March 1 Sermon

Today is the first Sunday in Lent, and as is the case with every Lenten season the first Gospel text we come to recounts the story of Jesus' time in the wilderness. But most of what we know of it actually does not appear in Mark. In Mark there is no description of the temptations--it merely says that Jesus was tempted in the wilderness. The story is quickly inserted in between a very quick description of Jesus' baptism and a trip to Galilee after John is arrested. All of this is done in six verses.
But Mark's description is fairly accurate to how Lent often feels. It arrives quick on the heels of Christmas and Epiphany and before we know it Easter will be right in front of us. Six weeks fly by just like these six verses. But we also know that Lent isn't always confined to just six weeks, not just Ash Wednesday to Good Friday. We can't so easily and quickly pack away our times in the wilderness. Instead sometimes Easter comes and goes and we are still wandering. Many of you know that the week of Ash Wednesday in 2007 my brother was diagnosed with cancer. And on Good Friday of 2008, last year, he died. And even then my lent didn't end. Our wilderness doesn’t wrap up neatly with a trip to Galilee. Mark gets that too, despite the shortness of his account. Jesus arrives in Galilee only after John is arrested. His cousin and the one who had just baptized him has been arrested and would eventually be killed. The wilderness is not always just a place nor is it just a time.
So the wilderness isn't a time and place--it ca. n't be neatly packed into 40 days, then why even celebrate Lent at all? Many churches and Christians would prefer that we didn't. There are too many churches and preachers who gloss over Lent and the wilderness. Who would insist that the whole Christian life should just be about celebration and praise. But the problem is we all know that the world we live in is not all about joy and happiness. We spend a lot of time in the wilderness. We observe Lent so that when our wilderness arrives we might be prepared. And I really think that Mark has something to teach us, a tool to pack into our belt so that we might be prepared when we are hit with the wilderness of life.
That comes with the phrase "he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him." So much of our time in the wilderness feels lonely and isolated. It seems as if no one understands and no one could ever have experienced anything as horrible or awful as what we are experiencing. I know that is what I was experiencing after my brother died. (And for those of you who are regulars don’t worry I'm not going to spend the next six weeks talking about my brother's death. But today I am, and I'm even about to tell a story that I'm fairly certain many of you have heard before but I think it really fits today.) About a month after the funeral I arrived on the Scottish Island of Iona to spend a week living in community with other pilgrims like me. The others were from all over the world and together we covered a wide array of ages and backgrounds. They were delightful and interesting people. But over the course of the week I realized I didn't want to really have anything to do with them. I went through the motions of getting to know these folks, but my heart wasn't in it. I didn't feel as if I could be fully honest and open about all that I was struggling with because I didn't trust that these strangers could hold what I was really feeling. No one could understand. Even with people all around me, I still felt isolated. So on the last day I decided that I had had enough of people so I went for a swim--alright not really a swim so much as a step into the ice cold waters and then a step back out. But the place I went was on the other side of the island and I had heard it was beautiful. So I headed out on what was about a 20 or 30 minute hike. This part of the island is largely inhabited by sheep and cows only, humans live on the other side of the island. As I was walking to the water I walked through what I can only describe as a ravine, high rock walls on both sides of me. And as I got to about the middle of the ravine there was a dead baby lamb lying on the ground. It didn't look as if it had been attacked but merely came to this lonely place and died. I passed it by and came to the beach. While I was laying on the beach a Sheep and another lamb wondered close by. We were there together, me and the wild beasts. I wandered if they were like me. Were they grieving the loss of this lamb the way I was grieving the loss of my brother? For the first time I was feeling as if I was not alone. I was being attended to by angels. And for a moment I was at least able to lay down a bit of the pain that I was feeling, because I knew I didn't have to bear it alone.
When a bit of that weight was lifted I felt lighter and in contrast I also felt more grounded. I felt as if I might better understand the heart of God. I felt as if God was grieving with me and with this sheep and lamb.
What I told the children earlier I think really is an appropriate metaphor for lent. Lent is a time for grounding and I don’t just mean some theoretical place in our heads and our hearts, I mean the physical ground. The wilderness all too often sends us to places away from where we are, the land that we are on. We go to what ifs, we go to lonely places. In the Dr. Seuss book, Oh the Places You'll Go, a book that was originally written as a college commencement address, he wrote about "You can get so confused that you'll start in to race down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace, and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space, headed, I fear, toward a most useless place. The Waiting Place…" But when we stop and look around, and notice the world around us, be present to the moment we are in, we see that God is speaking to us right there through the wild beasts. We will notice that we are being cared for by angels. We notice the ground below us, the sky above us, the world around us. And we see that the earth is springing forth shoots of green, blossoms are continuing to appear on trees, and vegetables are popping up out of the ground. Life is continuing. The very ground from which we were formed continues to bear fruit.
In this economic crisis we are being invited to find a new ground, return to the earth, return to a simpler way of living--a way that involves family, friends, love, God. But we have to see this as an invitation. Or we will be stuck in the waiting place, waiting for the market to change or our jobs to start paying more. Even in the crisis and the wildeness we have all we need, but we have to put our feet on the ground.
Lent is about practicing being in the wilderness so that we will be prepared when the wilderness arrives. Many people give up something during lent--it is often wine or chocolate or some other vice. I could rail on and on about how it should be something deeper and more meaningful than simply a new diet, but even in the simple practice of giving up chocolate or whatever it is, we are learning that we can even do with out that. We get back to what is at the heart of what we truly need. We pray and we sit in silence and we listen. We hope that we will hear God speaking through one another, because that is where we most often hear the words of the divine, but we sit in silence and we take a walk on the beach because sometimes the voices of one another aren't enough. There are times when we need to be with the wild beast and simply be tended to by the angels.
Let us enter into this time of preparation. Some of you might be in the wilderness already and I don't know when you'll leave--for you I hope that you will know that you are not walking through this desert alone and that you will find proof of that, proof that won't necessarily come in words. For those who are not walking through a desert right now, store up these moments and practices, practice noticing and seeing God everywhere. Return to the earth and find your grounding. Amen.