2021.02.21 | Wilderness School
Wilderness School
Rev. Dr. Arlene K. Nehring
Eden United Church of Christ
Hayward, California
First Sunday in Lent
Feb 21, 2021
Mark 1:9-15 (NRSV)
This past Wednesday, Ash Wednesday as we call it in the Christian tradition, we began a journey into the wilderness of Lent.
One of my clergy colleagues recently commented that we never actually left the season of Lent, because Lent 2020 Lent never ended. The pandemic launched us into a wilderness filled with snares, wild beasts, and an array of devils--the likes of which none of us had ever experienced.
I agree. This pandemic is not for the faint of heart. Dan Livesay, one of the elders of our congregation refers to the pandemic as the “damn demic.” This damn demic has brought us to our knees economically and spiritually. It has tested the mettle of our democracy, and daylighted the disparities between rich and poor, lighter-complected and darker-complected people, and new arrivals and long-time residents within our national borders. And these disparities punctuate the products of every injustice that we have we taught ourselves to tolerate.
Contemplating all of these realities leads me to cry out with my Hillbilly relatives and country music singer, Carrie Underwood, “Jesus, take the wheel!”
Jesus, take the wheel, because our lives and our world are out of control. We are spinning around like an old Chevy with no snow tires on an icy stretch of highway in West Texas, and when we end up in the ditch there isn’t going to be anybody coming along for days to find us, because no one in their right mind would be out on the roads in these conditions.
And yet, when we zoom in on Mark’s gospel lesson today, we discover — perhaps for the very first time — that the wilderness of Lent was and is not the godforsaken place that we may have assumed it to be. Listen again to Mark 1:12-13:
“...the Spirit immediately drove Jesus into the wilderness. He was there forty days, tempted by Satan; and Jesus was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.”
Did you hear that?
The Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness. The Spirit, not the devil, drove Jesus into the wilderness. And Jesus was there forty days and forty nights, and he was tempted by Satan. And, he was with the wild beasts, and the angels waited on him.
To be sure, the wilderness is not “the happiest place on earth,” but neither is it the godforsaken place that we may have thought it to be.
Mark says, the Spirit sent Jesus into the wilderness, and the Spirit accompanied him through the wilderness, and the angels — the good angels, not the bad angel — flapped their wings around him and attended to his needs.
If you let these verses seep into your soul, and if you believe like I do, that God is good, and that, as the prophet Jeremiah says, “God has plans for us--plans to prosper..and not to harm [us], plans to give [us] a hope and a future. “ (Jer. 29: 11) Then, you, like me, may come to believe that the wilderness is a good place--or at least a place where good things can happen.
Wrap your mind around those thoughts for a moment, and ask yourself: “What good could lay ahead in this wilderness of Lent? What good surprises may God have in store in the final chapter of this damn demic?” These are some of the questions that I encourage us to ponder as we travel through this season of Lent. These are questions worthy of our reflection, and that hold the potential for strengthening us in the struggles that we encounter, and prepare us for the final chapter that God has in store for us.
II
So let’s get on it! What, in God’s name, could possibly come from this season of unrelenting challenges?
My hunch is that God is “schooling” us through the season of Lent. God is teaching us. God is working with us like a personal trainer or physical therapist, helping us get in better shape to meet and overcome the spiritual, emotional, physical, economic, and moral challenges that lay ahead of us, like an equestrian steeplechase.
About fifty years ago, law enforcement professionals, social workers, and educators re-discovered something that faith leaders have known for eons. They discovered that human’s spiritual, emotional, physical, intellectual, and social skills could be strengthened through wilderness experiences.
Programs such as “Outward Bound,” “Vision Quest,” and “Wilderness Schools” popped up all over the country. The Peace Corps, several state juvenile justice systems, and a number of private colleges and universities based their orientation and therapeutic programs on these types of experiences that many indigenous peoples have all along thought to be necessary rites of passage for youth entering adulthood.
Native American tribes such as the Cherokee Nation, for example, once regularly required young men to complete a “vision quest” in order to be recognized as adults in their tribes. First Nations people and other cultural groups have also cultivated rites of passage for young women, although these rites have not always been based on outdoor activities.
Two of our sister congregations, Trinity Church in Chicago, which is largely comprised of African-American members, and some of the Samoan UCC congregations on the Peninsula here in the Bay Area, have reclaimed rites of passage grounded not only in our theological heritage but also in the cultural heritage of their congregations, and these programs have helped their young people enter adulthood better prepared to navigate the dominant culture.
III
So God is using this season of Lent to school us like our sister congregations are schooling their youth in preparation for the brave new world they are entering. But if God is schooling us, “What exactly are we supposed to be learning through this experience?”
The opportunities are numerous. I’ll just offer a few to get the conversation started.
One lesson that we are offered is that Jesus was both human and divine. Jesus was human, like us. He was tempted in the wilderness. He was vulnerable, he was hooked by the devil, and yet he faced and successfully overcame these temptations. Because this is true, we can look to him and find a reliable model and a guide for facing the temptations that might otherwise ensnare us.
To learn more about these temptations, we must turn to Matthew and Luke’s gospels, because they go into more detail about Jesus’ temptations than Mark does. Mark simply tells us that Jesus was tempted.
From Luke, for example, we learn that Jesus was tempted to let the ends justify the means when it came to moral decisions. Jesus was also tempted to think he could control all outcomes. And, he was tempted to invoke divine authority for his own gain.
In each case, though, Jesus did not succumb to temptations, and so we can draw inspiration and insight about how to meet, navigate, and overcome these wilderness challenges.
A second lesson that we may learn from the wilderness is that the devil works overtime in places where we are vulnerable.
Consider, again, Jesus’ wilderness experience. Matthew and Luke depict Jesus as tired, hungry, alone, and a long way from home. To compound matters, Jesus had been suffering these privations for a long time--forty days and forty nights. He was in a compromised state, and so the devil snuck up on him in his time of weakness.
Similarly, the devil is working overtime on us in this pandemic, preying on our weaknesses. This is why so many are struggling with addictions, with the temptation to self-medicate rather than therapeutically address open wounds, and this is why so many continue to slip into the quagmire of depression and other forms of mental illness, even though help is all around us.
“And what help is that?” we ask? It’s the help that has always been there, as Mark explains, it’s the Spirit who goads and the angels who attend us.
Remember, Mark teaches us that it is the Spirit--not the devil--sends Jesus (and all of us) into the wilderness. The Spirit accompanies us along the way, and the angels surround and attend us.
So the question is not whether we are alone. The questions are: a) whether we are paying attention and recognizing the Spirit’s presence and guidance, and b) whether we are accepting the hand up and out that the angels are offering us.
A third lesson that we can learn from this wilderness experience is that the divine and her winged wonders don’t always show up in woo-woo ways. Sometimes the divine delivers in a very concrete manner
Our Spirit guide may show up as an AA or Al -Anon sponsor who invites us into a life of sobriety, and the angels among us may be 12-step buddies who challenge our “stinking thinking” and offer a hand up when we fall off the wagon.
Similarly, the angels who attend us may have a more earth-bound appearance than Raphael’s cherubs in his Sistine Madonna painting. Our Lenten legends may look more like neighbors who door dash our groceries, send cards in the post mail for no reason at all, or check up on our welfare while we are safely ensconced at home.
Our wingless wonders may show up as a retired teacher who tutors our struggling children on Zoom, while their regular teacher scrambles to migrate his classroom lessons to distance learning platforms.
Our wilderness guides may also look like National Guard troops who operate vaccine PODs at NFL stadiums, and our earthly angels may sound like promotoras who help newcomers navigate COVID testing sites where the medical staff wear moon suits and speak a language that is foreign to them.
Perhaps now you see that if we let go of the drag we’ve been expecting the Spirit to don, and look for the behavior that Mark attributed to earthly angels, then we may find traveling companions in the wilderness--who can help us avoid the snares that might entrap us, and discover the wonders that God has planted along the way to our destination that is grander than we likely imagined. Amen.