isn’t that they aren’t sheep. It is only that they are human beings and, like all human beings, affected by sin.

If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. So says the writer of the first letter of John. There is not one among us free from sin, but strangely enough, we have a tendency to think we can separate ourselves into the good guys and the bad guys, the sinners and the sin-free.

One of the underlying themes of Matthew’s gospel is that we simply cannot do this. At every opportunity, Matthew reminds us that the judging is God’s to do, not ours. John the Baptist, early on, said to his followers that he came to offer them a baptism of repentance, but one who would come after him with more power, the power to separate the wheat from the chaff with his winnowing fork.

We see this image used again in Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the weeds. A farmer sows good seed in his field but sometime later weeds are found among the wheat. Rather than try to clear out the weeds from the wheat, Jesus says, let them grow up together and they will be separated at harvest time, or, the time of judgment. Leave it to the Lord to judge between them. “Judge not, lest you be judged,” Jesus says to his followers in his sermon on the mount.

It is simply not ours to say who is worthy and who is not. The story of the sheep and the goats suggests that we do well when we seek to treat every person we encounter, particularly the least, the last, and the lost, as an opportunity to serve Jesus. And why not? As lovers of Christ, why would we not embrace every opportunity to serve him?

Yet, we will never get it fully right, because we are, alas, a little bit sheep and a little bit goat. We will make errors in judgment on a routine basis. We will be guilty of failing Jesus and faulting others, and bringing more pain into the world. But still, every day we are presented with opportunities to bring a bit more light into the world, to serve Jesus with our acts, small or large, of compassion and generosity. The question is, will we do it?

Will we?

Photo: This is Lammie, who joins the circle at Children's Chapel and helps us share our joys and concerns.