First Sunday in Lent Year B 2009

01 Lent B 09
March 1, 2009

Genesis 9:8-17
8 Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, 9 "As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, 10 and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. 11 I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth." 12 God said, "This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: 13 I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. 14 When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, 15 I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. 16 When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth." 17 God said to Noah, "This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth."

Psalm 25:1-10
1 To you, O LORD, I lift up my soul.
2 O my God, in you I trust;
do not let me be put to shame;
do not let my enemies exult over me.
3 Do not let those who wait for you be put to shame;
let them be ashamed who are wantonly treacherous.
4 Make me to know your ways, O LORD;
teach me your paths.
5 Lead me in your truth, and teach me,
for you are the God of my salvation;
for you I wait all day long.
6 Be mindful of your mercy, O LORD, and of your steadfast love,
for they have been from of old.
7 Do not remember the sins of my youth or my transgressions;
according to your steadfast love remember me,
for your goodness' sake, O LORD!
8 Good and upright is the LORD;
therefore he instructs sinners in the way.
9 He leads the humble in what is right,
and teaches the humble his way.
10 All the paths of the LORD are steadfast love and faithfulness,
for those who keep his covenant and his decrees.

1 Peter 3:18-22
18 For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, 19 in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, 20 who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water. 21 And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you--not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, 22 who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers made subject to him.

Mark 1:9-15
9 In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. 10 And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. 11 And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased."
12 And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. 13 He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.
14 Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, 15 and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news."


The Wild Beasts

I would like to take you to the wilderness this morning.

We’re going to leave Deltaville. We’re going to leave Virginia. We’re going to leave our homes and families. We’re going to leave our parents and our sisters and brothers, our children and our grandchildren. We’re not going to tell them where we’re going. We’re not even going to say goodbye. It might take a few days for them to even know we’ve disappeared. We’re going where they can’t possibly find us.

We’re going to leave the United States of America, with its armies and roads and hospitals and churches and conveniences stores. We’re going to leave the sheriff’s department behind. They won’t even know where we are. We’re going to leave the ground beef and the vegetables and the TV dinners in our refrigerators. We’re going to leave the milk and the water and the orange juice behind. We’re going to leave our medicine in the bathroom cabinet. We’re going to leave the shotgun in the safe. We’re going to walk, and we’re going to walk, and we’re going to walk, until we are so far away from everything that we couldn’t walk back without starving to death on the way.

We’re going into a desert. It’s blistering hot in the day time and the cold at night gets into your bones. Nothing you can eat grows here.

But there are some animals around, especially at night. Hungry animals with teeth. Animals that can only live in terrible places like this. Animals with cold and ruthless eyes.

Are you afraid?

Of course you are. You’re alone. Without food you might very well starve to death. Without water you will probably die of thirst. Without protection you might be attacked. Without your family and friends, you might go mad with loneliness. Without shelter you will die of exposure.

So you wait. And while you wait, your fear is joined by other sensations. Your stomach growls. Your throat gets parched and dry. You skin burns in the sun and you shiver uncontrollably in the freezing cold at night. When it gets dark you listen to the small sounds of things scurrying around you. You hear howls and wonder how close the things that are making them are coming. You wonder if they can smell you there, dying. You can’t sleep, you can’t rest, you become weak and exhausted.

I visited a man in jail this week. None of you know him. He is a homeless man who lives a very marginal life. I listened to his story for about an hour. Of course, he reviews again and again the things that led him to be in jail. He can’t find any impure motives in himself. He can’t remember doing anything wrong. Yet he is charged with a serious crime and he will probably end up incarcerated for some time.

The facts of the case don’t really matter. What happened is that this man couldn’t find a way to live in mainstream society. He couldn’t get a job and hold it. He couldn’t amass enough money, with the little fringe jobs he managed to get, to rent an apartment or buy a house. He has trouble getting along with people.

So he was in a kind of wilderness. And loneliness came to him like a hungry animal and he fled it. He searched out other people, because he was lonely. Of course, the only people he could find, living the marginal life he was living, were other people living marginal lives. Other people like him, who couldn’t get along, who couldn’t find their way into the mainstream most of us live in.

But he thought he was doing a good thing. He thought he was befriending someone who was lonely. He felt good about that.

But of course, he and these friends got into conflicts. Various hurtful things were done on both sides, and really, it’s hard for me to say that anything really illegal happened. But there came a time when one of his friends got mad and called the police and made a charge and, largely because this guy is so marginal, so unconnected to anyone or anything, it stuck.

So now this man if is filled with anger. Day and night, all he can think about is how unfair everything is, how sick people are, how little he can depend on anyone. His anger is based in his fear. He is scared of the other people in the jail. He is scared of being locked up and deprived of his humanity. He wants to get out of the jail and run as far away as he can go.

At no time had he ever thought, “I’m going to do something evil. I’m going to hurt someone. I’m going to commit a crime.” No, he thought, “I’m lonely.” Or he thought, “I don’t have anywhere to stay.” Or he thought, “I’m hungry.” But he can’t even look at these motives. They frighten him too much.

When we are in the wilderness, we are really not alone. Besides the dangerous people and animals out there, we are visited by a whole set of wild beasts. These beasts are not rational. They are not moral. They have no conscience. They are hunger, loneliness, vulnerability and exhaustion. These are the wild beasts.

Whether we are in the wilderness or not, these beasts are always circling us. The only difference between the wilderness and civilization is that there we are alone, and here we are together. And whether we are in the wilderness or we are together, the beasts that circle us are just as irrational, just as pitiless, just as amoral.

Even when we form social groups, families, communities, nations, we are no different from that man in jail. We see threats all around us, we have trouble getting along with the rest of the world. And when we think, “We’re hungry” or “We’re vulnerable and exposed,” “We’re too isolated,” or “We can’t get any rest,” we react. We build weapons and walls. We ally ourselves with the wrong people. We steal from our neighbors or we kill them. We’re not thinking, “Let’s do something evil today.” We’re thinking “The beasts are going to get us.”

Those beasts are why a community of good individuals can do horrible and evil things without ever even considering that what they are doing is wrong. They are why a nation made up of deeply moral individuals can brutalize and oppress other nations. When the beasts come, the devil is close at hand.

About a hundred years after Jesus rose from the dead, the very first Christian monks went out into the wilderness alone. I read an interesting article recently that argued that the monks didn’t go into the wilderness to find God. They went into the wilderness to find the devil. One teacher I had in seminary, Philip Krey, said that monks were the Christian equivalent of Michael Jordan or Babe Ruth, spiritual athletes. In the wilderness they faced the forces that cause all the evil in the world. In the wilderness they did battle with the wild beasts. Some of the ancient stories even tell of literal beasts that attacked the saints and were conquered or befriended by them.

And this is why people get addicted to drugs and alcohol and food, why married people claw at each other, while children lash out at their parents or disobey them. They are fighting society or they are fighting each other because they have confused the wild beast with the one they are fighting. They have identified the enemy wrongly. The enemy is not society or their spouse or their parents, the enemy is one of those wild beasts, hunger, loneliness, vulnerability, exhaustion.

It does no good to pretend they’re not there, or that only other people are threatened by them. Above all, it is no good to think that by ourselves we can keep them under control. They are far more powerful than we are. The devil’s greatest trick is to convince us we can handle the wild beasts without God’s help. And he laughs with glee when we try. We think we are handling them, but they are handling us.

In the twelve-step fellowships, the first thing the addict or alcoholic does after making a decision to give his life to God is to examine himself for any defects of character that stand in the way of his fully serving God and others. Many who try twelve-step programs flop out on this process. They are unwilling or unable to face the wild beasts. The reason for this is simple. They haven’t really decided to give their lives to God in the first place, and without his help, those wild beasts are just too scary.

The problem with this is that denying the beasts and their power, to pretend that they’re not really a problem, frees them to dominate and consume us. Our only real protection from them is God.

Jerry Dant likes to tell the story of someone in town who had heard about my occasional confessions in the pulpit. He said something like, “I guess it’s good to tell on yourself, but I’ll be darned if I’d tell everything.”

But the power of the beasts is greatest when they are hidden from view. If I tried to base my friendships and my position in society on my moral worth, I would have to hide my history. In order to do this, I would probably have to lie, or at least to refuse to tell the truth. I would live in fear that someone would uncover my secrets. I would be looking over my shoulder all the time. Not only that, but I would have a lot invested in silencing detractors. Anyone who criticized me would have to somehow be silenced or at least discredited. This is how conflict starts. This is how people get hurt.

Jesus came out of the waters of baptism and God said “You are my son. You are the Messiah. You are the Savior of the world.” And the Holy Spirit, the creating power of God, descended from heaven and entered into Jesus. Now, you’d think that after that announcement, after receiving something as powerful as God’s own Spirit, Jesus might have simply launched off on his campaign. The next thing we would normally expect is to read, “And he went into all their synagogues and said, ‘The Kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe this good news!”

But no. The first thing that happened was that the Spirit drove him into the wilderness. And Mark gives us this little sentence:

“He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.”

This is what Lent is all about. We are going to spend forty days in the wilderness, and we are going to face the beasts, and the angels are going to wait on us.

Those who do trust in God can fearlessly face the wild beasts and even befriend them, because God’s angels wait on them. In this, Christians differ from Buddhists. I’m no expert on Buddhism, but I think they believe that the goal of spirituality is to eliminate desire, and thereby eliminate suffering. We believe instead that God has given us these instincts, the desire for the society of others, the desire for a mate, the desire for food and drink, the desire for security and protection, the desire for rest. It is not our task to destroy them or eliminate them, but to befriend them, to submit them into God’s guidance and care.

In the psalm we recited this morning, the psalmist, terrified of his enemies, does not ask God to destroy them. He asks instead that God give him God’s own insight and wisdom. He does not ask because he’s better than his enemies, but because he’s not. He doesn’t depend on his own strength and willpower or righteousness, but on God’s. He is seeking the power of God to help him befriend the wild beasts of hunger and loneliness and exhaustion and vulnerability.

If we admit we are powerless over these wild beasts of our nature, and call on God to address them, he will send his angels to wait on us. We will run and not grow weary, we will drink the water that eliminates thirst forever, we will never be alone again, we need fear no threat.

In the second chapter of Hebrews, we learn that Jesus Christ is the friend of those who have been tested because he himself was tested. When we face our wild beasts with God’s help, we see others differently. We are able to see that we have no enemies but those wild beasts. We are able to have compassion even for the most heinous wrongdoer. And just as God has promised never to destroy us, so we can abandon our desires to destroy them.

God is creation’s friend. The wild beasts were made by him and obey him. But without God’s help, the wild beasts become our masters, and we cease to be what we are meant to be. Only when we see how powerful our inner beasts can be, and only when we can see how God can help us befriend them, can we become a friend to those who are driven by them. Without acknowledging their power over us and God’s superior power over them, we can have no hope of being compassionate and forgiving. We cannot see the world as God sees it, not as a world deserving of destruction, but as a flock of frightened sheep without a shepherd.

Amen.