The Rev. Keri T. Aubert   March 1, 2009

Genesis 9:8-17

Psalm 25:1-9

1 Peter 3:18-22

Mark 1:9-15

First Sunday in Lent, Year B, RCL 

In Mark’s gospel, Jesus is claimed by God and then immediately driven by the Spirit into the wilderness. If the voice from heaven is about Jesus’ divinity, then the temptation in the wilderness is about his humanity. Maybe there’s something we can learn from it. Unlike Matthew and Luke, Mark doesn’t go into any detail about Jesus’ encounter with Satan. But I can imagine how I’d feel a few days after being left alone in the wilderness without a clue as to how long I’d be there. Hopelessness, despair, fear, anger—I’d be susceptible to anyone offering me a way out. I’m not sure I’d perform as well as Jesus did under pressure.

It is into a similar sort of wilderness that we are invited every Lent. As Jesus’ baptism was followed by forty days in the wilderness, so too does the season of Lent give us the opportunity to remember our own baptisms by undertaking our own forty-day journey. Maybe it doesn’t sound very inviting. In fact, when Mark says that the Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness, it feels downright forbidding. But maybe the Spirit has plans for us. And by choosing a metaphorical wilderness, by making space to experience that wilderness, maybe we uncover things that help us even with the wildernesses we don’t choose.

Okay, so most of us aren’t really going anywhere. But the point is that in the wilderness, we try to distance ourselves from the usual distractions and routines of our everyday lives and focus our attention on the things that really matter. However, we go to the wilderness, the point is to take the opportunity to let our lives be stripped down and to let our selves be laid bare. As the masks and trappings fall away, the essence is revealed. Under these conditions, we are able to discover truths long hidden. I suspect we find what has been there all along. And I suspect that one of the important things we find is that our humanity and our divinity are as inseparable in us as they are in Jesus.

Episcopal priest and writer Martin Smith tells this story of his youth in England:

In the last months of my schooldays I was pursuing my interest in local history by investigating the therapeutic wells and springs of Worcestershire. In my research I came across an account of an Edwardian expedition to discover a holy spring . . . .  In the middle ages pilgrims with eye diseases had gone there to seek healing. All trace of it was lost and that expedition had been a failure. One warm day I strapped a spade to my bicycle and set out to see whether I could find it.

Nothing came of hours of probing in the fields where tradition located the spring, until I realized that the cows that stood in a stinking mud patch might be guarding the secret. I prodded them with my spade, forcing them to leave, and began to dig in the dung. After twenty minutes my spade grated against stone and moments later I had uncovered a carved platform from which protruded a wooden pipe. Pure water poured out in a steady flow. I had found the well, the place of pilgrimage and healing.[i] 

Smith relates his finding to the Spirit, which is living water residing in us. He says that, “The home of the Spirit is . . . in the guts, the deep core where our passions have their spring, the place of conflict, confusion, vulnerability, and desire.”[ii] He continues with this:

. . . the Spirit is to be found in the core of our own humanity. One of the wonderful things about my discovery of the spring was the sense that it had been there, flowing, all the time, for centuries. It just needed to be uncovered. I knew God was teaching me about my own baptism in this experience. The Spirit had been in me all the time. Finding the Spirit of God in my life was not a matter of looking for something I had never had. It was a matter of actively uncovering through faith a Presence in the depth of my being that had been there all along, and that had been at work in my actions and sufferings, my fears and desires.[iii] 

Lent may be the season of wilderness, but it is also the season of penitence. Thinking about the things we have to be penitential about, it seems to me that the root of all our transgression is fear and despair. Fear and despair turn us away from the abundance that God desires for us. Going into the wilderness is our opportunity to confront our fear and despair. When we confront them, they lose their power over us, and we can begin to find hope. And so, in the season of Lent, we turn to penitence, but always with the purpose of finding our way to God’s healing well of holiness. This well of holiness is, I believe, the only thing that that will keep us from fear and despair.

The uncovering of the spring inside us is something that we need to do over and over again. Part of our living on this earth is being plunged repeatedly into wildernesses that are not of our choosing. Sometimes they are triggered by loss or grief, sometimes by the mystery of the emotions that cycle in our lives. When we have difficult periods in our lives, it can be as if the wilderness is surrounding us on all sides. Sometimes we are there for much more than forty days, and the timing is always bad. We forget that God’s goodness is with us and in us. But God’s goodness is with us and in us, and so we make it through. And though we may not choose our trips to the wilderness, it is often during these times that we learn the most about ourselves, and the most about God.

If during Lent we choose to place ourselves in the wilderness, then it is not due to some masochistic urge. Rather, it is due to our ability to hear the Spirit’s call to find its source within us. Not despite but because of the wilderness, there is good news. Our chosen sojourns in the wilderness bring us closer to God in all aspects of our lives. And they help us to be ready when we find ourselves in a wilderness that comes not of our choosing.

Any time we emerge from the wilderness, having uncovered again that hidden spring, our reaction is joyful appreciation of God’s gifts. And so it makes sense that Jesus went from his temptation in the wilderness to his proclamation of the good news. Baptism to temptation to proclamation: this is the Lenten journey that we share. With the water of holiness flowing in our hearts, we cannot help but become messengers of God’s goodness and loving-kindness, spreading of the good news through word and deed throughout creation.