March 1, 2009
The First Sunday in Lent (Year B)
Genesis 9:8-17; Psalm 25:1-9; 1 Peter 3:18-22;
Mark 1:9-15
Using this 1928 liturgy is like going back to my childhood in some ways. The fact that I am the one doing all the talking is a very sharp contrast to my experience of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer (BCP) as a child, and, of course, it never occurred to me that I would be the one standing up here leading the prayers. Never as a child did it occur to me that women could be priests.
Things have changed in the past fifty years, some things, anyway, but the words seem familiar to me and comfortable, a little sexist to be sure, but this is in hind sight, which as we all know is 20/20!
So, in the backdrop of these words, familiar to some of us, and like a foreign language to others, we come upon the familiar story that we usually hear on Lent 1. Jesus is baptized, then immediately driven into the desert where he is tempted by Satan while in the company of beasts and angels.
There are four key things about this simple story that I want to look at this morning.
“He was driven into the desert” is the first.
The desert is traditional and sometimes referred to as a “wilderness” or a place that was thought of in the Hebrew tradition as being a place of Divine testing – and Divine Revelation. Jesus was in the wilderness of the desert for forty days; the Hebrew people spent forty years in the desert wandering until they found the promised land. Forty, then, becomes significant to the Hebrew people, to Jesus, and to us, not because it was the number of days he could fast and survive, or be with the beasts and survive, or be tempted and survive, but because forty echoes the story of the people who wandered in the desert until they found their way toward the saving place God intended for them. In the forty days Jesus found his way, too, – or became in tune with or fully realized his way – the way God intended for him to go once he came out of the extended period of time in the desert.
I think it begs us to think about ourselves in the forty days of Lent, not because forty is a magical number, but because it echoes the stories of those forbears of ours who helped write our spiritual history and call us to continue the salvation story and relationship with God in our day and time with our own forty days or years or months or times of overcoming beasts, Satan, and going deeper into our own relationship with God. Lent is our “forty” time, a time to explore and reflect and examine ourselves and to seek our own promised land, our own mission in God’s name.
The second part of this gospel that I want to explore this morning is that Jesus was “tempted by Satan.”
I looked up Satan and found that “[i]n the old testament tradition Satan was the adversary who tested the faithfulness of those chosen by God. He was one of God’s angels and not one who was in direct opposition to God. However, by the time the New Testament was written Satan was identified with the evil forces working against God. Satan was seen to hold limited power over the present age and would be destroyed when the reign of God began”
In our time not many of us can identify with a devil in red with pointed ears and pitchfork tail as anything more than a children’s costume for Halloween, but evil – well, we all can name evil, and it can be palpable at different times of our lives. Satan may well still be working with God to tempt us. And in some ways I like that idea better than having a God who tries to entice us into evil. But knowing human nature as I do, I would guess that we don’t need any tempting from one of God’s angels to get us into trouble! We humans can pretty much fall into the grip of temptation all on our own!
But evil, true evil, is cunning and deceptive, and it is alive and well in the world today. Alexander Solzhenitsyn said “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart.” We all have both within us, good and evil, and we often have trouble recognizing evil, much more trouble, than recognizing good. Our hearts are torn when it comes to recognizing evil, and none of us are Jesus who likely saw evil – or Satan – for exactly what they were.
Evil is cunning and wily and smooth talking. Evil is very close to good and truth and righteousness, but always with a little twist that takes truth and good and righteousness and pushes them into the pit of destructive, hurtful, self-aggrandizement, and usually in a way that blinds us to truth and good and righteousness.
For instance, I knew of a person who came into a clergy person’s office to talk of the great love in his life. This love he expounded was a true gift from God because it was so filled with love, passion, chemistry, trust, and synchronicity that it could only come from God. Truly it was love like he had never known or imagined possible ever before. The fact that he was hurting his family, his wife and children, and the husband and children of the object his love was hidden from him in that pit of self-deception into which he fell. He at once blamed and then alternately thanked his “cold fish of a wife” for pushing him into finding such bliss in a woman so young and vibrant. You probably have seen such a story lived out in your own life by someone you know. But. I believe, evil was causing him to turn a blind eye to the reality of his actions. That is what evil does. It causes us to point a finger at someone else, and allows us in a very convoluted way to blame someone else for the wrong we are doing and for us to claim the good as a reward. When evil reigns, we think we are getting “the good” we deserve. The man thought he deserved to be loved by this beautiful young woman – after all he had put up with his wife for years.
Do you see how wily evil is? How deceptive and smooth talking? Do you see how wrapping it all in love which is, of course, of God places it in the proximity of good and truth and righteousness without ever really getting there?
The final two things to be explored this morning are the beasts and the angels who kept Jesus company in the desert those forty days.
Wild animals were another Hebrew testament way of saying “danger.” The animals were dangerous. Jesus had no gun for protection. The animals were wild and his meat was tender. Someplace along the course of human history, the animals became dangerous. In the Garden of Eden all lived peaceably together, but by the time this gospel was written animals were associated with danger. So Jesus faced danger from within, his own human heart split in two between good and evil. Remember he was human in every way that we are, yet did not “sin”! And he was in danger from without, from the animals who scavenged the wasteland searching for sustenance – danger from within and danger from without. That is not much different from what any of us face every day of our lives, even when we are not in the wasteland of the desert or wilderness of separation from God and/or those we love. Life is a natural wasteland and desert that confronts us with danger – and angels provide for us almost without ceasing.
And, those angels? The angels attended him. The angels kept him company and provided spiritual shelter and probably a clarifying and calming presence to the beasts and the demons alike. The angels waited on him. “Waited on him” means served him, as a servant or slave would, ministered to him as a nurse or pastor or friend or mother would.
Angels are here for all of us, good- and evil-hearted, desert wandering, beast facing, desert reflecting pilgrims on our Lenten journey if we but have eyes to see and hearts that will let us believe and let go and be catered to by them.
It is my prayer for all of us that as we go through Lent, celebrating the fifty years we have been a community, that we will all gladly walk into the desert for our own forty days, knowing we need not pray for temptation. It will find us! But I do pray that we will be brave as we face the beasts of danger that accompany us in life, and that we will be wise enough to recognize the angels when they minister to us. May your forty days lead you toward the place God is calling you to be. May you, like Jesus, know the depth of that call and the direction of it when you arrive at Easter.
Amen.
The Rev. Dr. Gale Davis Morris
Church of the Good Shepherd