God in the Margins

See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way;

The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:

 “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.

(Mark 1:2b, 3)

 

A devotional by Siegfried S. Johnson on Wednesday, December 12, 2007

First United Methodist Church, 605 West 6^th, Mountain Home, Arkansas 72653

 

 

We are now in the Second Week of Advent, our worship services last Sunday beginning with the lighting of the Second Advent candle and a reading from Mark 1 introducing us to the Wilderness.  The Wilderness is an apt metaphor of our Advent wait. 

 

Making a straight path out of a highway in the Judean Wilderness?  Now, THAT would be some accomplishment.  “On the Jericho Road, there’s room for just two,” as the old Stamps-Baxter hymn tells it.  The Jericho Road is a twisting road through barren mountains dotted with caves.  And that’s just the image we need for Advent, because Advent calls us back to the Wilderness stages of our own spiritual journey, back to the earliest beginnings of our faith, to the brooding presence of the Spirit making crooked paths straight, rough places smooth, and old things new. 

 

So it is into the Wilderness that Mark takes us in the opening words of his gospel.  Mark’s image of John the baptizer is a Wilderness image, the one proclaiming a baptism of repentance, clothed in camel’s hair and eating locusts and wild honey. 

 

I spoke Sunday of Isaiah’s prophecy of a  “highway in the wilderness” (Isaiah 35:8) cutting its way through the barren mountains from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea and Jericho, mentioning how Jesus highlights the uncivilized image of the place, telling of a man going from Jerusalem to Jericho and falling among robbers who beat him and leave him for dead.   Here is stark and vivid hopelessness.  Yet human kindness emerges at a most unexpected Crossroad, when a Samaritan enters the picture.  A Good Samaritan.  Here was one who, in Jewish opinion, was on the margins of civilization!  Yet, as always, God was to be found in the margins.

 

In this very Wilderness Jesus experienced the Advent of his own ministry, preparing for his journey by making his way to John the baptizer at the Jordan River, near Jericho, at Bethany beyond the Jordan.  This Wilderness had been for centuries a major factor in the lives of the ancient Hebrews, and is still a major component of modern life in the Holy Land.  In Jesus’ day many of the people of Judah felt an emptiness in the Main Street religion of their professionals in Jerusalem, following John into this Wilderness, confessing their sins, their emptiness, there to be baptized by John.  The arduous trip down the Jericho Road must have seemed due penance, a quest for forgiveness, an escape from Main Street back to their beginnings as a nomadic people.  What was such a journey to the Wilderness but a desire for a new start?

 

And they discovered that God is found, not on Main Street, but in the Margins.   No surprise.  It was in their spiritual DNA.  Had not Moses spent forty days among the caves of Mount Sinai?  Had not Elijah, in his haste to escape Jezebel, come to the Mountain of God in the Wilderness, there to discover God, not in the fire, earthquake, wind -- but in “the still, small voice of God?”  Then it is that Elijah wraps his face in his mantel and emerges from his cave of hiding.  The monastic traditions of the Desert Fathers have given us some of our richest spiritual writings, suggesting that, somehow, in the silence of the Wilderness, our ears are better able to hear God.

 

Even Jesus, Mark says, having been baptized by John, is “driven” into the Wilderness by the Spirit, there to be among the wild beasts, tempted forty days by Satan, and ministered to by angels.  Jesus, too, found God in the margins.  Perhaps, then, we should consider that, before we come to Bethlehem in each cycle of our church’s liturgy, Advent drives us to the Wilderness with John the Baptist, there to engage in some uncomfortable confrontation with ourselves, there to hear a call to something new. 

 

What does this have to say to us?  I wonder at our fear for the marginalization of Christianity.  If Christianity is gradually being pushed to the margins of an increasingly secular society, then we are moving to where we might discover God in a new way.  Is Christmas as a holiday being marginalized?  Then let it answer our ache to know an experience deeper than tinsel and mushy holiday tunes and can't-miss Christmas bargains.  Awash in a sea of colorful lights, let us recognize ache of our hearts to discover the deeper meaning of Christmas.

 

We can't get to the manger without first coming face to face with John.  If Christmas is being pushed to the margins, perhaps the culture is doing us a favor.  It is when we are comfortably accommodated by the culture that we are de-voiced.  It is when we think of ourselves as belonging on Main Street rather than in the wilderness that we are de-voiced.  “In the margins,” is where we are at our best.  The church is weakened when we don’t have anything to say more interesting than what the world says.  

 

Could it be that the declining membership statistics of Mainline churches over the past decades is due, at least in part, to our perceived sophistication, our self-conscious Main Street-status?  We seem to have provided people with a theological rationale not to go to church.  Mainline pulpits gave their churches a theology of secularity, reducing the church practically to something of a sanctified form of Rotary.  We misplaced the message that Christian disciples must be clearly, intentionally, and relentlessly determined to be in the place where we meet God.  All that we do as a church is driven by our worship as the energy source of our mission.  As we offered Christians reasons to not think worship attendance important, the reducing of those numbers necessarily created a dwindling of energy. 

 

When I was in a Baptist pulpit I quoted fairly regularly Hebrews 10:25, “not forsaking the assembling of yourselves together, as the manner of some is, but all the more as you see the day approaching.”   I haven’t used that text much since I’ve joined the Mainline clergy.  It seems to have dropped from my ecclesial vocabulary through a more respectful, Main Street theology of secularity.    

 

But if Advent is anything, it is a call to re-engage the Wilderness, to get back to the basics.  Advent urges us to respond to the call to radical availability.

 

Since this Second Week of Advent leads us to an uncomfortable John-the-Baptist style confrontation with that which is false in our lives, I thought to share with you a letter from Methodist Bishop William Willimon, a letter written – Book of Revelation style – to the church called “Mainline.”  This was written several years ago for Christianity Today, its editors asking Willimon to participate in a special project patterned after Revelation’s Letters to the Seven Churches.  Notable Christian authors were invited to write “letters” to their own churches (Evangelical, Charismatic, Pentecostal, Baptist, etc.).  Willimon, then, is writing as if Jesus were writing to his church, to the “Mainline” church.  As I share it with you, I hope you’ll especially note his emphasis on marginalization, remembering my title, “God in the Margins.”

 

To: The Church called Mainline

 

Behold, I make all things new!  Even you.

 

How eagerly you began this century that you so confidently called “Christian.”  You organized to beat the Devil, to build, to expand, to crusade, to reform, to grow.  Quite a contrast to the way your century ends.  You, who enjoyed thinking of yourselves as “mainline” got sidelined.  Though you are averse to taking my Word literally, for my sake, and for yours, I hope that you will at least take these words seriously.

 

I, the One who so exuberantly turned water into wine at Cana, tire of your propensity to turn wine into water at your bureaucracies in Nashville, Minneapolis, and Louisville.  The best thing about you is your past.  What does that tell you?  My how you loved to organize and build!  You made North America into the most thoroughly Protestant Christian place in the world.  Hospitals, orphanages, schools, nursing homes, printing presses.  You really took love of neighbor to a new level and I’m grateful . . . you built some beautiful churches, (and) give me The Lutheran Hymnal any day over most of those “praise choruses” of some of my evangelicals.

 

Fosdick, Hartness, Peale, Steimlie, Thurman, Achtemeir can preach for me any time they like.  I wish some of them would steer a bit closer to the Scriptures, but I’ll speak to them individually about that.  When you mainliners stop talking about me, your preaching tends to get moralistic and trite.  I hate that.  It wouldn’t kill you to get back to the Bible.

 

You know me, I love to make the oldline new.  If you will stick with me, I shall give you a future, new wineskins and all that.  I am Lord of life, not death.  I shall move you from mordant decline to life.  I’ve still got plans for you.  You’ll be smaller, but small can be good.  Ask the Mennonites.  You will no longer be in charge of the nation, if you ever were.  Remember, the national church thing was your idea of church, not mine.  Get back to basics like worship, service, and witness.  Don’t mourn the downsizing of your bureaucracy. 

 

Your marginalization may be providential.

 

Personally, I think you tend to be open-minded to a fault.  Laditudinarianism is you all over.  I wish you would hire some theologians with some guts for a change.  Can’t you find something more fun to do than General Conference?  Some of your good ideas from the last century need a decent burial if I can work birth in you in the next. 

 

One more thing.  Please get out of the middle of the road!  That’s where all accidents happen, theologically speaking. 

 

Remember, I wasn’t crucified for my moderation.

I love the Mainline church.  I love the Main Street feel to who we are and what we are doing.  But it comes with risk.  Loving our Main Street status, we must not be reluctant to take our message to the margins.  If so, then the words of Willimon will be sadly ours – “the best thing about us will be our past.”

 

 I hesitate to leave you with such a thought.  But then, it is, after all, the Second Week of Advent, a time when a little John the Baptist honesty is called for, reminding us on our journey to the manger that we, even we Mainliners, need the salvation and hope and newness of life which this child brings.   

 

Sources and notes:

 

“To: The Church called Mainline,” found at the website for the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church, www.northalabamaumc.org