"Wilderness Faith"
Mark 1:9-15
There’s a hymn
in our hymnal that we sing sometimes, “There’s
a sweet, sweet Spirit in this place. And I know that it’s the Spirit of the
Lord. There are sweet expressions on each face. And I know they feel the
presence of the Lord.”
Somehow, I don’t think the “sweet holy Spirit, sweet heavenly dove”
adequately describes the Spirit in Marks’ account of the gospel. As Jill
Duffield says, “Mark’s Holy Spirit dove does not sit cooing on a nearby branch, placidly watching. No. Mark’s version of the Holy Spirit was an
angry bird long before the video game came on the scene. The descending dove
tears apart heaven to get to earthly Jesus as he comes up out of the waters of
baptism… Somehow that image of a gentle bird, branch in its mouth, doesn’t do
Mark’s Holy Spirit justice.”[1]
Jesus had come from Nazareth of
Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. Just as he was coming up out of
the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove
upon him. A voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved. With you I am
well pleased.”
And then, immediately, the Spirit drove
Jesus out into the wilderness. Jesus was
in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild
beasts, and the angels waited on him.
Now, both Matthew and Luke give us
more details about those forty days. Mark’s sparse account leaves a lot more to
the imagination. We might like to fill
in the gaps of Mark’s account with details from Matthew or Luke. Some of us
might like to minimize the power of evil or tell ourselves there’s little we
can do to resist evil. But I wonder if it isn’t more faithful to pay attention to
the sparseness in the story…and spend time in the silence …and to invite the
story to speak our truth to us.
There’s a popular Sunday school
curriculum for young children called “Godly Play.” One of the key phrases teachers use in “Godly
Play” teaches “The wilderness is a dangerous place. You only go there if you have
to.” The children are encouraged to run their fingers through large, wooden
sandboxes, and to imagine the scorched landscapes Biblical characters
encountered as they sought to follow God. Fierce heat. Jagged rocks. Scarcity
of water. Wild animals. Blistered feet.
“The wilderness is a dangerous
place. You only go there if you have to.”[2]
We don’t know how Jesus spent those
forty days and forty nights. Did he walk for miles each day, or camp out in one
spot? Where did he sleep? Did he climb up into a cave? What was the silence
like, hour after hour? As the days stretched on and on, did he fear for his survival?
Did he question his sanity? Did he have visions?
What we do know is that Jesus didn’t
choose to go to the wilderness, and that it was dangerous. “The wilderness is a dangerous place. You only
go there if you have to.”
Does that ring true for you? Most of
us don’t choose to enter a wilderness place. We don’t generally seek out pain
or loss or danger or terror. But sometimes we find ourselves in the wilderness
anyway. It may be in a hospital waiting room…
a troubled relationship… a sudden death of a loved one… a crippling panic
attack… loss of a job… a financial crisis.
Can we bear to think it’s
the Spirit that dries us into the wilderness among the wild beasts? When we’re
suffering, we might wonder if this mean that God wills bad things to happen to
us?
Sometimes
people will try to tell us things like this.
I don’t
think so. But I do believe that God can
redeem even the most parched and barren times in our lives and that the dangerous places can also be holy.
I
hesitate to even say this, because I remember that at times Christians have
suffered under the false teaching that God gives us human pain and suffering
for some greater good. I’ve heard the old platitude that “everything happens
for a reason,” and I don’t believe it. I’ve had a hard time believing it for a long
time, because of all the suffering I’ve seen and because I don’t believe the
God I love and trust, the God who is love, goes around dispensing suffering and
pain to teach us lessons.
A few
days ago, I heard part of an interview with Kate Bowler on the radio, on NPR,
and I knew I needed to read her book, Everything
Happens for a Reason (and Other Lies I’ve Loved).[3]
Kate is
a Duke Divinity School professor with a Christian background. She was best
known, until recently, as an expert on prosperity gospel teachings and author
of a book on the subject. Married in her twenties, a baby in her thirties, she
got a job at her alma mater straight out of graduate school. She said she felt
breathless with the possibilities. She writes, “I felt that God had a worthy
plan for my life, in which every setback would also be a step forward. I wanted God to make me good and make me
faithful, with just a few shining accolades along the way. Anything would do if
hardships were only detours on my long life’s journey. I believed God would
make a way.” She continues, “I don’t believe that anymore.”[4]
In 2015,
at the age of 35, Kate was diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer.
Kate
prayed the same prayer every day: “God, save me. Save me. Save me. Oh, God,
remember my baby boy. Remember my son and my husband before you return me to
ashes. Before they walk this earth
alone.” She says, “I pleaded with a God of Maybe, who may or may not let me
collect more years. It is a God I love, and a God that breaks my heart.”
She had
so many questions. “Why? God, are you
here? What does this suffering mean?” Sometimes she thought she could almost make
out an answer. But then it was drowned out by what by now she’s heard a
thousand times. “Everything happens for a reason” or “God is writing a better
story.” Apparently, she says, God is also busy going around closing doors and
opening windows.
For
Kate, THE WORLD OF CERTAINTY had ended and so many people seemed to know why.
Most of their explanations were reassurances that even her cancer is a secret
plan to improve her. “This is a test and it will make you stronger!” Sometimes,
they’d pepper their platitudes with scripture verses.
So, what I do believe, is
that sometimes our life journeys take us to desolate and dangerous places. I
don’t think this is because God takes pleasure in our pain or gives it to us to
teach us something-- but because we live in a broken, fragile, dangerous world
that includes wilderness places. I believe God is with us in ways and through
people we might experience as angels. I
believe goodness is stronger than evil and that God can take the things of death
and wring from them new life.
I
believe that there aren’t as many simple or certain answers as we might want to
believe.
So that’s what I wanted to say
before we go back to the story of Jesus in the wilderness, and to wondering why
God’s Beloved Son Jesus needed to be tempted and what it might mean.
I think Nadia Bolz-Weber is right
when she suggests that temptation--Jesus’ and ours-- is always about identity.
It’s about who we are and whose we are. “Identity,” Nadia says, “is always God’s first
move. Before we do anything wrong and before we do anything right, God has
named and claimed us as God’s own.”[5]
But almost immediately, other forces
try to tell us who we are and to whom we belong. Forces within capitalism tell us we need to
buy certain kinds of cars or houses or clothing to show we have worth. If we’re poor, parts of society tell us we’ve
made bad choices or are lazy or just haven’t tried hard enough. “The
weight-loss industrial complex”[6],
our parents, teachers, the kids at school all have a go at telling us who we
are.
But only God can tell us who we are.
Everything else is temptation. If we’re
out in the wilderness and we hear a voice on the wind telling us that we don’t have
enough, that we aren’t good enough, that we can’t keep ourselves or our loved
ones safe without gates and walls and bombs and assault weapons-- that’s
temptation.
If God’s first move is to give us
our identity and tell us we are Beloved, Satan’s first move is to make us doubt
our identity. As we wander in the wilderness, in dangerous and desolate
places, we are tempted to doubt that we are God’s own--beloved.
The gospel story we heard today
reminds us that we will have times of doubt and temptation. The wilderness
experience is not unique to Jesus.
Our times in the wilderness can teach us more about who we really are.
As Mark tells us, there were angels
in the wilderness. They might not have glistening wings and golden halos. Our
angels might not come in the form we might prefer. And yet, somehow, help comes. Rest
comes. Comfort comes. Angels come and minister to us. And sometimes
we are angels to others.
That’s
we do in the church, when we are out in the wilderness. We minister to each other. We minister to
each other. We whisper “beloved” …” child of God” into each other’s ears.
I hope and pray that when
angels in various forms whisper “beloved” into our ears, that we will listen
and trust in the good news.
When we’re in the wilderness, we can trust that God is with
us, and that we are not alone. We can trust that we belong to God and
that God has named us and claimed us as God’s own. We can trust that evil
will never have the last word. We can know that love wins. Thanks be to God! Amen.
Rev. Fran Hayes, Pastor
Littlefield Presbyterian Church
Dearborn, Michigan
February 18, 2018
[3]
Kate Bowler, Everything Happens for a Reason (and Other Lies I’ve Loved). Random House, 2018.
[4] Kate Bowler, Everything Happens for a Reason, Kindle location 69.
[5] Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint.” (Jericho
Books, 2013), page 139.
[6] I like Nadia’s description of this, on
page 139.
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