First Sunday in Lent , March 1, 2009

Into the Wilderness

Mark 1:9-15

Actually, the temptation naturally flows from Jesus’ baptism.  For though we sometimes assume that temptations arise in our weakness, actually the opposite is true:  temptation is born in power.  For we are tempted only to doing what is possible.  Our temptations accompany our potency. Power corrupts; and it corrupts those who wield power more surely than those who merely long for it.  As the 20^th century German saint Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote famously from his Nazi prison cell:  “human being sin most gravely at the point of their strengths, not their weaknesses.”  (Letters and Papers from Prison, quoted in Leonard Sweet, Homiletics, April 6, 1996.)

In today’s lesson, Jesus senses the power of the Holy Spirit present at his baptism.  He knows the calling of God.  He senses his power, and with the power he, being human, surely feels the urge to put that force to immediate positive use.  Personal gain, national advantage, religious renewal – these and other possibilities open before him.  What will he do?

What he does, the lesson reminds us, is wait.  Specifically, he withdraws into the wilderness, the desert above the Jordan.  He goes to a wild place, perhaps to tame the wild urges of his power.  In fact, you may have heard the way Mark tells the story, after his baptism, God almost forcibly pulls him aside.  These are Mark’s words:  “And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.”  (Mark 1:12, New Revised Standard Version) Hear that?  “The [Holy] Spirit drove him out…”

It’s as if God knows that even Jesus must go into the world only after withdrawing from the world.  Blessed with God’s divine benediction, he carefully considers the implications of his own powerful blessing.

In the late 1970’s, Kathleen Norris and her husband were surprised when their lives took an unexpected turn and they found themselves living in her grandmother’s home in northwest South Dakota.  They were developing writers and sophisticated New Yorkers who hardly blended into the world of ranching, a mere generation removed from homesteaders.  But she was committed to saving her family home, and she found her new life in a high plains environment remarkably akin to a desert.  In her 1993 memoir, Dakota:  A Spiritual Geography, she reflects on surviving in a near-wilderness:  “[this is] what I regard as the basic principle of desert survival:  not only to know where you are but to learn to love what you find there.” (Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, page 23.)  That may sound a bit like “bloom where you are planted;” but while that advice may sound trite, it is also true.

Jesus goes into the desert, even as Christ has come from the glory of heaven, we might say, to the dreary imperfection of our bleak world, red in tooth and claw.  And, as Jesus, the Christ, he loves the people and the places that he encounters.  Showing us the way, Jesus learns to love what he finds with us.

Here’s the gospel.  Jesus goes into the wilderness partly to find himself, perhaps; but primarily he goes to find us.  And doing so, he invites us to follow him.  We have been baptized like him, baptized with him, baptized into the life he gives us, new every day.  And he invites us, baptized with him, to love the world with him.  He invites us to see in our own worlds not wilderness devoid of life, but a desert rich with life unimagined.

As we flew last week into the coastal desert at the lower tip of Mexico’s Baja California, it looked from the air like a foreboding, hostile wasteland.  But down close, even that desert is a place of rich and varied life. Though it receives just a few inches of rainfall a year, its plants and animals have adapted, learning to thrive in a foreboding world.

This Lent, we have the chance to journey with Christ into the desert places of our own lives.  We are invited to claim our power and our calling as God’s chosen, baptized and alive, on a journey of faith that we watch Ava begin this morning.  It’s a journey most of us have known for a while.  But in this season we have the chance to reflect on its meaning anew.  God has claimed and named us; God has called us sons and daughters; God empowers us to be citizens of a new and holy realm.  How do we use that power?  How do we see the beauty of the world around us, even the parts we so easily dismiss as “wilderness”?  How do we live, after the example of Christ, giving ourselves to this world, still imperfect, yet made holy by God’s love in Jesus Christ?

That’s our challenge:  to follow Jesus into the desert, and to emerge, with him, powerfully committed to God and to God’s world.  Here.  Now.  And always.