Prophecy from the Edge

By Sylvia W. Crouter

12 10 2006

On this second Sunday in Advent we turn our minds to “preparing the way”. The way in John the Baptist’s case is the way of repenting sins, sins which had as much to do with the social concerns of his day as with personal transgressions.

The way in our case is Jesus’ way, the way he calls us to live, the way he calls our minds and hearts to see and feel.

This call to prepare the way comes from a very strange Biblical character. John is described by Fritz West, a United Church of Christ pastor, described as coming from and being of “the lunatic fringe”,  by which the Rev. West means, I think,“different” rather than mentally ill.John was active along the banks of the Jordan River on the edge of the Promised Land and on the edge of the wilderness.

He wore animal skins and existed by eating wild honey and insects. He had a wild personality, uttered wild words, insulted people in authority, calling them to repent. But,… he spoke truth to power, spoke truth to the orderly settled world, spoke that truth from the fringes of civilized normalcy, and had a profound effect on the people of his world, including our Lord, Jesus of Nazareth.

John the Baptist was a wilderness kind of person and he spoke his message of repentance from the wilderness  to settled, comfortable people, people not from the wilderness fringe but from the normal center, the every day center of life as lived 1000 years after the Israelites entered the Promised Land. These were the people who had been changed       from wilderness wanderers close to God into “people of the land”, people of the center, people of civilized, orderly living.

They had their fig trees to sit under, but had lost perhaps their God of the pillar of cloud and fire.

Yet as John Dominic Crossan tells us they were also people who lived under the “domination system”. That system is defined as a culture in which elites have all the power, the wealth,

the land, and the means of production; while those others, the tenant farmers, the poor artisans,    the debtors who had lost their land, the sick, the injured, the mentally ill, all of whom had no help for their desperate condition.

We can begin to get a handle on this divided world of settled center versus wilderness on the fringes as we consider our own valley as a metaphor for civilized center fringed by wilderness.

We in the center have warm houses served by the High Plains Power Company. We have a medical clinic, schools, library, sheriff’s deputies to keep order, trash pick up, a variety of restaurants to choose from,  book groups to stimulate our minds and churches to stir our souls.

We have internet access, DSL, shopping on line, UPS delivery. We have wood stoves and open fireplaces where we can pull up chairs, lift a glass of wine and enjoy our family and friends

as nature throws her wind and horizontal snow beyond our double-paned windows.

Are we not however in some ways like those long ago Israelites who missed the experiences of        “ thin places “ they had known as trekkers headed away from Egypt  towards God’s planned place for them?

The wilderness where the boundary was thin between themselves and the Holy ?

Beyond our settled center, our civilized Wind River Valley, beyond the last ranches, the last houses, is wilderness. It has its beauties, its thin places, but also its very real dangers. It is here that our routines and comforts are challenged. To cross country ski in the wilderness is to go prepared and to be on the lookout for avalanches and hypo-thermia

To go into the mountain wilderness is also to sometimes sense the holy, to be in a thin place.

In the summer wilderness there are grizzlies and wolves. And more and more these creatures of God’s creation are pressing at the margins of our settled civilized valley. Sometimes we see glimpses of a huge dog and wonder, “Is that a wolf?”We see tracks of both wolves and grizzlies and sometimes mountain lions. So, we live in the settled center with all its comforts and conveniences, but at the margins of our lives is wilderness.

John the Baptist lived on the edge of a wilderness-y place, a hot desert-y place, not at all like our northern, forested wilderness. We could call the scrub brush and dry canyons beyond the Jordan

an “outer place”, far from the everyday first century routines of making a living, raising a family,

getting along under the domination system, putting up with Roman occupation, adjusting to the ways things just were.

Into this settled center John came proclaiming the need to repent, proclaiming the corruption of the power elites, including King Herod, whom he accused of stealing his brother’s wife.

The Gospel of Luke describes what John was doing and what he represented, relates John to earlier writings and prophecies in the Hebrew scriptures, the words of Isaiah and Baruch.

Luke repeated Isaiah’s words we heard today: “Prepare the way of the Lord. Make his paths straight.”

Then to show that the Lord would make the Way  easy if the people would only return in their hearts to God, Luke quotes Isaiah again, “Every valley shall be filled and every hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight…” (Isa 40 :3-5)  Baruch finishes Isaiah’s sentence with the words,”…so that Israel may walk safely in the glory of God.”

To put these words into our time and our Wyoming wilderness it is as if we, returning from a two week pack trip, tired, hungry and looking forward to our nice soft beds, have our way eased by God flattening out the mountains so we can get home faster and more comfortably.

            Perhaps there have been times in our lives, yours and mine, when we have sensed

a presence beyond our seeing or hearing that has eased a situation for us? Flattened and straightened the way for us?

Today as we consider John the Baptist speaking from the fringes of civilization

we remember those who in our time spoke from the edges of society to the comfortable.

Helen Keller spoke from blindness to the sighted world.  Mahatma Ghandi from an occupied India to the British Empire.  Mother Teresa spoke for the poor of Calcutta to the comfortable everywhere. Nelson Mandela to apartheid. Martin Luther King to our own Jim Crow.

If Dr. King and many other troublers of our white comfort had remained silent would we have had a Colin Powell, a Condoleeza Rice, a Barack Obama?

It is the John the Baptists of our day who express a vision of God’s hopes for our world.

As we consider this prophetic voice from the fringe calling us to repentance we might ask ourselves: what in my life needs to be examined, repented of, forgiven? A relationship gone wrong? Being judgmental of others? A prejudice I have about race, gender, class?

And what do we as a nation need to look hard at in our national psyche, in our attitude towards those who share the planet? To examine our national soul is a courageous form of patriotism

that leads to taking the first steps  on the road God wants to flatten and straighten for us.

Next week we hear more about John the Baptist, this first century prophet from the wild fringe.

Jesus comes to the river, is galvanized by the wild call to repentance. He hears John’s words from the wilderness, then carries them back to the civilized center.

Stay tuned!

12/10/06