2018-02-20
Brooke Strong
First Sunday in Lent
Scripture: Mark 1:9-15
A number of years ago, my mother went to the Holy Land. When she returned, she was full of reactions to what she had seen. And one of her most notable reactions was her shock at the wilderness she had seen. My mother grew up in Illinois, and spent a good part of her summers in New Hampshire. Wilderness, to her, was the woods. It was trees, and trails through the forests, and climbs in the White Mountains. When she was in the Holy Land, though, the wilderness was not at all green and forested. I remember being struck by the same thing when a group of Federated pilgrims went to the Holy Land in 2012. It was bare and brown and rocky and sandy and hot and dry and exposed. Wilderness in the Middle East is entirely different from wilderness in New Hampshire or Ohio.
That wilderness, forbidding as it is, is a recurring theme in the life of Israel and of Jesus. And it’s often paired—that wilderness—with the number forty. It rains for forty days and forty nights on Noah and the ark. Moses is on Mt. Sinai for forty days waiting for the Ten Commandments. The Israelites wander in the wilderness for forty years looking for the Promised Land. And then, as we hear today, the gospel of Mark tells us that, right after being baptized, and before Jesus’ ministry begins, Jesus spends forty days being tested in the wilderness.
Wilderness is a prominent theme in the Bible. And whether we’ve ever spent any time in a literal wilderness, of either the New Hampshire variety or the Middle Eastern variety, we all know what it is to be in the figurative wilderness.
In Mark’s story, what Jesus undergoes in the wilderness is a testing. The Greek word can mean temptation, too, but here its force is really that of a testing. And not a testing like an exam, to see if we pass, but more like being challenged, or being subjected to a trial. We all know what it is to be tested. Someone here has likely run into a figurative buzz saw at work. Someone has descended into a severe depression. Someone has watched as their marriage has slowly disintegrated. And as a culture, we have all been tested again this week by another senseless, murderous school rampage. We know what it is to be tested in the wilderness.
Brené Brown, in her new book called, appropriately enough, Braving the Wilderness, says that one of the major ways in which we know wilderness is in a pervasive sense of loneliness. All around us, and perhaps including ourselves, people feel isolated from each other. The Greek word Mark uses for the wilderness Jesus enters means abandoned, empty, desolate, deserted. It means literally a lonely place, an image that resonates in our world, too. It may not be too much of a stretch to say, in fact, that loneliness in this society is at epidemic proportions. Brené Brown is reminded of a style of bluegrass music called “high lonesome.” High lonesome, she says is “hard. And full of pain” (p. 44). “The world,” she says, “feels high lonesome and heartbroken to me right now” (p. 45). I suspect a number of us know what she’s talking about, know a kind of “high lonesome” desert.
Loneliness, it turns out, is more than just a discouraging feeling of isolation. It’s also ruinous to our health. We tend to think the worst things for our health are bad diets and lack of exercise and smoking. But, as it happens, even more damaging to us is being isolated from other people. People who have little social connection are the most likely to die early. “Living with air pollution,” says Brené Brown, “increases your odds of dying early by 5 percent. Living with obesity, 20 percent. Excessive drinking, 30 percent. And living with loneliness? It increases our odds of dying early by 45 percent” (p. 55). Loneliness is certainly personal wilderness.
Loneliness, though, is more than just personal wilderness. Because loneliness, while it pinches individual lives, also mars and tears at the fabric of the life we lead together. The lonelier we are, the more we tend to turn against others. We sort them and judge them and rule them out based on any number of qualities. The grief of our loneliness gets turned sideways, in other words. It devolves into fear, and often into exclusion and intolerance.
“Here’s what I can tell you,” says Brown: “Terrorism is time-released fear. The ultimate goal of both global and domestic terrorism is to conduct strikes that embed fear so deeply in the heart of a community that fear becomes a way of life. This unconscious way of living then fuels so much anger and blame that people start to turn on one another” (p. 56). Fear becomes so prevalent that it makes us suspect everybody.
Personal wilderness, in other words—the fear we carry within us, a fear spawned by real strains—can so easily become a societal wilderness of cruelty and segregation and meanness toward others. And then the wilderness spreads like a weed. Brené Brown quotes James Baldwin as saying, “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain” (p. 63). It’s much easier, or so we think, to be angry and suspicious than it is to face and express the pain of our wilderness and loneliness. We self-medicate or we zone out or we take out our anxiety on others. You don’t have to look any further than Wednesday’s school shooting in Florida to see disquiet and dis-ease played out in a horrendous way. Wilderness, both personal and communal.
There’s a striking detail in today’s gospel story. It’s Mark’s note that Jesus is driven out into the wilderness how? By the Spirit. That has to be one of the odder things in scripture. How peculiar it is for the Spirit to throw the Blessed Child of God out into this arid, forbidding place. Is it really possible that God would choose to put Jesus through that, or to put us through a nasty divorce or a ghastly illness or a gruesome school shooting just to test us? Could that really be what God intends? Come on!
And yet, I suspect there’s also a sense in which we get it. We, too, of course, know the feeling of having been forced into a challenging place when we didn’t choose it. What we may not have counted on was that that trying time was, in some sense, the work of God, that it was precipitated by the Spirit. Let’s be careful here. It’s not that God is a sadist who just wants to see us suffer. Maybe, instead, it’s that God, in that strange wisdom of which we only sometimes get glimpses, knows there is something about our struggles, our hurdles, our deserts, that strengthens us and gives life some of its greatest meaning and depth. Like iron, maybe life is at its richest when it is forged by fire on the anvil of life. Maybe it really is true that there can be gift in the wilderness.
When I think about who I am, a good part of what has shaped me is the curve balls that have come my way. When I went to college, I thought I was going to be a math major. Math had always been my favorite subject, and I’m still fascinated by its patterns and its peculiar beauty. In my first semester in college, I took a calculus course and did well. Then in my second semester, I took a linear algebra course, and I had no idea what was going on. Not a clue. I went to the dean of the college, who was also a math professor, and I remember sitting in his office as he tried to convey the principles of linear algebra. And it all just flew over my head. That was the end of my math career, and it was a huge loss to me. This was what I was supposed to be good at! That feeling of failure was certainly wilderness. And it felt very much as though I had been driven there against my will.
That monkey wrench, though, became a springboard to developing a different side of myself. Failure at math led me to philosophy and religion, and eventually to the vocation of ministry. Who would I be today without that failure in math? Wilderness and testing have been vital cogs in my journey, cogs precipitated, I would say now, by God.
In his little gem of a book called Let Your Life Speak, the Quaker mystic and writer, Parker Palmer, says that, as a young man, before he had really found his calling, he was asked to be the president of a school. As he sat with friends to discern whether this was what he ought to do, he struggled to articulate compelling reasons to accept the invitation. He had quite a list of reasons not to take the position, but struggled to think of a reason to do so. Finally one of his friends asked him why he wanted to do it, and Palmer blurted out, “Well . . . I guess what I’d like most is getting my picture in the paper with the word president under it” (p. 46). Hearing the ridiculousness of those words helped hone his sense that his vocation was as a scholar and mystic, not an administrator.
We really do have to be careful with all of this. It would be abhorrent for us to romanticize every wilderness. It would be monstrous of us to blithely declare that child abuse and sexual violence and slavery and human trafficking and war were actually gifts of God. But I do think we can return to a line of James Forbes that I often quote. When asked by Bill Moyers, after 9/11, whether God had made this happen, Forbes said, “I don’t believe that God makes everything happen. But I do believe that God can make something happen out of everything.” Wilderness itself may not be the gift, in other words, but there can be a gift in the wilderness.
To put it another way, there’s an odd, and in some ways unwelcome, sense that we are, in a very real way, the struggles of our lives. Whatever wilderness we’ve gone through, whatever challenges we’ve endured—that is who we are. For good or for ill, if we’ve navigated a bitter divorce, it shapes us. If we’ve survived, or are still dealing with, a dread disease, it shapes us. If we have wrestled with job and vocational issues, it shapes us. The wildernesses we’ve endured are often the hinges and pivots of our lives.
And what we all want to know is: what can make of those testing wildernesses something valuable and hopeful? The story has a subtle clue as to what can make those wildernesses redemptive. Look what happens in the story of Jesus’ sojourn in the wilderness. What marks it in a uniquely wonderful way is that he doesn’t go through it alone. The story tells us that Jesus “was tested by Satan” and that “he was with the wild beasts, and the angels took care of him” (1:13). Who accompanies him; who makes the wilderness bearable? The animals and the angels do.
Sharing the journey, with the animals and with the angels and with each other: that’s what we’re invited to do. It’s what counters the pervasive cultural loneliness we mentioned earlier. It’s one of the things that brings the Dominion of God near, as Jesus tells us a verse later (1:15). In a wonderfully pithy line, Ram Dass once said, “We’re all just walking each other home.” That’s a wonderfully simple, poetic way of summing up the purpose of life. So in our various wildernesses, let’s be about the business of walking each other home. When school shootings happen, what can we do, personally and communally, to walk each other home; what laws can be passed, what policies can be developed, what new attitudes can shape us to make it clear that the valuing of life is central for us? When a friend is sick, how can we help walk them home; what meals can be brought, what child care offered, what listening ears lent? When a child or parent is floundering, how can we help walk them home; what phone calls can be made, what presence offered, what hugs shared?
When we’re present with each other during our various wilderness sojourns, we can be part of the work God does to shape difficulty for good. Challenges are made bearable. Joy emerges from struggle. Problems that are borne lightly together let us soar into a lighter realm. Then our challenges become sources of hope and peace. And the richness of God carries us aloft to a new and rarefied space of grace. And then we can say, with passionate conviction and joy, “It’s all good. It’s all grace.” May it always be so.