Until last year, my family owned a primitive cabin in the Redwoods near the Russian River. The site was green and romantic and beautiful, but the cabin was not an easy place to maintain. The overstory cast a deep shade, and moisture so permeated the ecosystem such that everything seemed to compost overnight. Including nylon mesh, which I didn’t even think was vulnerable to rot. I loved our forested acre on Austin Creek, but never felt entirely safe there. It was alternately voracious and vulnerable to fire and flood. It was, in short, a dangerously un-tamed landscape. And evidently the indigenous people of the coast thought so as well, because they lived in clearings and along waterways near the trees, but never in the redwood groves themselves. Those big trees are truly wilderness.
John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, as our Gospel teaches us. We know a lot about John, and we’ve likely heard this story many times before on the second Sunday of Advent. We know that John’s job was to proclaim the one who was more powerful coming after him; the one whose sandal-thong John was unworthy to untie. Mark sees fit to compare John’s ministry with the words of the prophet Isaiah, who prophesied salvation to the Israelites in exile in Babylon.
Get ready, these prophets exhort us. Repent, clear out your spiritual attic and clear your soul so that you can receive the good news that God promises. Make his paths straight. These images of clearing out and cleaning up take on a particular urgency when they come to us from the wilderness, a landscape which is inherently messy and resistant to path-building. The Jewish Scriptures are full of wilderness imagery and stories, beginning with the Exodus when the people of God had to live a precarious existence in uncivilized desert for forty years. What we’re supposed to understand about this setting is that wilderness was not safe. It was even the habitation of demons. That dangerous understanding of wilderness is on full view in the story Mark tells later in this first chapter, of Jesus own wilderness temptations.
But that’s not the whole story. Yes, the Biblical wilderness was dangerous, but that’s exactly why people went there. Whether they were forced to go there as a condition of freedom, or in some cases went of their own choice, the wilderness was a necessary risk. It was the place of purification where old habits might die away, and where people could learn to live anew on God’s providence and within God’s laws. Little wonder that John came out of the wilderness empowered to tell good news.
African American theologian Delores Williams offers an interpretation of the wilderness rooted in the experiences of enslaved persons, that remains present in many American Black churches. Rather than a place to be feared, Williams looks at wilderness through the lens of the Biblical slave Hagar. Although she was cruelly cast out by Abraham and Sarah, Hagar is met by God in the wilderness. Her experiences are symbolic of the African American experience of wilderness as both sacred and struggle-ridden. “For African American slaves,” writes Williams, “the wilderness did not bear the negative connotations that mainline white pioneer culture assigned to it.” Rather, “The wilderness was a positive place conducive to uplifting the spirit and to strengthening religious life. Perhaps understanding wilderness as a space where faith is strengthened illuminates why people throughout the Judean countryside went to meet John in the wilderness. They were drawn to a man on the margins with a message.”
Where are the people at the wilderness margins in our midst, today? Who speaks in the voice of John the Baptist now? I wouldn’t presume to answer for you, because I think that’s a work of spiritual attentiveness we each need to engage in during Advent. But one possibility I’m considering is that the person who calls me to repentance might be an immigrant, coming into this country from a wilderness of economic and political instability.
This weekend we’re celebrating the Virgin of Juquila with our Spanish speaking congregation. It’s a celebration that’s not on the Episcopal calendar, although the Virgin of Guadalupe—whose feast we’ll observe next Sunday—is. That’s because our church has seen fit to hear the message of the many Latino Episcopalians in our midst, who teach us of the great esteem in which they hold the mother of Jesus.
I’ll confess that this devotion felt a little foreign to me when I first came to Trinity. My own Christian piety did not have much of a Marian bent, and celebrating multiple apparitions of the Virgin Mary and successive weeks in December was a confusing to me. Weird, even. Kind of like a guy appearing in camel’s hair and eating locusts level of weird. This is not someone I was expecting to prepare the way of the Lord.
But God is known for nothing if not using unexpected people to reveal his purposes. Like an un-scrubbed prophet at the riverside, like a young girl with an unexplainable pregnancy, like Jesus Christ himself: God is always sending people from the margins to bear good news to people in the center.
The Mexican apparitions of the Virgin who grace our sanctuary might not feel like good news to you. Or they might seem like colorful but inoffensive folkloric accessories. But this Sunday’s somewhat disturbing presence and message of John the Baptist gives me pause to wonder whether the discomfort these images evoke might actually be good news. You might not agree with me about that—and that’s fine—but bear with me while I consider what these iconic women from the margins might have to teach us.
Notice that Juquila and Guadalupe both have symbolic clothing. This is no small part of their message. Juquila’s oversize dress like—for example—the robes of a bishop, bespeaks a spiritual power that belies her diminutive size. Guadalupe, even more pointedly, was said to have imprinted the her own image on the robe of a humble peasant, Juan Diego. That allowed him to speak power to a skeptical bishop. I should mention also that both apparitions of the virgin come from what were then overlooked places in Mexico. From the wilderness, if you will. That’s no small part of the reason that they appeal to ordinary people.
Admittedly, all this lore might be considered the realm of myth, but that doesn’t mean their stories aren’t true in the sense that they empower God’s people. Empower for what?
To bear the word of God to the world, as we have always understood the fundamental mission of the Virgin Mary. She modeled self-giving love when she said yes to God’s angel; she spoke truth to power when she said “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly.” She was an discomfiting prophet then; little wonder that she still is.
So here’s my invitation to you on this second Sunday of Advent. Spend a little time in the wilderness of your discomfort. We’re in a pandemic, so we can’t really avoid discomfort anyway. But perhaps discomfort can serve as our teacher, just like the wild-eyed prophet on the riverbank once was. You may be perfectly comfortable with the Mexican images of the Virgin Mary in our church, or you may not. Or maybe there’s something else here—the language, the music, the preacher—that leaves you feeling a little unsettled. Let me assure you, that’s OK. Seasonally appropriate, even!
But it’s also always possible that our discomfort is something like a formative wilderness within us. If so, then I invite you to go with John the Baptist into the wilds of your own soul. Don’t miss the opportunity to pay attention to the demons, the angels and the prophets who are straightening the path within you for the Lord. It’ll be OK. Because I am confident of this: he is coming our way, even now.
