In the Wilderness
Mark 1:9-15
Rev. Lisa Day
Swarthmore Presbyterian Church
March 1, 2009
“Tell me a story” -- I miss those days of my parenting life and some of you I know are still well in the midst of them. “Tell me a story” -- preferably an old favorite, again and again, and let me settle into it until my eyes droop and I dream.
A story – you remember them even if you aren’t currently engaged in the nightly discipline of telling them or hearing them. You remember – the best ones begin someplace that seems to be safe, seems to be happy, seems to be secure. But in short order, this seeming security is exchanged for a wildness, a tangled place, jungle or forest or desert for the wilderness. In the wilderness, things are not always what they seem – friends can wear scary masks and enemies smiles of welcome. In the wilderness, these stories seem to tell us, the truth will be tested, and the masks will be stripped away and all will be revealed.
You remember – those stories begin with a girl or a boy, or maybe both, someone young enough to be vulnerable, to be imaginative, to be naïve, to be frightened. Someone hungry for adventure, or maybe just hungry.
And so they move to the wilderness, where the hero or heroine is tested, where her strength must be proven, where the fullness of his heart must be shown. The wilderness where even little girls must let their red capes become superhero garb. Even little boys must plant their magic bean dreams in hope that a garden will come of them.
But the garden was at the start of another story, wasn’t it? An old, old story. It began with a garden watered by a river – a muddy place where God’s fruitful creativity could play – where the great storyteller had room to breathe, to shape with word and mud and spirit. The chaos and disorder were set behind boundaries – locked up between heaven and earth. There were no wild beasts – but each docile creature was named and claimed by the first earthling—the dusty one made of mud inspired with God’s own breath, wind, Spirit. A place of security, of perfection, of protection. But even there, there was a tempter and a temptation that was not withstood. There, the angels did not come to tend, but to bar the way back, to send us out into the wilderness.
But today we read a bit further on in that story. We come back around, like the parents of the child eager to hear things again, to a place where we were just a few weeks ago, back there on January 11th at the Baptism of the Lord – the beginning of our journey in Mark’s gospel this liturgical year. But we get to read a little more this time – what happens next. There we stopped at the satisfying conclusion to the baptism story. Jesus leaves home, his home in Galilee, and comes to the waters, and through the waters, emerging he hears the voice of God—“You are my beloved son, with you I am well pleased.” That is where we folded down the page a few weeks ago and went off to work or play or sleep – went off to begin our new year.
It felt more like the way the story ends, didn’t it? After the hero has faced trials and temptations, shown courage and forbearance and wisdom. The way the story ends when the lowly servant with calloused hands, some seeming carpenter’s son, is revealed to be the beloved son of the Great King. Not so much the way it usually begins – all this approval and belovedness before any test has been withstood, before any temptation overcome, before any heroic service has been rendered.
Oh, but don’t worry, there will be temptation and tears, testing and love and blood poured out before this story ends. How good for this One to know before all of that, who he is, who will be with him, what he was sent to do.
“And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.”
In the wilderness forty days – like those forty years his ancestors wandered in the wilderness learning to rely on God for their daily bread. Tempted by Satan, as those first humans had been in the beginning, only this time the temptation is withstood. With the wild beasts – as docile as on that first day when they were made by God and named by the Human, here in the presence of this one both fully human and fully God. “And the angels waited on him” – his way Home was not barred by them as in that first garden, but they ministered to him in this wilderness.
The rest of the story still waits – what will it take for us to know that he is King of Kings and Lord of Lords. What price the revelation?
“Tell me a story.” Sometimes I still long for those days – when the bedtime stories were the only places of chaos and disorder in our lives. When booboos could be healed with the application of a band-aid and a kiss. Or is that just nostalgia as well? The bumps and bruises come early don’t they – and often. The chaos, the disorder come to most of our lives early and far too often.
So, heroes and heroines, where do you find yourselves today? Here this first Sunday of our forty days of Lent. Are you in a place of seeming security, a place of your own making -- wondering each night when it might collapse around you? Are you fastening your red cape about your shoulders ready to run an errand of mercy or keep a promise you once treasured when you are tempted by a detour off the path into a meadow of flowers where wolves may lurk? Do you have a handful of beans and only hope between you and the great hunger which gnaws at you? Are you at the edge of the tangled forest wondering whether to plunge ahead? Or already lost, so lost in its dark and thirsty places?
Come out to the wilderness, the Spirit beckons. Come out to the wilderness – when you find that what you have made, what you have done, what you have imagined will protect you and keep you safe and let you dream secure at night has been all disordered, has become chaos. Come out to the wild place, and allow God’s spirit to reorder all for you. Come out to the place where God can be trusted to be present, can be trusted to provide.
Even if it feels as if all the water in Creation cannot wash you clean, lift up your eyes and see the rainbow and know the floods will not last forever, need not last forever. Hold out your hand in the dark and feel it taken by the Lord who has gone before you into the dark and tangled places and made a path home safe.
These stories that we tell and hear and love – you remember where they end. Not in the wilderness. You know where they end – with restoration, with revelation – they may have their genesis, their beginning in a garden, and they may travel through a tangled wilderness, but they end with the true Prince revealed in all his loving strength, the worthy princess unmasked from her ragged garb so she can take her throne. They start in the wilderness, and end in glory, in a kingdom Ever After.
We are a people of the wilderness, but that is not our destination. We are a people of the wilderness, but we are on a journey home, home to a place we have not been before, and the journey is what will make us know it when we arrive. The journey will strip away our masks, our pretensions, our idols and will reveal the hero and his beauty, the heroine and her strength – does she belong in a kingdom where the queen is the servant? Does he belong to a city where the king gives his only coat to a peasant?
We are not the authors of our own stories, writing our own unhappy endings, we are not even struggling in the wilderness to prove our worthiness…. the good news of the kingdom is that our lives are written by God, that our journey is in the company of Jesus, that our character is, by the power of the Holy Spirit, revealed to be the very character of the Prince of Peace. It is not so much that we go to the wilderness in order to have the masks removed from us to reveal our true character, it is that we go to the wilderness – the place of disorder, where all we have wrapped ourselves in, our trappings of security, our ragged robes, are stripped away, stripped away so that we might receive the garment of Christ as a gift. And when we are wrapped in that mantle and accompanied by that One, when we receive and put on Christ in our baptisms, – it is this which gives us entry to glory, which makes us citizens of the Kingdom.
And though we are still on a journey, still in the wilderness, we are called to live together as though we are already in the Kingdom which is not only at its end, but is indeed, at hand.