Wilderness Lessons

Here we are, Lent again; approaching one year of pandemic wilderness. This wilderness was thrust on us with a brutal vengeance. Everything and everyone has been affected, to varying degrees. Covid has been forcing a self-examination, personally and collectively, with an urgency rarely imposed by external events.

To be honest, it feels like we’ve been in Lent all year. But I wonder if in pre-Covid times we could kind’a play Lent casually. Before Covid we could pick and choose our Lenten observance: what shall I commit to/give up for Lent this year? Shall I … try to pray more, fast from chocolate, worry less? Or maybe I could help the local Foodbank for Lent? Yeah, that sounds nice, I can handle that. Remember what I said last week about willed and un-willed change. I’m guessing that many little Lenten practices could easily be in the category of “willed” change.

This pandemic has certainly thrown us into un-willed change! We didn’t ask for this, we didn’t choose it, we didn’t want it. And yet, here we are, one full year in and more to come. How do we draw meaning and purpose from this global wilderness? Enter today’s account in Mark’s Gospel – filled with meaning, with purpose and with hope.

Mark’s story begins with Jesus’s baptism, short and to the point. When Jesus rose from the waters of the Jordan River, the heavens tore open, and God’s voice thunders loud and clear: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Jesus is barely dried off from the big plunge, and Mark writes: immediately the Spirit drove him out into the wilderness. That’s a bit like taking a baby from its warm bath right into -45C! Brrr ….  So, there he was, pushed into this ominous wilderness for one week, two weeks, three weeks, four weeks … How did that affect Jesus? Did the Son of God have to keep reminding himself who and whose he was?  Did he have hours, or days, or weeks, when he forgot – such as we might right now?

I suggest three aspects of this brutal 4-week wilderness trek worth exploring:
First, Jesus didn’t choose the wilderness. He didn’t book an exotic expedition to Africa, or enter a Fitbit competition to improve his physical fitness. No. The Spirit of God “drove” him, compelled him, forced him, into the desolation of a wild and unsafe place, danger lurking in every shadow. I bet Jesus didn’t want to go, and it is very possible he resisted. But the Spirit drove him, anyway.

Most of the time, we don’t choose to enter the wilderness. None of us chose to be thrown into this current pandemic wilderness. We don’t volunteer for pain and illness, loss and danger, or terror. But the wilderness happens, despite our best efforts to avoid it. Whether it comes as a devastating pandemic, a frightening hospital stay, a broken relationship, a hurting child, or a loss of faith, the wilderness appears, unbidden and unwelcome, flinging open the doors of our safety and comfort. And sometimes … God’s own Spirit … drives us there.

Now, does this mean that God wills bad things to happen to us?  That God wants us to suffer?  No. Does it mean that God is ready to teach, shape, and redeem us even during the most scary and arid seasons of our lives?  Yes. In God’s world, even a dangerous desert can become holy. Even our wilderness wanderings can reveal the divine. This is not because God takes pleasure in our pain, but because we live in a chaotic, fragile, and broken world that includes deserts and shadows and wild beasts. It’s because God’s specialty is to take the pain, the shadows and the wild beasts of life, even death itself, and transform them into … resurrection living…

Second, forced wilderness treks feel like they never end, like a trip to Disneyland, Barbados or the Mexican beaches does ☹. This pandemic wilderness is lasting way, way longer than any of us anticipated. I’m guessing that most of us have never spent forty days in solitude and silence, although this past year may have come awfully close to that. But even now most of us are not physically deprived and in actual danger. I imagine that Jesus’s time in the wilderness did not pass quickly.  Time flies when you’re having fun; time stops when you’re hurting and sweating, hungering and thirsting. Being human like us, Jesus most likely despaired of the grim places where the wild beasts were growling.  Most likely each day brought a battle of mind, spirit, and body.  Mark doesn’t give details, like the other Gospel writers do, but I’m sure the hours felt like years, and the nights felt terrifyingly endless. 

For us who have been steeped in instant, impatient, quick-fix cultures, this aspect of the wilderness is truly terrifying and daunting, because we tire and despair so quickly. Patience is nobody’s virtue, especially now in this isolation season.  Why is this isolation, this pain, not ending?  Why are our prayers not being answered?  Where the heck is God anyways?!

Last Sunday’s CBC Radio program Tapestry featured the writings and witness of Julien of Norwich, a 14^th century recluse who never left her cell. The program was entitled: When to be still, when to be stirred: what mystics can teach us about patience during COVID-19. We didn’t exactly choose to keep our own company all this year, sitting alone with our thoughts and feelings as Julian did. But Julian’s experience with seclusion can offer insight and wisdom for us today. So I encourage you to listen to this episode of Tapestry online. Listen, and make Julian’s wisdom part of your Lenten learning.

At his baptism, Jesus heard the absolute truth about who he was.  That was the easy part. The much harder part came in the wilderness/desert, when he had to stare down every vicious, mocking assault on that truth.  I’m sure Jesus had days when God’s voice faded, and the isolation of the wilderness played tricks on his heart and mind. In the face of all this, Jesus had to learn, the hard way, that his beloved-ness and belonging to God would still hold.  That God’s deep and unconditional delight would never depend on external circumstances, no matter how dismal.

Those forty days in the wilderness helped Jesus to get deeply grounded in who he was and what he was sent to do: the Son of God chose deprivation over power, vulnerability over rescue, obscurity over earthly honour.  At every instance in which he could have reached for the easy and certain, the extraordinary and the miraculous, he reached instead for the precarious, the quiet, the hard and the mundane.

Of course, there is nothing easy about these choices, not even when you’re God’s son.  Indeed, some days we might find these choices quite appalling.  How often we prefer the miraculous intervention, the dramatic rescue, the long-awaited vindication.  How often do we find ourselves silently screaming: Feed me!  Deliver me!  Prove yourself to me!  How offensive God’s restraint and silence can feel. Sometimes we, like Jesus, need long stints in the wilderness to learn what it really means to be God’s children.  The chosen people of Israel wandered in the wilderness for forty years. This long stint in the pandemic-wilderness is offering important lessons. In the wilderness, the love that survives becomes strong as steel.  In the wilderness, the love that survives has the power to save. Learning to trust God in the wilderness takes time. A long time …

Third, there were angels in the wilderness! Whew! Even in the land of shadows and starvation, even in the place where the wild beasts roamed, God’s agents of love and care linger.  This is a startling and comforting truth — one we can recognize if we open our eyes and take a good look around, especially now in pand-emic-times.  Where and who are the angels today? Even in the grimmest places, God abides, and somehow, without reason or explanation, help comes.  Rest comes.  Solace comes.  Granted, our angels don’t always appear in the forms we prefer, but they come.

I wonder what Jesus’s angels looked like.  Did they manifest as winged creatures from heaven? As comforting breezes across the sun-scorched hills?  As a trickle of water for his parched throat? As the swirl of constellations on a clear, cloudless night? As a stranger offering comfort?

What do your angels look like?  Do you recognize them when they show up?  When they minister to you, hold you, brace you, do you hear God’s voice anew, calling you “beloved?”  And what is it like to enter into someone else’s barren desert, scary wilderness, right now, and become their angel?

As we enter Lent, my prayer is that we may learn to trust with Christ Jesus that our vulnerability can become our strength.  May we enter with courage the deserts/wilderness places which we do not choose or cannot avoid.  May our long stints among the wild beasts teach us who we really are — the precious and beautiful children of God.  And when the angels in all their sweet and secret disguises whisper our name “beloved” into our ears, may we listen, and believe them. AMEN

Homily preached on the First Sunday of Lent, February 21, 2021. Genesis 9:8-17; Psalm 25:1-9; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:9-15.

• The social isolation as a precautionary measure against virus transmission is having an unprecedented emptying effect on this extrovert writer and priest/pastor. Truly, dear friends, my writing and preaching tank has rarely been this empty. While my sermons continue to be borne from my own wrestling with God’s holy Word for our difficult time, I lean on other preachers’ sermons more heavily than usual right now, especially Debie Thomas’ blog Journey with Jesus. I am immensely grateful for their writing gifts and insights into the sacred text shared so generously online.

Revealing and Concealing

In the Anglican and Lutheran lectionary, we celebrate Transfiguration Sunday today. This concludes the season of Epiphany (aka Ordinary Time), the season of light shining in the darkness. The readings from the Holy Book are full of strange wonders: fiery chariots and a wild whirlwind, dazzling clothes and magic mantles, radiant light. In the reading from the Hebrew Scriptures, Elijah ascends to heaven in a spectacular whirlwind. In the Gospel, Jesus reveals his divinity on a mountaintop drenched in blinding light. There is nothing subtle about either of these stories. After the hints and glimmers of light in the Epiphany season, today we witness with uncovered eyes God’s glory in all its fullness.

But before we engage that glory a bit more, there is one puzzle piece in Mark’s Gospel that needs exploring. It’s a piece that Bishop Sid (Haugen, ELCIC SaskSynod) named in his sermon last week.

It’s a piece that made one of you email me a question. And that same piece is present in today’s account from Mark’s Gospel. That puzzle piece is Jesus’ words to the disciples at the end of their mountaintop moment in glory: he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.

Now it’s one thing for Jesus to tell the demons to shut up (as we heard last week in Mark 1:29—39). I mean, be honest, would you want demons to testify about you? Jesus certainly didn’t. Soon enough the Pharisees would begin to accuse him of being in league with the devil. Just because the demons “knew him” does not make their testimony desirable. The demons knew him not because of faith or love, but out of fear and doom they knew he’d cast them into hell. The demons’ words might be true and correct, but they were spoken to do harm.

So no demon testimony please. But it’s quite another that Jesus would give the same gag order to the disciples after that mountaintop revelation. Doesn’t he want his disciples to spread the glorious news about him? Yes and no.

On the one hand, Jesus is not secretive at all. He is visibly anointed by the Holy Spirit and declared God’s “Son” (Mark 1:9–11). He proclaims the kingdom of God openly in Galilee (1:14–15). He heals in in public (e.g., 1:34; 2:1–12). He calms the storm (4:35–41) and feeds the 5,000 (6:30–44). He engages in public debate with religious leaders directly states his purpose (10:45), etc. He is not shy to reveal his identity, his mission, and his message.

On the other hand, Mark’s Jesus sometimes does the opposite and conceals himself. There seem to be largely three different groups who are commanded not to speak about him: demons/unclean spirits, crowds, and disciples. Jesus’ summons to silence appears to play different roles, depending on the context and the audience. With evil spirits, Jesus’s commands to “be silent” and “not to make him known” (Mark 1:24; 1:34; 3:12) come on the heels of the spirits’ crying that he’s the “Holy One of God” (1:24) or “Son of God” (3:11). Jesus forbids them from speaking, lest this only increases the impression that he’s in bed with the devil. Most likely Mark’s concern was for Jesus to reduce the risks of misinformation, the speculations and the gossip about who he was, until the proper time had arrived for the complete revealing.

With Jesus’s disciples the commands to silence take a different shape. The first instance comes after Peter proclaims Jesus to be “the Christ” (Mark 8:29) —at which Jesus insists “to tell no one about him” (8:30). The second comes after the transfiguration scene (9:2–8) at which Jesus “charged them to tell no one what they had seen” until after his resurrection (9:9). Both scenes feature a pivotal revelation of Jesus’s identity: “Christ” (8:29, spoken by Peter) and “my beloved Son” (9:7)

Why silence his closest friends? Easy: his dear friends, the disciples, simply don’t get it. Peter rebukes Jesus, resulting in a counter-rebuke “they did not understand the saying” (9:32); James and John squabble about future privilege (10:35–41). Throughout Mark’s Gospel the disciples come off looking slow-minded and self-centered, obtuse and hard-hearted. If I had been one of them, I’d be embarrassed by Mark’s depiction of our little band of followers. Jesus commands them to be silent because his confidantes —despite his plain self-revealing—kept struggling with incomprehension. With the disciples, it’s not how Jesus keeps his identity a secret, but rather how those who could know better failed to grasp what he revealed to them. It’s not Jesus who is concealing truth, but their own hearts not seeing. Even after his resurrection, the female disciples “said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” Mark’s story ends with silence….

Given this brief summary from Biblical scholars, Jesus’s commands to silence seem aimed at avoiding any impression of colluding with the devil, reducing the spread of misinformation as well as an effort to manage the timing: he is the Messiah and divine Son, but that is only fully revealed at his death and resurrection. Until then, the misunderstandings result in shrieking demons, gossiping and speculating crowds, and obtuse statements by the disciples. Keep this in mind as we make our way through Mark’s Gospel this year. Let’s now return to today’s glorious mountaintop.

Here’s a strange thing about the two glory stories: these glory stories are not “happy” stories. As miraculous and light-filled as they are, each story (Elijah and Jesus) involves bewilderment and loss. Why? Because embedded in each is a … threshold. A change. A boundary line marking a “before” and an “after.” And let’s face it: we human beings rarely cross thresholds willingly, eagerly and without hesitation. Because we are creatures of habit, we need predictability and stability. So when a threshold is thrust upon us by external circumstances, we resist, we hesitate, we look for the easy way out.

In my annual report I speak of willed and un-willed change. Willed change, something I freely decide, is often easier than un-willed change. But the paradox is, the irony really, is that it is the un-willed, the un-chosen change that holds the most potential for depth and growth. Both moments of glory and un-willed change pose thresholds into undiscovered territory inside us and outside us. Sometimes we cross over the threshold with naïve excitement, only to find ourselves into a change too deep to navigate. Sometimes we cross over in grief, consumed with pining for what we’re leaving behind (I wonder if a lot of us are doing that right now). Sometimes we move forward in fear, convinced that whatever lies ahead will be beyond our capacity to handle. Sometimes we refuse to cross over at all until stubborn necessity forces us to just put one foot in front of the other, like right now in this pandemic season, forcing brutal change caused by an invisible bug.

I don’t believe that our hesitation and fear make us inadequate, un-spiritual or unworthy. It simply means we are fragile, human and cautious. But what this week’s accounts from the Holy Book teach us is that glimpses of glory announce thresholds that are essential to the life of faith. Risky as it is, crossing over into the effects of the glory, into un-willed change and suffering, is what keeps our faith relationship with God real and dynamic. Without moments of glory and dangerous thresholds, without evolution, without change, we die a spiritual death long before we find ourselves six feet under.

For us, over 2,000 years later, we have an advantage the disciples didn’t have. We know from the outset that Jesus is “Christ” as well as “Son of God,” two claims Mark makes in the very first verse of his Gospel (Mark 1:1). And we know how the story ends. Yet we, too, struggle with incomprehension. We, like the crowds, may be attracted to the wonder-working Jesus and ignore his call to suffer. We, like the disciples, may want a “Christ” in our own image but not the dying one on the cross. We, too, may feel the inward urge to “say nothing to anyone” about the Son of God.

But as we bathe in today’s final Epiphany light of Jesus’ glory and approach the threshold of the Lenten season, summoning us into self-examination and un-willed change of heart, we can help each other to stare down these temptations and fears. We stand downstream of the full revealing of Jesus. Nothing is hidden anymore, all is revealed. AMEN

Homily preached on Sunday February 14, 2021
2 Kings 2:1–12, Mark 9:2–9
Image: Earl Mot
With thanks to Debie Thomas for her inspiration on these Scripture passages.