Isaiah 40:1-11
Mark 1:1-8
I remember one day back in kindergarten when the teacher gave us a coloring sheet and told us, “Color it all in, nice and neat.” I was a little rule follower, so I made it my job to color in and cover over every speck of white within the lines of the picture. I wanted teacher to know she could count on me. I colored just as hard as I could – but I ran into a problem. 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’m older now and no longer so obsessive as I was. But a few years ago, I got some Advent coloring books and began a coloring group at church. The coloring pictures were mandalas, and the books had a mandala for each of the days of advent. The idea is to color in the mandalas prayerfully; there is a suggested process for doing it. You start in the center and work your way out to the perimeter of the circle – the edge. In the center, you focus your attention on God, because God is the center of everything.
Someone in our group told me she started coloring her mandalas at the edges and worked her way in. She began with all the thoughts and concerns that were at the periphery of life, and slowly moved toward the center. This is the way that seemed right to her. Even if it was uncomfortable for me – someone who has always followed the directions – it was the way that seemed right to her.
And the scriptures for this week seem to agree. The scriptures for this day, the second Sunday of Advent, 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.” So out in the wilderness we must go to make these preparations, into the wild and untamed, the forgotten and neglected places.
And the evangelist Mark echoes these words, 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 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 promise of a fresh start, the hope of forgiveness. Something they need. So they step away from the conventional things – the laws of the Pharisees, the temple sacrifices, to take a walk on the wild side.
This, according to Mark, is the beginning of the good news.
We don’t get angels bearing tidings of great joy. From Mark, we get a journey into the wilderness. And 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, spiritually. All year we have been finding ourselves in places we don’t want to be, haven’t we? It is as though last March we were plucked up out of our lives and set down in a strange and unfamiliar place on the edges of our lives.
This year has caused us to examine our priorities and our values. We have discovered that some things we thought were high priorities are actually not. We have learned to do without things we took for granted. But on the other hand, some things we have lost, or are at risk of losing, we now know are critically important. For example, what happens to children when they cannot go to school? So many of them fall behind.
More than anything, perhaps, this year has shined a powerful light on the great inequality in our nation. The wealthy have enjoyed surprising gains, even in the middle of a pandemic. And at the same time, the poor have suffered even more. They are less able to socially distance, have less access to health care, are more likely to have jobs that put them at risk or to lose the jobs they had. Their 401Ks are not growing, because they do not have them.
Now, it’s not a new thing that there are so many poor in our land who are suffering. It’s only that we might be noticing it more. In this strange year, our attention has been drawn a little bit more out to the edges, where the have-nots reside. And perhaps we see the injustices more clearly when we look in from the margins.
It is a good thing when the ones with power begin to hear the cries of the ones who are powerless. When those who are at the center of things can move out to the margins and see what life is like there. Like John did. Like Jesus did.
So I am trying something different this year, as I color my mandalas, a bold and reckless thing. I will try starting from the edges. Because, just as much as God is at the center of everything, God resides at the margins – with the least, the lost, the left behind. And I need to be there too – watching, praying, listening.
