Wilderness

First Sunday in Lent 
February 18, 2018

Listen to today’s gospel reading and sermon here:

⁹In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. ¹⁰And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. ¹¹And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

  ¹²And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. ¹³He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.

  ¹⁴Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, ¹⁵and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” – Mark 1:9-15

The kind of wilderness that Jesus enters is the kind of wilderness you don’t want to be in and the kind of wilderness you don’t know how to get out of. It’s the kind of wilderness we live in everyday. Sometimes I pretend we don’t live in the wilderness, but it’s been difficult lately to keep pretending.

The mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, made the wilderness feel somehow more wild. As I dropped my daughter off the next day, I couldn’t help but think of all the parents who dropped children off the day before and didn’t see them again. And we continue to hear demands from young people themselves that all of us take collective action to change things but as I watch them speak their truth on the television screen, I don’t have any words of hope for them, for all of us, for something to change. I feel we are lost together in some surreal wilderness.

The ongoing immigration crisis keeps awakening me to the wilderness in which we live, too. The end of Temporary Protective Status for Haitians and Salvadorans and others could result in hundreds of thousands of individuals put in harm’s way and families torn apart, many of whom live nearby. We continue to feed an economy that depends on the contributions of immigrants while at the same time demanding they go back to countries that in many cases are ill-equipped to care for them. Dreamers are in limbo despite widespread support. And behind those big stories are individual stories – when taking a shift as a church host for Lucio in Sanctuary at First Church yesterday, another man came asking for legal counsel and assistance with his own family’s immigration issues. I sent him off with contact information for people who can give good, sound advice, people who might be able to accompany him for a few steps of his journey, but with the fear that I was just sending him back to the wilderness.

And sometimes awareness of the wilderness comes with another wave of clinical depression or the diagnosis of a life-threatening illness or the death of a loved one. Sometimes the wilderness is simply feeling lost and directionless, overwhelmed or alone, or it’s the things those stones represent that weigh us down with guilt or shame or which simply exhaust our resources, and, sometimes the wilderness is coming together as we did on Ash Wednesday, to acknowledge our own mortality and the recognize that one way or another the wilderness will swallow us up.

So like Jesus, we begin Lent in the wilderness. We may be on a journey to resurrection, but we know that our whole lives and not just our Lenten seasons are spent there, in a place we may not entirely want to be and a place we don’t know how to get out of.

And in Mark’s account there are three types of beings that Jesus encounters in the wilderness, things I think we encounter, too: devils, wild beasts, and angels.

This account doesn’t detail a conversation between Jesus and the tempter; there is no triumphant defeat of temptation, but rather 40 long days of wrestling with his demons. What were his temptations? What did his mind have to fight off hour after hour? What would he have written on his stone? Was it power or greed or fear of failure? Anxiety or self-hatred or a belief that everything really might be meaningless? Or all of the above? No final defeat of the tempter in this story, just hour after hour in the wilderness with the things that touched a place inside himself he did not want to acknowledge even existed?

And the wild beasts joined Jesus, too. I wonder if he was glad for their company or fearful. Were they friendly in a peaceable kingdom sort of way, companions in the lonely wilderness? Or was this a tense standoff between beings who recognized the wild in one another and kept their respectful but wary and watchful distance? Did they add to the feeling of wilderness or did even their uneasy companionship make it feel less lonely out there?

And the angels attended him, too – companions who did accompany him with support. The ones who visited, who sat in silence through the hard moments, who perhaps brought him something to eat, a gesture that comforted even when he didn’t feel like eating.

And so it is in our wilderness. As we wander hour after hour in a world that feels like it is falling apart, in lives that sometimes are falling apart with it, we meet the companions and circumstances that put us in touch with the parts of ourselves we are not proud of and which are difficult to control. We meet the companions who are not clearly one or the other, people who just like us bring both gifts and flaws to all our encounters, each of us wild in our own way, trying to make it in the wilderness. And we encounter the angels who bear us up and give us strength and comfort and support.

But we have one more companion in our stay out in the wilderness. Because Jesus has joined us. Not just for Lent, not just for the hard moments, but for our whole long stay in the wilderness, however long it lasts. You see, we started off with a reading in which God promises never again to get so fed up with our wilderness lives that God wipes us out along with it all. For those of us tired of living with wilderness, we perhaps begin to sense the weight of that promise. A promise to put up with all the ways we make living hard for ourselves and our neighbors. A promise to put up with sharing the pain we experience and inflict day in and day out. A promise that so values human life that God would enter the wilderness to sit with us, and with the devils, wild beasts, and angels, until our wilderness journey is over.

We are headed for Easter in these weeks and resurrection is our destination. But we can expect to spend more than Lent living in wilderness, living in the midst of hard things around us, with pain and brokenness within us, and wondering how we make a path out. But today we remember God coming to sit with us there, among all the challenges that wilderness presents. And with God as our companion we might begin to find the strength to continue forward with angels, demons, and wild beasts, to follow that same baptismal call that Jesus had to make a way forward in the wilderness on our way to resurrection.

-Pastor Steven Wilco