March 5, 2006
First Congregational Church
This past Wednesday we began the Lenten season, that time during
which the people of the church prepare themselves for Easter—and the
typical way that is done is answering the invitation issued by the church
to look inward and take stock of our lives, especially those areas in which
we have failed each other, failed God, and failed our best selves. The
prescription that the church has given us over the centuries for those
personal and sometimes even communal failings has been the
subtraction of a particular vice, maybe sometimes just a guilty pleasure—
we subtract something to remind ourselves of our need to transform our
lives. Or sometimes we are asked to add a spiritual discipline of some
sort—maybe reading through the Gospels during the next 40 days, or
choosing to do a time of morning prayer, or something like that. We’ll, I’
ve tried both adding and subtracting from my life during the Lenten
season in the past 20 years—and I have been a stunning failure all
around when it comes to this spiritual mathematics! I try to subtract
something, something even as small as sweets, but the demonic pull of
chocolate chip cookies is simply too much. Or I’ve tried to add a spiritual
discipline of some sort, but waking up at 5:30 in the morning to read that
Lenten devotional book is too much, and by the second or third week, its
all gone by the wayside. Some people are good at it, at these time
sensitive disciplines, but I’m not and though it is often suggested that we
do something different in our lives during this season in order to
acknowledge the spiritual and moral gaps in our lives, I’ve found that
most people don’t even bother, or they’re like me—they’re full of good
intentions, much like the beginning of each new year with those new
years resolutions, but they collapse midway through the race, and, at
best, limp their way to the end, into Holy Week.
I keep thinking that part of the reason why many of us don’t even bother
with the Lenten disciplines is because we instinctively know that life or
God is going throw something into our lives that will teach us what we
need to learn, without us even having to bother with intentionally adding
or subtracting something during a season like Lent—we’ll get the lessons
of Lent, one way or another, whether we choose to teach them to
ourselves, or we allow life to teach them to us, in God’s own good time.
Why intentionally add to our struggles in life when we know that the same
lessons and challenges we need to learn will be foisted upon us, with or
without our permission! Why bring on the inevitable, especially before its
time?!
And there is something to be said for this fatalist, maybe even slightly
cynical point of view—especially if we pay attention to passages like the
Markan text we have before us this morning. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is
said to have been “driven” into the wilderness by the Spirit of God after
his baptism by John at the river Jordan. Eugene Peterson translates a
line from the text this way: “the same Spirit PUSHED Jesus out into the
wild.” The Greek word used here for “driven” or “pushed” is the same
word that the writer of Mark’s Gospel uses for those moments in the text
when Jesus drives the demons out of people—it implies force, it offers no
choice, it is not a request, it not tugging or a pulling—it is a forceful
removal of Jesus from the banks of the river Jordan right into the
wilderness. For Jesus, there seems to be no choice: the desert was his
next destination, the shadows, the hunger, the loneliness, the self-
doubt—it’s all there, waiting for him there and unlike the choices we can
make during Lent about our personal and spiritual disciplines, this
moment for Jesus is not optional. Yet, the reality is that this story tells us
that whether we want to go there or not, the wilderness awaits all of us—
we will all get our forty days in the desert, at some point in our lives, and
it matters not whether we choose to go into Lent because there is a good
chance that Lent will come to us, at some point in our lives—Lent and all
its needed emotional and spiritual lessons will arrive at our doors, one
way or another. At this point, for me, I’ll wait for the additions and
subtractions to come to me, rather plunging headfirst into them of my
own choosing!
It’s really amazing how this moment in the Gospel text really mimics our
lives, with all of its ups and downs. Jesus, having just been named as
the Son, the child of God, the Beloved—again, Peterson translates it as
“you are my chosen and marked by my love, the pride of my life”—here
Jesus is on a high, a moment of ultimate inclusion and recognition—and
then he is immediately pushed into the wilderness, from light to shadows,
almost within seconds, it seems. I mean, who hasn’t been on the top of
the world in one moment and moments later found oneself crashing
down to earth. It seems inevitable, these moments of pain, maybe even
failure. There is a rhythm there, mountaintops and valleys, the truth that
we should probably learn early on in our lives—when the good stuff
comes, keep your eye out, there’s probably some difficult stuff right
around the corner, some valley we’ll be experiencing soon enough.
Sometimes the highs and lows are of varying height and depth, but the
humbling rhythm of the universe remains—rarely do we live on the
mountaintops throughout our lives.
But the inevitability of these Lenten seasons found within our lives
should probably indicate their spiritual importance for us, their
importance in the shaping of our spirits and our souls—if Christ had to
be in the wilderness, struggling with his demons for a time, why would we
think that we’re not going to have to experience these moments as well?
And, of course, there are lessons that only the wilderness can teach us,
truths that only the shadows can share with us—truths about ourselves,
about God, and about the way the world really works. The writers of
Matthew and Luke elaborate on Jesus’ days in the desert, though
interestingly the book of John never even mentions the experience—and
in these elaborations you see Jesus struggling with what God to worship,
with who to trust for the bread on his table, with how and where to use
his personal power—all of these are certainly issues we all struggle with,
in one form or another. Mark’s simple version of this event gets
elaborated upon, because Matthew and Luke know that the human
experience of wilderness—of being alone and struggling with despairing
over choices that must be made in life, those things are reflected in this
story of Jesus’ time in the desert—Matthew and Luke knows that life can
be overwhelming, and despair can almost swallow us alive, and that the
wilderness is an all too familiar place for his readers, and Jesus’ story
needs to reflect and mirror our human story.
So, why the wilderness, why are there some things we can only learn
during the difficult, dry places in our lives? Why is it that only some
things can be learned in the difficult moments, the shadow times, of our
lives? I ask the obvious question but I have no obvious answer—I have
no real idea, to be honest. I mean there has always been the
explanation that we cannot joy without knowing and experiencing
despair, that we cannot know the meaning of hope without moments
when we have been hopeless, that we cannot know the importance of life
without the haunting presence of death—without the cross, there can be
no resurrection. To be honest, as much as a I get the odd logic of it,
even the beautiful symmetry of the explanation, its something I have
some doubts about—I can’t help but think that God might have found a
better way of teaching humankind the lessons that come out of our
wilderness experiences. Surely God could have come up with a different
way of giving humans joy without saddling us with despair? Or giving us
life without death? Or resurrection without the accompanying
crucifixion? And yet, as one of my college religion professors at the
University of Alabama wisely and frustratingly told us in one of my
freshman year classes—hey, that’s just the way things are, it is what it
is. The choice isn’t whether or not to go into the wilderness—it’s really a
choice on whether or not to accept the inevitability of the wilderness
moments in our lives, whether or not to accept our own 40 days, or 40
years in the desert as simply a part of the human journey.
The good news here—and there isn’t supposed to be too much good
news during the season of Lent, but I couldn’t help myself here—the
good news is that those places of emotional and spiritual wildernesses
often get transformed into something new, into something different than
how we had first experienced them. Its interesting that in our text today,
the wilderness is a place of challenge and despair, of pain and
temptation, of loneliness—it is the place that the Spirit forces or pushes
towards, but in the rest of the Gospels, the wilderness gets transformed
into a place of rest of Jesus—the wilderness becomes the place where
Jesus goes to get away from the maddening crowds, from his own
disciples even—it becomes a place where Jesus re-centers himself, and
it seems to be a place of self-healing that he finds within the chaos and
busyness of his ministry. The wilderness and the all the shadows that
came with that early experience become transformed into something new
altogether.
The only reason I can figure out for the reason that God drives or
pushes us into the desert, into the terrible time of our lives, or if you
prefer, the reason that God allows us to drive ourselves into the desert,
is because some truths must be experienced for them to become our
truth—they are truths that must be moved from our heads to our hearts,
and the wilderness seems to be the connection between these two
places within us. There is our wonderful moment in the writings of Soren
Kierkegaard, the 19th century Danish philosopher and theologian, where
he writes in the midst of particular time of despair, of difficulty in his life,
when he is trying to find his own way in his life, beyond the religious
burtality of his father, beyond the all-encompassing theories of the
universe and life that were the vogue amongst the German philosophers
of his day (Hegel, Schopenhauer). He writes:
What I really need is to become clear in my own mind what I must do, not
what I must know—except in so far as knowing must precede every
action. The important thing is to understand what I am destined for, to
perceive what the Deity wants me to do; the point is to find the truth
which is truth for me, to find that idea for which I am ready to live or
die…What good would it do for me if I were able to expound the
significance of Christianity, to explain many individual phenomena, if for
me and my life it did not have any really profound importance? I have
tasted the fruits of the tree of knowledge and have often enjoyed their
savor. But this joy was only in the moment of apprehension and left in
me no deeper mark. It appears to me that I have not drunk from the
chalice of wisdom, but rather have fallen into it. (A Short Life of
Kiekegaard, Lowrie, page 82-83)
That is it, isn’t it? To drink of wisdom, to experience a truth for yourself,
rather than simply accepting the wisdom of others, to learn the truth for
oneself rather the learning it from others—that is why the wilderness
come into our lives, to teach each us a truth that can only be learned on
our own, to actually drink of the chalice rather of wisdom rather than
simply falling into the wisdom of others. To allow our souls to learn the
lessons they must learn, to know a truth for oneself, maybe that is the
reason Jesus had to go the desert, maybe that is why we have to be
pushed into the wilderness, to learn what only the experience of the
desert could teach us. After the wilderness, Christ knows the blessing
and curse of being God’s own Beloved, to be marked as one of God’s
own. This is a truth he had to learn before he arrived at the cross,
before he went to Jerusalem for the last time. So, maybe it is with us—
some truths must become the truths that we know in our own bones,
bones that themselves may have been shattered in that same
wilderness—but some truths have to be experienced and known that
deeply if we are to make our way to the next step in our human and
divine journey. That is the point of it all, to drink of the cup of wisdom
God hands us, the truth that must be learned in the shadows—that is the
grace of it, the good news found in these moments, even as we stagger
out of the wilderness, that the place where the wild beasts are and the
angels have nurtured our weary souls. Amen.
