The Second Sunday in Advent[1]
My wife, Julie, and I recently visited New York City to spend Thanksgiving with a close friend of ours. Being the history buffs that we are, during one of our days there we visited Hell’s Kitchen and the former Five Points Neighborhood – an area made famous several years ago by Martin Scorsese’s film Gangs of New York. The Five Points has a complicated but interesting history. Originally the site was the location of a spring-fed pool named Collect Pond. Throughout the 1700s industry built up around the fresh-water source, and by the end of the century the pond had become incredibly polluted. Into this environmental fiasco stepped Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the famed architect and city planner who would eventually lay out the street design for Washington. L’Enfant recognized the instability of the ground around the pound, and he purposed a plan to clean the water and turn the area into a city park around which development could occur. The powers that be, however, disagreed with L’Enfant and filled in the pound with dirt in order to build housing on top of it. While this plan worked for a very brief time, the weak foundations began giving way, the homes began settling, and the wealthy residents quickly fled – thus, what had been hoped to be a middle to upper class development quickly turned into the city’s largest slum. L’Enfant had been the voice crying out in the wilderness, the voice that was not heeded.
In today’s readings we come face-to-face with the struggle of marginalized voices. As our reading from Philippians reminds us, this season of Advent – every season of Advent – is a calling not just to remember the first coming of the Messiah but to vigilantly prepare for His second coming as well. Today’s readings from Malachi and the Gospel of Luke teach us two important lessons about our preparation and vigilance. First, we are taught what happens when we neglect the voice and the prophecy of the messenger – we have to be refined, purified, and cleansed from our waywardness. The question is, who are the marginalized and prophetic voices that I neglect and ignore? That we all neglect and ignore? Second, we are taught in the Gospel of Luke what it looks like to be called – what it looks like to become marginalized and to find God’s voice in that experience. In what ways are each of us marginalized, or how can each of us become more marginalized for the Gospel? What is the prophetic message that we can each bring into our Church, our community, our larger society and world?
Several years ago, while I was still living in central Arkansas, I was wrestling with a struggle between becoming Roman Catholic or becoming Episcopalian. At the time, I was attending an Episcopal Church that I had fallen deeply in love with while at the same time participating in RCIA which is the confirmation process adults go through to enter the Roman Catholic Church. I felt completely torn, disoriented, and uncertain of the decision I should make. In the midst of this turmoil, Helen Prejean the Roman Catholic nun and famous death penalty advocate came to a nearby college to talk about her life’s work. In the course of her remarks that evening, she spoke eloquently and forcibly about the importance of Catholic social teaching – care for the poor and marginalized, care for creation – issues that drew me towards Rome but issues that I was seeing lived out more explicitly in the Episcopal Church. At the end of her talk, I began moving towards the exit amidst the sea of other attendants, but something drew me back – something made me stay. I mulled about and waited until everyone else had left. With much trepidation I approached Sister Helen and laid my life bare to her. I explained my turmoil and my struggle, and I told her I did not know what to do or where to turn. She told me many prophetic things that night, but the one message that always continued to stay with me is this. She said, “Look, let me ask you something. When you receive communion at the Episcopal church, do you think it is any less valid than what you would receive in a Catholic church?” Brought up short, and caught off guard, I sputtered, “In all my wrestling with this that is never a question that has occurred to me. No, no I don’t think it is any less valid.” At that, Sister Helen threw up her hands in joyful exuberance and said, “Then, what’s your problem?” In that moment, Sister Helen was the voice crying out in the wilderness – the prophetic voice that I needed to hear. I often fondly and warmly think back on that moment of divine inspiration — but, oh, for that one instance how many other times have I neglected the prophetic voices in my life, the other times God has called out to me and I have instead chosen to journey on amidst the sea of deaf humanity. Jennifer Ryan Ayres says of our Malachi reading today, “The people, newly restored to Judah, are skeptical of God’s justice, because their practices of piety have yielded neither divine retributive judgment against ‘evildoers’ nor prosperity for the restoration community.”[2] How often, I – we – get caught up in our own conviction of rightness. It is so easy to assume that our perspective is of course the correct and Godly one. Who are the marginalized and prophetic voices that we neglect and ignore, and in this season of Advent especially how might we lift those voices up and give them greater attention?
As some of you may know, I was born with a cleft lip and palette and went through eight reconstructive surgeries before I left home to go to college. While my parents are PhD trained academics, I grew-up in a very working class neighborhood with children of plumbers, machinists, and factory workers. I thought I was a marginalized voice. As I grew up, and especially after I left home, I realized just how little marginalization I actually experience. As a cis-gendered, heterosexual, white male I do pretty well in our society. How can I possibly be a voice crying out in the wilderness? And yet, as I ask myself this question, I think about John in today’s Gospel passage. In the first chapter of Luke we learn that John was born into a priestly lineage and as the angel said to his father Zechariah, “even before his birth he will be filled with the Holy Spirit. He will turn many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God.”[3] What must Zechariah and Elizabeth have thought then about this wild man living in the desert? How could he possibly turn Israel to the Lord while being on the fringe of society? But that’s the point isn’t it? For all of the power, influence, and access that John could have enjoyed by virtue of his station in life, his prophetic calling by God was to live into marginalization and become a voice crying out in the wilderness. Veli-Matti Karkkainen writes, “In God’s salvific work, there is a mysterious interplay of divine and human, or ordinary and extraordinary, or regular and miraculous.”[4] John transformed his human life and lived into the divine. He turned his ordinary advantages into extraordinary gifts. He let his regular voice be transformed into the miraculous prophetic herald that prepared the way for the Lord. John lived into marginalization and was there transformed by God. In what ways can each of us live into a marginalization that will break us open to the work God has for us to do? What is the prophetic message that we each can bring into our Church, our community, our larger society and world?
When you go to the old Five Points neighborhood today, it is not easy to find. It is not easy to find, because what once was has been wiped away. Streets have been redirected and old tenement structures torn down. The memory of the mistake has all but been erased. Pierre L’Enfant had a lot of advantages and power in life, but in the history of Collect Pond and the Five Points, he is remembered as the marginalized voice crying out in the wilderness. As we spend this time in Advent preparing for the coming of Christ, who are the marginalized voices that we are not listening to and what is the marginalized prophetic message within each of us that the world needs to hear? AMEN.
[1] Malachi 3:1-4; Philippians 1:3-11; Luke 3:1-6
[2] David Lyon Bartlett et al., eds., Feasting on the Word. Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary / Year C / Vol 1, 1st ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 26.
[3] Luke 1:15b-16 (NRSV)
[4] David Lyon Bartlett et al., eds., Feasting on the Word. Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary / Year C / Vol 1, 1st ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 44.
Ad Orientem 