February 26, 2012
Texts: Genesis 9:8-17; Mark 1:9-15
God established a covenant with Noah and all Noah’s descendants, including even the animals and every living thing, that the earth would never again be destroyed by a flood. God’s image was being revised. Yes, they reasoned, God does get angry and destroy things…yet God also has the capacity to repent and begin again. And if God can repent and begin again, and we are created in that same image, then can we not learn to repent, too?
So later, when John the Baptist comes preaching repentance, it strikes a familiar chord in the memory of the people. This is like other times that God and the people have turned from the sin of their old ways and have begun again. And now, John says, one who has been heralded by the prophets through the ages, who will make possible what we by our own power have not been able to do, is at hand, actually bringing God’s realm into the earthly realm so that we will be able to see it, and live it, together.
Jesus’ baptism, for those who had eyes to see, was certainly extraordinary. Going down into the same dirty waters of any ordinary disciple, yet arising to a sky split open and the light of another realm shining on him, and the Holy Spirit, descending like a dove, while a voice announces him as the Beloved, in whom God is well pleased. Wow. Quite a reunion—a reminder of the covenant.
And then, almost immediately, he is driven into the wilderness….
Every year, during this season called Lent, we are given the opportunity to remember our own baptism and then go on our own 40-day vision quest, facing ourselves at the point of our greatest temptations. The wilderness, often, is imagined as a dark, lonely, barren place where we are confronted by our love of the pursuit of power and prestige and privilege…and where we struggle to die to self and take up the ways of a new realm.
I wonder how we began to see these 40 days as just taking another shot at our New Year’s resolutions? The temptations Jesus faced were not exactly in the same category as candy/caffeine/complaining/gossiping, and other “personal issues.” Not that there’s anything wrong with taking a look at these kinds of things, but the wilderness is about something else. It’s about peeling away the illusion that we are in control and can manage life alone. Even God knows the temptation to turn away from union with us. Even God has to choose to return. What if the wilderness isn’t a place of barren emptiness but the place of return, the place where God’s dream at last becomes possible because we return ourselves to the One who made us, and who is turning, at the same time, back toward us.
We go into the wild and find, not barrenness, but abundance. We meet some scary characters there, yes, but maybe they scare us because we have forgotten how to speak their language, how to receive their wisdom. The wilderness asks us, will we find the fortitude this time to really own up to our pride, our self-righteousness, our judgments, our greed, our lethargy—whatever is still untamed within each of us? Will we let the wild beasts of our native intelligence come to us and teach us their wisdom?
“Satan”—the images we put upon anything or anyone that stands opposite God—would like to be our only teacher, but he knows only the techniques of temptation and failure. The wild beasts, on the other hand, are Jesus’ true companions. Who knows, maybe they were the angels who cared for him, this one who was bringing into being the peaceable kingdom that they too surely longed for. The wild beasts are more innately prepared for that realm’s arrival than we are. Maybe they are explicitly added to the covenant made with Noah and humanity going forward because if we have any hope of re-union with all living things, we will need them and their wisdom to find our way there.
Noah had a flood—Jesus had a baptism—and with them, we too rise up out of the waters of an old consciousness into a new consciousness, a consciousness that can only be formed outside the dominant culture. The “dominant culture” that we are called out of, in our baptism and as we set our feet on the Jesus path, is not a culture of certain habits and behaviors that distract us from God. The “dominant culture” is made up of all the twisted ways we have learned to interpret life and justify our lack of faith and our selfish acts. So the Lenten wilderness is not about facing the darkness of our personal habits and interpersonal behaviors so much as fully repenting and entirely relearning the truths we have been living by: truths about the machine of war and violence, about food production, about the goods we buy from overseas factories, about the political process, about subterranean prisons being built out West where prisoners will never see daylight, about our own DC jail’s uptake in violence…a friend who is there right now reports officers beating inmates into unconsciousness without report. So many sickening truths that we have to justify in some way if we hope to get on with our lives.
Don’t we wish these 40 days were simply about reducing our caffeine intake or exercising more!? Instead, they are about being divested of everything we thought we already knew so that new understandings can be given. To face ourselves and to emerge humbled, not because we know what to do with all we are learning, but because we are more aware of how much we need God and each other. Only when we see the truth will we know how much we want to devote ourselves to embodying the peaceable realm because that realm is the only sustainable option.
We are led to believe the wilderness is just an alternative path to take occasionally, a sort of get-away when we need some down time, but “civilized life” is what matters most and is where our primary energies belong. But the wilderness, for committed followers of Jesus, is not optional. It is where we learn to see life from a different perspective, where we learn what we forgot—the native intelligence that the wild beasts know well. The interconnectedness of all life—the wild beasts know about this. The importance of both doing and being—they know. On a Cape Cod beach one March day I came across a seal being watched over by the “beach police” so that people wouldn’t get too close. I asked if it was dying and was told no, just resting, but if people got too close, they would drain the seal’s energy and then it might be unable to return to the water. “How does it know how long to rest?” I asked. The officer said, “It just knows. Seal intuition.” That seal was my teacher.
I’m concerned we might be losing our intuition for compassion, for community, for cooperation, for nurturing “what is” rather than always competing for more. The wilderness is wherever we realize we do not know everything. We are humbled in the face of it and must receive its wisdom in new ways. The wilderness is not a troubled place to be endured, but a place filled with new perspectives and understandings, everything we need to become fully ourselves. Maybe this is why we avoid going there, literally or figuratively. We don’t particularly want to see more of the Truth than we are ready to justify.
Last week the evening news did a piece about a factory in China that makes Apple computers. These folks were making all the parts that make up an iPad, but they had never seen a completed iPad and had no idea what it is or does. As factories go, this one meets a higher standard than many, the reporter said. Wages here start at $1.78 an hour and go as high as $2 an hour. The work week is only 60 hours. Fewer workers commit suicide here than at other factories. (But they keep “suicide nets” attached to the building to break the fall of those who do try to jump from the roof.) One young mother said she sees her children once a month because the factory is two hours away from her home and she can’t afford to travel there more often. All day she trims aluminum shavings from around the shape of an apple cut from a slab of aluminum. Never having seen a finished iPad, she had no idea this was the product’s logo or why the apple had a bite taken from the side.
But we recognize that apple, don’t we? The one that looks like it came straight out of the creation story. Is this what God had in mind when Adam and Eve were driven, like Jesus, into the wilderness, away from Eden? I think not. I don’t think God intended for them to become the forebears of mass poverty, working day in and day out to scratch out a living but never knowing what they were making or who it was for. When the reporter showed the workers his own iPad and what it could do when it was connected to the Internet, they were awestruck. And they said, with sincerity, that owning one must be very nice for those people.
The wilderness is not a place set apart, far removed from our ordinary lives. There are entry points everywhere. Because the wilderness is anywhere we are taken out of our comfort zone and faced with Truth, anywhere we are torn between the temptation to deny it and the courage to let it in. It is any place that shows us ourselves and calls us, for the good of all, to repent and begin again building a world that works better for everyone. In the wilderness, there are no “insiders” and “outsiders.” Everyone is “outside”—all of us in need of re-union. The wilderness reminds us that we can learn new ways to be “with and for” each other, “with and for” all creation. The only question is, will we?