Lent 1B
March 1, 2009
St. Dunstan's
The Rev. Patricia Templeton

"Not Alone in the Wilderness"

Today we begin the season of Lent by going into the wilderness.

We start with Noah, crammed on that tiny ark with his family and hundreds of animals, huddling together for 40 days as the rains fall harder and harder and the waters rise higher and higher, until finally every bit of the earth has disappeared.

Then we come to Jesus, who celebrates his baptism not with a reception in his honor attended by his family and friends, but by being driven, forced, by the Spirit into the wilderness for 40 days, where he struggled with temptation and Satan and wild beasts.

Now, as we enter our own 40-day period of penitence and preparation for Easter, I cannot remember a Lenten season when the metaphor of wilderness seemed more appropriate.

This Lent we are indeed in a time of wilderness. We are in it as a nation, as a community, and as individuals.

We are in a time when, like Noah, the ground under our feet seems to be have disappeared. The safety nets and structures we have depended on are suddenly gone.

This time in the economic wilderness is not a distant abstraction affecting only Washington and Wall Street. It is here, among us, in lost jobs and dwindling retirement funds, in plunging home values and sky rocketing anxiety.

Nobel Prize economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman writes that the U.S. economy is suffering from a “crisis of faith.”

Krugman is not speaking about religion, but about a growing lack of trust in our economic institutions. At the center of the crisis, he says, are problems surrounding the extension of credit.

The word credit comes from the Latin credere, to believe or to trust. Writer Adam Hamilton notes that in the case of financial credit, belief or trust is placed in the borrower and his or her willingness and ability to repay.

Our current economic crisis is in part about misplaced trust or faith between debtors and lenders.

And nothing that our institutions or leaders do or say – multi-billion dollar bailouts, cuts in interest rates, stimulus packages – seem to speak adequately to the crisis.

Ironically, credit is also part of the vocabulary of faith, the religious kind. In Latin, our creeds begin with credo, I believe. The credit crisis shows us the inadequacy of any kind of credo in anything but God.

As Hamilton says, “God is our refuge and our strength. And God’s sustaining power is not tied to the Dow.”

As our scripture readings today show us, the wilderness is a familiar place to people of faith. And it is in the wilderness that God speaks profound words of hope and promise.

Theologian Beldan Lane, the author of The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, writes that our God is one who thrives in the wilderness.

In fact, Lane notes, God at times forces God’s people into the wilderness, into wretched and wild climes that demand radical faith and trust.

The Exodus of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt was one such time. A look at the map shows that there were shorter, less perilous routes the Israelites could have taken to the Promised Land.

But instead they were led by God into the wilderness, deliberately forced into the desert, taking the harder, more onerous and hazardous route, where dependence on God was the only saving grace.

“They are shoved down the difficult path so there will be no thought of ever turning back,” Lane writes. “They cover grueling miles of terrain so torturous they will never be tempted to recross it in quest of the leeks and onions they remembered in Egypt.

“Perhaps others can go around the desert on the simpler route toward home, but the way of God’s people is always through it,” Lane says.

And yet there is not only bleakness in the wilderness; solace can be found there, too. It is in the desert that God feeds God’s people with quail and manna. It is in the desert that a ragtag group of former slaves becomes a people, a community of faith.

Centuries after the Exodus, the descendant of that community of faith, Jesus, is also driven into the wilderness. The Greek word for driven is a harsh word. Jesus was not just prodded toward the desert, he was violently propelled there by God’s spirit.

Jesus, like the slaves fleeing Egypt, is forced to take the hard way, Lane notes, going directly from his baptism into the wilderness of temptation.

In Mark’s gospel, the desert or the wilderness, always foreshadows the cross, that place of suffering and death where we will end up with Jesus at the end of our Lenten journey.

But Jesus also finds solace and comfort in the wilderness. In today’s gospel we hear that angels waited on him there. Elsewhere in the gospel, Jesus retreats to the wilderness for solitude and solace and refreshment.

It is into the desert that people follow Jesus, and where a place of death becomes a place of miraculous nourishment and hope. It is in the desert that people are fed by Jesus, 5,000 of them at a time.

“Here in the desert a new community takes shape,” Lane says. “A community formed in brokenness, constituted on the edge. It is a community defined by the exigencies of the place.

“In the presence of Jesus, the desert evokes a sharing and openness that, back home, would be repudiated by every social and economic distinction.

“The place of scarcity, even death, is revealed by Jesus as a place of hope and new life.”

There is wisdom here for us in our own time of wilderness.

From those who have traveled through the wilderness before us we learn that God is present there, bringing sustenance and hope in the most unlikely places.

And we also learn that the wilderness is a place where the bonds of community can be strengthened.

This week, our stewardship committee came to me with what I think is an excellent suggestion – that we come together as a parish community to discuss the economy and its affects on us all.

We envision this gathering as a time and place where we can share what impact this crisis is having on us, and what fears and anxieties may be gripping us.

And it will also be a time to talk about what it means to be a community of faith in a time of crisis, and what concrete ways can we be there for each other and for those outside our immediate walls? How can we offer hope and help to one another?

It will be a time to remind ourselves that our faith is not in the stock market or housing prices, but in a God who is marked by grace, and generosity, and goodness.

It will be a time to remember that we are not in the wilderness alone. As a community of faith we support one another in both joy and suffering. We care for one another, we work together, and we share together in God’s grace.

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Readings

Genesis 9:8-17

God said to Noah and to his sons with him, “As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.”

1 Peter 3:18-22

Christ suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water. And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you—not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers made subject to him.

Mark 1:9-15

In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him. Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

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