What Are We Hoping For?

Isaiah 40:1-11; Mark 1:1-8

December 10, 2017

A trip to the wilderness can focus one’s attention. That’s the signal insight in this shift in the collection of texts that we have received as the book of Isaiah.

Isaiah was drawn together from several distinct sources, and chapter 40, our text this morning, marks the beginning of what scholars call Second Isaiah. The author of this prayer for comfort understands that the people have been in the wilderness – the wilderness of exile in Babylon – for many years.

The exile doesn’t determine what comes next, but surely it shapes it. That is to say, the people have walked in darkness, they have been out there in the wilderness beyond the lights of the city. They have been in exile. They have been forcibly relocated and treated as if they didn’t belong. They have no home. They cannot sing their own songs in this foreign land. They have been in the wilderness.

Now they are on the cusp of liberation. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they will seize the opportunity of return to create a just society where strangers are welcome and no one is exiled into darkness, but it does mean that they know what darkness is.

They have been there. They have struggled through it. They have tried to see clearly, but it’s really hard to focus in the darkness. You tend to rely on other senses. You lean in and attend with your ears. Your skin might prickle as your sense of touch grows more acute. The wilderness focuses your entire attention.

That wilderness experience provides the shape and contour of the hopes that flow forth from those desert springs. To know what you have been denied is to know what you hope for. The wilderness experience created a deep thirst for liberation that demands to be quenched.

Have you ever met someone who survived a near-death experience? We’ve all read stories about folks who discover a sharper focus, a deep sense of purpose in living fully the time they have for they have been to edge of the wilderness of existential fear. They have confronted death and understand the fierce urgency of now in a way that most of us simply don’t.

Isaiah is writing from that place.

Many people find their passions in life by way of wilderness experiences. That is to say, when you wind up in one of those frightening, arresting experiences that you didn’t really anticipate, you often come out the other side determined to respond to what you just went through.

That’s why survivors become advocates, whether it’s survivors of gun violence who join or even found organizations determined to reduce gun violence, survivors of human trafficking who become advocates for other survivors, survivors of sexual violence who do the same, and so on.

When Time announced its Persons of the Year last week I was in the midst of pondering this Isaiah text and the way that the gospel of Mark alludes to it in the prologue.

“Comfort, comfort my people,” says our God.

“My people,” says God. My people are the ones out on the margins. My people have been abused. My people have been exiled. My people have been discriminated against. My people are the ones who go through the wilderness.

We all want to think of ourselves as God’s people. The thing is, we don’t want to go to the wilderness. Oh, we like to go to national parks, hike mountain trails, and find remote waterfalls to gaze upon and feel all spiritual. But real wilderness – wilderness on a Biblical scale – is never so tame, never so beautiful.

That’s because in scripture wilderness is not a park. It’s not even a place, really. Wilderness is a condition.

In the prologue to Mark’s gospel, in Ched Myers’ reading, wilderness “represents the ‘peripheries.’”[1]

As the gospel unfolds, the narrative portrays mounting tension between the periphery and the center, between those on the margins of society and those who hold tightly to the reigns of economic, political, and religious power within the society.

When God calls forth prophetic witness, God is calling forth those who will speak out on behalf of God’s people. Prophets tend to emerge from the margins. The people God draws closest to in scripture always dwell on the margins. As the theologians of liberation put it, God has a preferential option for the poor, for the outcast, for the marginalized, the discriminated against, the abused. God prefers those who have been to the wilderness.

If we take seriously the theology of the cross this should not surprise us. After all, God has survived xenophobia, abuse, and violence, including the violence of death on a cross. God is another survivor.

Perhaps, a half century after declaring God dead on its cover, Time returned God to the cover last week. If you’ve seen the cover photo from last week you probably noticed the elbow off to the right edge of the picture. Some folks speculate that it represents those who remain anonymous and, perhaps, silenced in the face of sexual abuse.

That’s probably right, but I looked at the photo and thought, how sly of the editors. They reimagined God as female, understood that God is a survivor, realized that God dwells along the margins, and, because you can’t capture God in an image, just hinted at her by picturing an elbow.

That elbow of God is there to give a sharp jab to the midsection of patriarchy. As hard – and as heartening (it can be both) – as it is to confront the news of the day, I am reminded of Karl Barth’s insistence that we must do theology with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. And, in recalling that quote, I am mindful that Barth, who died in 1968, has been in the news himself recently right alongside Al Franken and Donald Trump and so many others as another man who abused his position of power to take advantage of a less powerful woman. It is time for such men to step aside. The testimony of abused women is enough to compel the resignation of presidents of media companies, and it is enough to compel the resignation of the president of the United States. Donald Trump should resign his office.

Marginalized women are pushing back. Such gestures – jabs, pokes, resistance – come inevitably from the edge of the frame, from the margins of the text, from the periphery of power.

The middle of the frame is filled with glorified images of power – almost always men who believe that they, alone, can make things great. The center of the text – that is to say, its dominate reading or interpretive tradition – almost always focuses on upholding traditional power structures that are centered on kings and princes, on the patriarchs. The centers of power are held, almost always, by men, and, traditionally, men only go to the wilderness to subdue it, to bring back trophies, to conquer and civilize it such that they will reign there, too.

But the God who chose to dwell among the outcasts in the person of Jesus did so through the life of a young woman who dwelled on the margins. Mary could well have been one of those women on the cover of Time last week. She could well have been one of the “silence breakers.”

And when she broke the silence she did so with a song.

Her song heralds a great reckoning, a turning of the world which will bring every tyrant from his throne. As movie moguls, corporate bigwigs, and United States congressmen are forced from their positions of power because they have abused that power, I hear a voice crying out: from the halls of power to the fortress tower, not a stone will be left on stone.” Tyrants have been toppling all year as more and more women’s voices have joined a rising chorus singing for hope that the world is about to turn.

We’re a long way from justice, still, and surely the beloved community remains little more than a dim vision, far from focused, way out there beyond the horizon. But a voice from the wilderness is crying out. When I lend ear toward the wilderness I believe I hear her saying, “Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.” Amen.

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[1] Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man, 126.