Lent 1B, 18 February 2024. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz
- Genesis 9:8-17. I will remember my covenant.
- 1 Peter 3:18-22. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit.
- Mark 1:9-15. And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.
O God of the spirit, grant us the wisdom, the strength and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
We have entered the season of Lent in our liturgical year. For those of you who are newish to Emmanuel, I want you to know that, in my view, this is the season that most closely aligns with the spirituality and the ethos of Emmanuel Church. We see the sin in the world; that is, we see so many ways in which the mark of Love is missed. (The Biblical definition of sin is missing the mark.) We know our need for mercy. “We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we [and others] have from time to time most grievously have committed,” as the Rite 1 Confession goes. The season of Lent, a time for self-examination and repentance, feels made for us. And you know that’s good, because it’s not fair for extroverts to get all of the holidays!
Our Gospel portion overlaps with what we heard from Mark at the beginning, the first Sunday after the Epiphany, and what we heard from Mark at the end, the third Sunday after the Epiphany. You might have thought when I read it just now, “Wait, haven’t we just heard this?” The answer is “yes.” We heard about the spirit descending like a dove at Jesus’ baptism and about Jesus being beloved of the Holy One. We heard about the beginning of his public ministry and the people he called on for help. We only hear this part, however, in the middle on the first Sunday in Lent every third year.
Today, we hear that Jesus didn’t even have time for a celebratory baptism-brunch before he was driven into the wilderness. In one moment, the spirit of holiness, like a dove, lands in a kind of gentle skid and the next moment, the spirit of holiness, like a territorial turkey or wild goose, chases him out of the crowds at the Jordan and into the desert for forty days. In his translation commentary, Mark Davis, suggests that the dovelike spirit became like the mythical monster, half-bird, half-person, called a harpy, which was the ancient personification of a storm wind. [1] According to the Gospel of Mark, it doesn’t sound like heading into the wilderness was Jesus’ idea at all; he was pushed, hard.
Words for wilderness appear about 300 times in the Bible: midbar in Hebrew, eremos in Greek. Wilderness, in Biblical literature, is a place for intense experiences of danger and delivery, of self-examination and surrender, of human renewal and divine revelation. [2] You might remember that 40 days is quite literally a quarantine. In Jesus’ time, forty days in the wilderness was a prescription for separating oneself from the community to stop the spread of disease, physical and spiritual. There wasn’t much of a distinction between physical and spiritual in Jesus’ time, and I think we make too much of a distinction between such maladies in our own time. During a quarantine in Jesus’ time, a deeper relationship with the divine, the ground of all being, was what was being sought. What was deeply desired was a more profound connection with the sacred for the purpose of healing and restoration. Our own need for quarantine hasn’t changed much.
The spiritual invitation of Lent prescribes three specific behaviors to stop the spread of disease (both physical and spiritual): almsgiving, praying, and fasting. We’re to give alms, pray, and fast not to impress other people, to impress ourselves, or even, and maybe especially, to impress a deity we have constructed in our own image. We give alms, pray, and fast to help us turn away from our own death-dealing patterns and turn toward life-giving patterns of love in action. In Lent, give up or take on whatever you need to get right with yourself and your neighbors, the ones you can see and the ones you can’t yet see.
Jesus was driven into the wilderness by the personification of storm winds. Mark tells us that he was tempted by the personification of evil. A literal translation of Satan is Accuser. What was the Accuser accusing Jesus of? Mark doesn’t tell us, but I imagine the voice accusing Jesus of not really being up to the task of proclaiming the Good News; or that his work wouldn’t really make any difference in the world; or that it was just too risky to confront the power of the occupying army or the complacency of those who did their bidding. I imagine the Accuser accusing Jesus of being “too big for his britches,” as my grandmother used to say when scolding someone who seemed puffed up with pride. I imagine the Accuser scoffing at John the Baptist’s message of repentance, saying: “You’re fooling yourself. They’ll never do it.”
Although according to Mark, Jesus was in an uncultivated and uncrowded place, he wasn’t entirely alone. There were messengers (or angels) of the Lord deaconing to him: that is, ministering to him, serving and attending to him, making sure he had sufficient water and food, shade from the strong sun and shelter at night. I imagine they were also helping Jesus not succumb to the accusations of the vocal personification of evil. Their presence in this story helps us remember that Jesus didn’t go it alone, even while he was in the wild.
Whatever the messengers of Love did must have worked, because Jesus came out of relative isolation to carry on the message of the arrested John the Baptist in spite of the risks. The message was, “The time is now; the realm of Love has come close. Repent: that is, turn around toward Love. Change your outlook and believe in the good news.” What is the good news? The good news is that the God you are searching for is right here, loving you, supporting you, prodding you to love others! The good news is healing of disability and disease, freedom from oppression and possession, food and drink for those who are hungry and thirsty, restoration of community, and love so comprehensive and generous that everyone is included. As activist and philanthropist Mallence Bart-Williams says, “It’s not about charity. It’s about sharity.”
Bart-Williams gave a TED talk in Berlin some years ago about loving kids in Sierra Leone, who were living lives of poverty and violence. She drew for her listeners a direct connection between their situation and the exploitation of African people by the US and other industrialized nations. She calmly and clearly invited her listeners to repent. She didn’t use the word repent, though. She said, “Change your channel.” Change your outlook so that rather than seeing lack, you see abundance; rather than seeing problems to solve, you see people to love, not with charity, but with sharity. The just distribution of resources requires sharing.
That powerful metaphor of changing channels reminded me that when I was a little girl, we sometimes had a working television. My father was not a fan of television but, according to my mom, from time to time, the kids’ inability to watch an assigned educational program or a moon landing made her feel guilty enough to buy a used black-and-white TV, which would last for a while and then break down. Then we’d have no TV again. I have a vivid memory of one TV that required pliers and strong hands to change the channel. Fortunately, there were only four channels that got any reception, so finding the right channel was relatively simple, even if it took some physical strength. Then came satellite technology, cable, and now multiple streaming services with what seems like an endless number of channels to search. I find myself talking to an oblong piece of plastic trying to remember the precise wording of the title of what I want to watch. Now, finding a channel requires not so much brute force, but patience, inner strength, and usually deaconing help from my wife or my grandchildren!
What do you need in order to change your channel to see that Love is stronger than anything else? What keeps any of us from changing the channel? I imagine the voice of the Accuser saying, “You’re not really up to the task”, that what you can do really wouldn’t make a difference, or that it’s just too risky, too futile, or not sustainable, or that you’re fooling yourself: things will never change. It all comes down to fear of failure and ultimately of heartbreak, I think. Heartbreak is inevitable, but there are angels standing by ready to help. You are some of them! Emmanuel is full of them lending a strong hand or a kind ear, extending grace and peace.
Here’s Jan Richardson’s “Blessing for the Brokenhearted.” [3]
Let us agree
for now
that we will not say
the breaking
makes us stronger
or that it is better
to have this pain
than to have done
without this love.
Let us promise
we will not
tell ourselves
time will heal
the wound,
when every day
our waking
opens it anew.
Perhaps for now
it can be enough
to simply marvel
at the mystery
of how a heart
so broken
can go on beating,
as if it were made
for precisely this –
as if it knows
the only cure for love
is more of it,
as if it sees
the heart’s sole remedy
for breaking
is to love still,
as if it trusts
that its own
persistent pulse
is the rhythm
of a blessing
we cannot
begin to fathom
but will save us
nonetheless.
- D. Mark Davis, leftbehindandlovingit.blogspot.com, entry for 2/12/24.
- Thanks to Holmes Rolston for this: https://www.environmentandsociety.org/exhibitions/wilderness-babel/midbar-arabah-and-eremos-biblical-wilderness#
- Jan Richardson. “Blessing for the Brokenhearted,” in The Cure for Sorrow: A Book of Blessings for Times of Grief (www.janrichardson.com: Wanton Gospeller Press, 2016).