Into the Wilderness of 2003

Mark 1:9-13

The Gospel of Mark dashes across our Lenten season this year, dramatically portraying in few words the appearance of "Jesus Christ, the Son of God." Mark, we might remember, wrote his gospel before the others and therefore originated the idea of a gospel. In a few lean lines in today's Gospel, Mark shows Jesus being baptized in the river Jordan, and then being driven by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan. The words are as sparse and direct as the landscape facing Jesus.

In the background are the life-giving waters of the Jordan, life returning to normal at the end of the winter season. There is a crowd of weary, apprehensive sinners who have come out from the villages, away from their usual busines, to be baptized by that wildman we call John the Baptist. Then there is Jesus, the Son of God, the one person in the crowd who does not need to repent but who chooses to to be baptized along with the repentant sinners. There is the voice of God, expressing unconstrained delight with his Son: "Look! This is the One I am sending!" And there is the dramatic touch of the life-giving Spirit in the unforgettable form of a dove.

We have to use our imaginations for some of this, of course. Like Jack Webb of Dragnet, we might imagine Mark explaining his style, “Just the facts, Ma'am.” Yet the background of his picture is replete with allusions that suggest that something new is about to happen. But we read on, "immediately," as Mark himself likes to say, to the foreground of this picture where the Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness—you remember our song from last week, “Blaze, Spirit, Blaze.” Why no time for a nice baptismal party or for tea and biscuits with the high priest? The crowds have gone; there is no water here. Jesus is on his own, among wind-carved rocks, in the blazing heat of the desert by day, in a place where the rocks feel like large ice cubes at night. The wilderness of Judea was a place of great danger, and if one had to go into those endless sands it was in order to get from one place to another quickly, with dried food and ported water, in caravans. But here is Jesus, alone, with only the angels to console him.

Yet the foreground of this picture also stimulates our imaginations. Jesus remains in this treacherous place for forty days, says Mark, and we remember the Israelite people in their forty-year journey across other deserts, notably through the wildernesses of Sinai. The word itself, "wilderness," is fraught with echoes of prophets such as Isaiah: "Behold, I am about to do a new thing... I will make a way in the wilderness" (Isaiah 43). The desert is dry and barren, and while it is nearly silent, it is a terrible place to sleep. The shadows moving in the wee hours, the occasional mysterious sound can be heard, and all this leaves one tossing during the darkest hours. Prophets retired to the wilderness because it was outside the dominion of the powers that were; new ideas could be thought, and old promises remembered. "A new highway is being built, a new thing is coming to pass," Jesus would have remembered Isaiah saying. Jesus is in the wilderness, to be tested, and to resist temptation, and to gather himself for his coming ministry.

Lent 2003

So now it is Lent, 2003, with the prospect of war and economic uncertainty coloring everything we see. As the world recoils in apprehension, the cable networks relish sky-high ratings. We perhaps forget that it was the Gulf War that made CNN in 1991. The cable-news images surely call us into a Lent that wants something beyond the familiar pieties of giving up chocolates or the “O’Reilly Factor,” or whatever might come to mind as a deprivation. Mark gives us Jesus and the Spirit in this wild environment: the waters of life and the dry wastes of the wilderness; the dramatic message of a dove, the searing blasts of the hostile desert winds. The economists told us Friday that 300,000 people lost their jobs in February. At every level of the economy, and at every level of government, there are shortages, uncertainties, and risks as we have not known them for some time. Like Jesus, we wonder, as we survey the wilderness before us, with the possibility of storm and nuclear-armed brigand that we now face: what will the days bring?

Of course we will use the penitential season to reflect, driven as we are into this unexpected wilderness. Who would have thought three years ago, as we congratulated ourselves on how well we can manage everything, that this would be the wilderness we would face? We will perhaps return to the faith of those who went before, in hopes that the wisdom we have forgotten can be resurrected in this new wilderness. Some of us will indeed welcome private Lenten disciplines, and we may choose to give up cable programs or chocolate desserts, as the sacrifices of the interior struggles we have. All these things can, in fact, cultivate the the spirit of penitance and humility that Lent encourages.

Lent can mean time to volunteer some extra work, for example, in the community or here at church; some of us will take our “Basic Bible” series with special seriousness, perhaps reading the books ahead of time. These Lenten choices, too, can shape and focus us on the kingdom of God, and nudge us to embrace the uncertainties of a Spirit doing new things—remember, “Blaze, Spirit, blaze!” At our Ashe Wednesday service, indeed, we heard the ancient prayer:

Though from dust we came and to dust we shall return,
You will sustain our souls from age to age.
O Ancient of Days, endow our fleeting days with your abiding worth.

There are powerful personal consolations in Lent. But this is Lent 2003, and if ever there was a time to re-think our Lenten disciplines, this is the time. Our Lenten disciplines work for us privately, personally, individually. But we can fall prey to imagining that Lent is only about personal introspection and personal confession of sin. Remember that Mark's is a Gospel of few words. It is true that he tells us very little of God's new Kingdom or how he understands the church will embody the Gospel. But all through his Gospel, Mark brandishes Jesus as the opponent of the vested secular and religious authority. Similarly, Mark's Gospel shows Jesus standing with those who are outside the social structures--for example he received John the Baptist’s ceremonial washings along with the sinners who came for repentance in the wilderness, far from the ceremonies of the Temple. Prophets, you might remember, often had little use for priests in religious buildings!

Out of the Wilderness:

God is Doing Something New

To accompany Mark through Lent in 2003 is to step outside the social framework that shapes our typical expectations. Lent with Mark is a time for grappling with the new wilderness of domestic and foreign policies facing our country, and then giving public voice to our informed convictions about both justice for the oppressed and peace for all of God’s children.

Let us cultivate our inner spiritual lives by fasting, by giving up things that will cause us to consider what is important. But let us also discipline ourselves to question the too-easy notion that war is inevitably the answer to foreign policy dilemmas. The peace of God is not simply a slogan. The peace of God is not simply feeling good about ourselves while much of the world recoils in fear and degradation. The peace of God is not simply the absence of terrorism and war. As we face the wilderness before us, with all its terrors and temptations, it is right that our leaders exhaust all diplomatic efforts so that war can be avoided. It is a time to remind ourselves that we are committed to the words of Jesus:"love your enemies; do good to them who hate you."

It is true that Christianity has taught that there can be just wars. St. Augustine and St. Thomas both gave us grounds for assessing whether specific wars are moral, and in fact they shaped much of modern thinking about justice and warfare. Of all people, to be sure, we ought not be naïve about the ways of the world and we ought to learn from what history teaches. Christianity and pacifism are not equivalent terms--though I respect the conscience of pacifists. Yet we need as a Christian community to be about the business of assessing whether crises in any time and place justify the inevitable horrors that military action generates. Above all, we ought not shrink into the private world of our own Lenten devotions; Jesus retired into the wilderness for a time, but then confronted all the powers of Judea--both religious and political--and it cost him his life.

In this morning's Gospel, Mark leaves Jesus in the wilderness just as his Gospel leaves Jesus dead in the tomb--scholars think the original end was lost. Mark knew, just as Jesus knew, that the wilderness of a world in turmoil is where we are called to make straight a highway for our God. My prayer this morning is that we find this Lent to be a wilderness in which we discover again that God is doing a new thing.