Christ Church Riverdale

1 Lent                                                                                      March 9, 2003

            Genesis 9:8-17; Psalm 25; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:9-13 

Immediately after his baptism, Jesus is driven into the wilderness for 40 days of temptation.  Mark’s account is typically sketchy and almost frantic in its immediacy, but he fills this brief account with multiple layers of meaning.  At one moment, God is speaking from heaven, “You are my Son, my beloved, You please me.”  In the next moment the Spirit drives him out into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan.  Temptation is a kind of torture for resistant souls, but in Mark’s account temptation is softened by the ministration of angels.  In a lovely touch, Jesus is “with the wild beasts,” making us wonder if this is a vision like that of Isaiah, where the lion and the lamb can finally lie down together in paradise.  As fire tests steel and makes it strong, temptation overcome strengthens us for the next challenge.

One of our temptations is to believe that we are failures in life, or that a small failure represents who we are.  Even failure is positive when we recognize its unreality.  I wrote down a few years ago in my “commonplace book” the words of the car manufacturer Soichiro Honda, who said, “Many people dream of success.  To me, success can only be achieved through repeated failure and introspection.  In fact, success represents the 1% of your work which results from the 99% which is called failure.  In parish life, it helps to be open to new things and to give them a try.  If it doesn’t work, call it a success and move on.  As Honda understood, failure prods us to introspection, and introspection  leads us to new possibilities and new life.  The wilderness prods us to seek the God who leads us into joy.

When Jesus leaves the wilderness, he immediately begins his public ministry.  The baptism and the temptation are his preparation.  God singles him out in baptism, and the wilderness strengthens him and gives him courage.  Aren’t our tough times also times of preparation?  Do we remember the calm that follows a storm, the joy that follows pain?

The First Sunday in Lent is the beginning of our pilgrimage toward Easter.  It is a time of repentance, looking forward to death and resurrection.  The story of death and the wilderness experience is also the story of our own lives.

When we go into a wilderness, either to an actual hermitage or desert, or into a mental wilderness of sadness or depression, we confront ourselves and our God.  We ask such questions as “Who am I?” and “Who are you, God?”  “What is the meaning of my life?” If you are in mid-life, you might ask, “Is this all there is?,” not realizing the abundance of wonder and love and joy all around you, so absorbed are we in ambition and ego-driven demons.  We forget that, like Jesus at baptism, we are affirmed by God as beloved children.

My step-sister Elizabeth  has been visiting, and I mentioned Elijah’s wish that he were dead in the passage just before last week’s reading.  We talked about depression and of  loneliness and wanting to die because life had lost meaning.  And she told me that a wise friend had said to her, “What is happening is that a part of you that needs to die is dying so that you can start a new life.”  Jesus once spoke of the pruning of a tree.  Sometimes, the dead branches need to go.  Sometimes, we even need new friends, as hard as it is to let the old ones go.  Sometimes, the pilgrimage is sad; sometimes it is full of joy.

The spiritual pilgrimage is like a spiral.  No one is ever always up or always down.  We never know when God will knock, and drive us to a place where we retreat to take stock of our lives.  The dark night of the soul, can happen any time of the year.  Lent is the time we’re reminded of the road we’re on, the challenges and the joys of faith.  God is with us as we ask the questions, and the angels minister to us.

If you’re reading the papers, or watching the news on television, you know that in world affairs, not everyone agrees on the solutions to endemic problems.  The Pope and the leaders of mainline Christian groups declare that there is no justification for war at this time; the President insists that the time is now.  Many former allies disagree.  It’s safe to say that the world is currently a wilderness of doubt and turmoil.  Trust among peoples and nations is in short supply.

I hope you’ll forgive me for bringing up Mr. Rogers again this Sunday, but in a piece on the op-ed page of the New York Times, he had something to say about our inability to get out of the wilderness to a place where individual people, if not wild beasts, get along.  It was written by a man named Davy Rothbart, whose brother wrote to Mr. Rogers when Davy was three years old.  Mr. Rogers wrote back, and they started a correspondence.  When Mr. Rogers heard that they were going to Massachusetts for a vacation, Mr. Rogers asked his whole family to chill out with him for a day at his summer home in Nantucket.  They had a thrilling time.  Not long ago, 20 years later, Davy went for an interview with his old friend, whom he hadn’t seen in all those years.  He wanted insights into the fighting going on in his neighborhood from his all-time favorite neighbor.

Davy said that, in his neighborhood, people seemed to fear each other.  The people moving in feared the people already there, and vice versa, and everyone feared the teenagers who cruised up and down the boulevard.  Davy wanted to know why people feared talking to each other.

He writes, “Mr. Rogers sat quietly for 15 full seconds.  ‘Perhaps we think that we won’t find another human being inside that other person.  Perhaps we think that there are some people in this world who I can’t ever communicate with, and so I’ll just give up before I try.  And how sad it is to think that we would give up on any other creature who’s just like us.’  His eyes seemed to be watering,” Davy writes.

Before they parted, Davy was wondering if Mr. Rogers was really was really saintlike.  He asked, “Don’t you ever get frustrated?”  He smiled.  “Sure.  Sometimes.  Sometimes I Do.  Don’t you?”

The wilderness we are in does not have simple answers.  But no answer is possible without a vision for a better world.  Mr. Rogers had such a vision.  He preached it every chance he had.  And this same vision of peace and understanding is a treasure of the best of our Christian heritage, this vision is the vision of Jesus, who taught to look first to yourself before judging your neighbor, to take the boulder out of your own eye before you take the little speck out of your neighbor’s.

Repentance is about change.  Repentance is about the death within of what is causing pain and keeping us from moving ahead.  Repentance is not about the past; it’s about the future.

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