Reading Francis

I was reflecting this week on what a blessing my friends who are agnostic or atheist are. I’ll get to that in a minute.

Here’s something I learned last week that was pretty interesting. The opening verses of the Gospel of Mark quote Isaiah 40: “A voice crying out in the desert: / Prepare the way of the Lord, / make straight His paths”. The other gospels also cite this verse, and all of them use it to identify John the Baptist as that voice crying out in the desert.

But that might not be how Isaiah wrote it. Apparently, and this is hearsay on my part, the Greek translations of Isaiah frame it that way – that the voice is in the desert crying out – but the Hebrew is a little different: “A voice crying out: / In the desert, prepare the way of the Lord.”

That changes things subtly, because while we can have the luxury of hearing “the voice in the desert” as that weird guy who ate locusts and honey in the middle of nowhere, the original is more challenging. That voice is crying out, “Hey, y’all better go out in the desert yourselves and start making things right.” The John the Baptist-as-voice version is an invitation to a curiosity; the Hebrew is a work order for us to fill. And the desert, the wilderness, the abandoned scary places, are where the action is at. When Pope Francis talks about a Church that needs to live “at the peripheries,” he means we better go to work in the deserts of our world.

One thing I noticed about my friends who are outspoken about their nonbelief (which is an admittedly small but marvelous sample size) is that it’s not really the Good News and its moral connotations that they are resisting. They generally buy into the notion that we are called to live out Love by showering it on those who need it most, the folks who are left by the roadsides of life, those stuck in a desert of our making or theirs. They intuitively accept the message of the Hebrew prophets like Isaiah.

What I hear these friends rejecting isn’t so much God as it is the group of people who claim to be God’s followers. Sure, by extension, they might prosecute a God who lets such hypocritical blowhards claim His name, but for the most part, it’s the chasm of hypocrisy Christians (and our Church) betray in the distance between our words and our actions that they object to. At the heart of it, my non-believing friends are offended that those of us who should know that our calling is to build a way in the desert seem far more interested in staying in our temples and palaces, and that indignation feeds the belief that this religion stuff must be a fraud.

I appreciate that indignation; many days, I need its reminder, and other days, I feel it myself. Now, look, I know that it is often people of faith who give their lives at the peripheries. I know the schools and hospitals, the refugee resettlement programs and gang intervention initiatives, the prison companions and intentional communities with the addicted and ill and unhoused, that are peopled by folks driven to those deserts by their faith.

And I recognize that the nuttiest thing about the God of the Good News is the depths of mercy that allows backstabbers like Judas and blowhards like Peter and misfits like Matthew to stick around, even when common sense would say that Jesus needed a roster upgrade. So the idea that the leaders of the modern Church would be hypocritical, misguided and sometimes monstrous, though unacceptable and awful, isn’t all that off brand. 

Even so, it’s a blessing to have friends who stand outside belief but still hear that voice crying out. They remind me that I really should be getting to work in the desert, and a lot of times, they’re already out there doing God’s work themselves.