Episodes
Wednesday Feb 13, 2013
Ash Wednesday
Wednesday Feb 13, 2013
Wednesday Feb 13, 2013
Deryl Davis Joel 2:1; 12-17
Today, Ash Wednesday, is the beginning of a forty-day-long journey towards Easter. We place ashes on our foreheads as a reminder of our own mortality, our need for repentance and reconciliation, and our reliance upon God’s care. It’s a time of reflection, when we consider the things that we’ve done, or left undone, in our lives over the past year. It’s not the sort of celebration the world encourages, or much likes to join in, as with Christmas or even Easter. We’re not hanging greens or festive banners. If anything, we’re going to spend some time stripping away – and that’s not something our culture, with its focus on beauty and success and accumulating things has much time for.
Traditionally, this season called Lent has been a time of preparation. In the early church, it was the period during which new believers were prepared for baptism and when those who had fallen away from the church or the faith repented and were reconciled. All went together to be baptized or to renew their baptismal vows at Easter. In many Methodist churches today, Lent is the time when young people study and prepare to publicly profess the faith in which they have been raised and nurtured.
While Lent as such does not appear in the Bible, it is modeled on the forty days that Gospel writers tell us Jesus spent in the wilderness. Forty is of course very significant: The people of Israel spent forty years in the wilderness of Sinai after Moses led them out of Egypt; Moses spent 40 days alone on Mount Sinai, where God appeared in a cloud of fire, before delivering the Ten Commandments; Elijah spent forty days and nights traveling through the wilderness to Mount Horeb, when fleeing from the soldiers of Ahab and Jezebel, and once he got there, God spoke to him, not in the wind, the fire, or the earthquake, but in a still small voice. In each case, the wilderness is a liminal place where God is experienced and transformation occurs.
Three of the Gospels – Matthew, Mark, and Luke – tell us that, after his baptism and prior to the beginning of his public ministry, Jesus went into the wilderness and was tempted. Actually, they say the Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness – the same Spirit that Jesus felt descending upon him in the moment of his baptism. So, we get a stark juxtaposition between the exhilaration and exultation of baptism, when the Spirit descends and a voice from heaven declares Jesus to be “the Beloved” before crowds of people, and the solitary sojourn in the Wilderness, where we hear not of the Holy Spirit, but of Satan.
So, why did Jesus go? And if the Lenten pilgrimage we begin tonight is modeled on Jesus’ experience, why do it? Why go to the wilderness?
The Bible doesn’t really tell us why Jesus went into the wilderness, only that the Spirit led or drove him to it. We can surmise that it was a chosen period of spiritual discipline, coming after his very public baptism, in which Jesus sought uninterrupted communion with God, searched his soul, and perhaps laid plans for his coming ministry – or intended to. But that sounds very thought out, like an extended monastic retreat. Did Jesus expect Satan to meet him there? Did he expect to be tempted in ways that he was, perhaps, most vulnerable?
The wilderness is always an in-between place in the Bible. It’s never really here nor there. It lacks a kind of definite-ness, a kind of certainty. That’s why the people of Israel wander for forty years in the desert – there are no roads in the wilderness, and you can’t see where you’re going with any clarity. It is neither Jerusalem with its temple and crowded markets, nor Nazareth, with its echoing streets and humming workshops, nor the Galilean countryside with its quiet agricultural rhythms. It is a place of danger and temptation where people who feel abandoned make golden calves, as the Israelites did while Moses went up the mountain, and prophets like Elijah are so tired of speaking truth to power and being persecuted for it that they beg to die. And where Jesus, hungry, uncertain, perhaps fearful of the future, faces the temptation to trade it all in for worldly comfort and success. To end his ministry before it even begins. The wilderness is a place of profound disorientation.
And that may be the point. We don’t go through the Lenten journey to reaffirm what we already know or believe about ourselves. We don’t undertake the pilgrimage to build self-confidence or affirm our point of view about things. We go into the wilderness to get a new perspective, to perhaps encounter something unexpected and unfamiliar. To open ourselves to the possibility of transformation, and sometimes that is hard.
Jesus understood this, and in fact, in Matthew’s gospel, he confronts the crowds who had been following John the Baptist, who was now in prison, with this very question:
“What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaking in the wind? That sounds pretty silly. Someone dressed in soft robes? You know the people in soft robes live in palaces back in Jerusalem. What did you come to see, then?”
Whatever they came to see – Entertainment? Good preaching? – it evidently was not a prophet, not the forerunner of the messiah who would announce the in-breaking of the kingdom of God. They did not expect transformation.
A few summers ago, I spent a week in Sante Fe, New Mexico, which is of course a remarkably beautiful place. I was at a college just outside of town, and you could access a number of hiking trails from a ravine below the college, and they would take you up to the top of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains above Sante Fe. The hike takes several hours, and since I had every afternoon free, I’d hike up to the top of the mountain every afternoon, take in the amazing view across Sante Fe and into the far distance of the desert beyond, and then make my way down the mountain in time for dinner back at the college. It was great exercize and great for the spirit, too.
Most nights we had evening presentations, so I didn’t really get out at night, other than around campus, until the last day there. About dusk I started walking up the same trail I had known all week and wandered around the lower rim of the mountain. You could look out and see the lights of Sante Fe, make out the historic center of the city, and see multi-million dollar homes lit up on small ridges here and there. What I didn’t expect is what I saw when I looked up into the night sky. It was so filled with stars that it seemed like they were going to blot out the sky altogether. I had never seen so many stars in my life! I had looked through telescopes and read the occasional star map, but I had never seen anything like this before. I was stunned, and I knew something unusual must be going on. I raced back to the college, and at the front gate, I met the security guard, who was making light drawings with his flashlight on the ground. “What’s going on?” I asked. “What do you mean?” he replied. “Well, there’s something happening in the sky. A meteor shower or something. I’ve never seen so many stars.” He looked up a second and shook his head. “Nah. It’s always like that here,” he said. “Where are you from?”
Sometimes, we have to go to the wilderness to find a new way of seeing, a new way of being. This is not a novel idea in our country of course, where we have a long tradition coming out of the native cultures of going into the wilderness on “vision quests” or rites of initiation. We have wilderness protection societies, like the Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society, and any number of backpacker groups that you can join for an experience in the wilderness. Every year, hundreds of people hike the entire 2,000 mile Appalachian Trail from end to end. And our national literature reflects this emphasis on and respect for wilderness. Henry David Thoreau explained why he spent two years by himself on the shores of Walden Pond – a kind of suburban wilderness – like this:
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
And near the beginning of the last century, conservationist John Muir, who helped found the Sierra Club, wrote that
"Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, overcivilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but fountains of life."
Time in the wilderness can re-orient us and bring us back to ourselves. But it may also be disquieting and even dangerous. The narratives around Jesus’ time in the wilderness are full of these dualities: City and wilderness, crowds and solitude, heaven and earth, Satan and angels, beasts and human beings, even freedom and imprisonment. The wilderness is dangerous because it presents the unexpected, and we cannot control it. Because God may use it to transform us in ways we cannot expect or sometimes apprehend.
The tribes of Israel are first lost in the wilderness, and then knit into a nation there, with a code of ethics that will forever guide their relationships with God and one another. In the wilderness, Moses will apprehend God in a burning bush, a cloud of fire, and the words of the Commandments, completing the journey from shepherd to prophet. Elijah, on the run and hiding for his life in a cave, will confront the powers of his day and set in motion the people and events that will overthrow them and establish God’s authority. Jesus, having faced temptation, will burst out of the wilderness proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God, calling disciples, and healing the sick and the lame.
The wilderness is bewildering! It should strip us of our usual attitudes and conceptions, leaving us available to be re-shaped and re-fashioned by God. We know this to be especially true in the difficult times in our lives, when a job is lost or a relationship ends and we don’t know where to turn next. But the message of Lent is that we don’t have to wait for transformation. It doesn’t depend upon something going terribly wrong . God knows there are cracks enough in each of our lives. This is a journey we willingly undertake because we know we need to be changed and that God has the power and the love to accomplish that.
Lent is a season of restoration, when we “repent” – “turn back from” – the things that have divided us, that have estranged us from one another. A time of rebuilding community, as Mark suggests Jesus experienced in the wilderness, where he is “with the wild beasts” and is ministered by angels. There is temptation to be sure, but after rejecting that, a new vision of how we live together. A view of the kingdom of God---from the wilderness.
The Ash Wednesday liturgy continues these dualities: It invites us to remember where we came from---from ashes, from nothing---but also from a garden paradise, where everything exists---people, creatures, environment---in harmony. [ Edward Hicks’ Peaceable Kingdom painting from Isaiah 65:25] - It invites us to remember our divisions, our temptations, our sins and estrangements, even as it points us toward the perfect kingdom of God. It calls us to remember our end, so that we can make a new beginning. The kingdom is now and it is still coming, because we are bringing it out of the wilderness with Jesus. We are proclaiming it with our small words and actions; our hellos and goodbyes, our simple, repeated inquiries – How are you, are you doing okay today? – our commitments to a food pantry or to affordable housing or to gun control or reconciliation in any form. We are bringing the kingdom out of the wilderness. We have seen the need for it; we have hailed it far off. We are bringing it to the places we live, to the everyday, familiar, habitual world we inhabit. It is a long journey out of the wilderness, but it’s worth it.
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