February 18, 2024
Lent 1 Year B
Epiphany, Winnipeg
Mark 1:9-15
What happened in your life in the last forty days? Since January 9th?
What good things happened? What not so good things happened? What did you do that gave someone life or joy or love? What did you do that…hurt someone? What messages did you get, what stories did you hear, that helped you trust that God is good and you are loved by God? What happened that made all that hard to believe? Who helped you and carried you along, and gave you what you needed for another day?
Everything happens so quickly in this story of Jesus’ baptism and Jesus’ temptation. You might have noticed. Jesus is baptized, comes up out of the water to see the heavens open and a dove coming down, and then the voice of God speaks just to Jesus and says, “You are my son, my beloved, and I’m pleased with you.”
And then right away the Spirit drives Jesus out into the wilderness, and then there’s hardly a word about what happens there. Just that he’s there for forty days, tempted by Satan, and he’s with the wild beasts, and the angels waited on him. That’s all. Forty-one days in three verses, forty days in one.
What happened to you in the last forty days? Since January 9th?
Were you tempted by Satan in the wilderness? No? Yes?
Here’s the thing about Satan. In the Bible Satan isn’t just God’s enemy with horns and a pitchfork who makes bad things happen. The name Satan actually means something like “The Accuser,” and so Satan’s job is to make accusations and to press charges against God’s people, to try to prove that someone is really up to no good, or to make them question the goodness of God, or simply to prove that their story or their faith is a lie.
So maybe this story today, with so many details left out, might just look like this: Jesus was baptized by John in the Jordan, and God spoke to Jesus and said, “You are my beloved son.” Then Jesus was sent straight into the wilderness and Satan the accuser met him there and said, “Do you really think you’re God’s son? Not just a nobody from Nazareth?” Then he said again and said it again and wouldn’t let up and maybe, just maybe – we don’t know – maybe Jesus wondered. “Is it really true that I’m God’s child? What if I’m not?”
The other thing that God’s voice from the clouds said when Jesus was baptized was “I am well pleased with you.” So then - I’m imagining, but imagining is just fine – I’m imagining Satan saying to Jesus, “Now I know that God said, ‘I am pleased with you.’ But do you really think that God is pleased with you? If God were pleased with you, Jesus, why would you be out here in the wilderness? With no food or shelter, and surrounded by wild beasts? If God were pleased with you wouldn’t God have kept you back home and surrounded you with good things, instead of leaving you to struggle out here? I think God is displeased with you.”
And maybe Jesus wondered. “Is God pleased with me? Then why am I out here in the wilderness? I’m hungry. I’m tired. It shouldn’t be this way. Is God pleased with me?”
What happened with you or with me in the past forty days? Were there times when you wondered? Did things happen that made you wonder whether you were God’s own beloved child? Was there a voice – someone else said something to you or called you something that made you wonder whether you were loveable, or your own inner critic just wouldn’t stop saying that you’re not all that God has claimed you to be?
I have a hunch that all of us face that accusing voice, a little or a lot, from inside or from outside.
What happened with you or me in the last forty days? Were there times when you were afraid, when it felt like wild beasts surrounded you, and maybe you weren’t safe?
When wars kept on being wars, and when we heard the news that two women and three children were killed by someone they all knew down by Carman, did you or I, or somebody somewhere, wonder whether this world is loved by God, or has God just sent us all into the wilderness where things like that keep happening?
That’s what it means to be tempted by Satan in the wilderness. Not pursued by a sneaky demonic figure, but to be nagged by those questions, wondering whether we really are loved, wondering whether God really loves.
“And the Spirit immediately drove Jesus out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan, and he was with the wild beasts…and angels waited on him.”
That’s the other piece: Angels waited on him. What happened to you in the last forty days? Did angels come to your table and say, “What do you need today?” Did angels who looked an awful lot like regular people around you come and give you a drink when you needed it, or some food or a couch to sleep on, or a really good laugh, or they let you cry and say what a bad day you’ve been having, or they just let you sit and be allowed to wonder what’s going on in the world or in any of our lives? There are angels in the wilderness. Usually they’re not being heroic and biblical, they’re just helping you or me or us make it to the next hour or the next day; they’re just helping you or me or us remember that we too are God’s beloved children.
What do we expect to happen in the next forty days? Forty days of Lent? The truth is, we have no idea what will happen. The next forty days are brand new, just like forty days were for Jesus when he was sent out there into the wilderness to face who-knows-what.
The pattern might be familiar, though. We’ll leave here today, bathed in the good news once more that we, like Jesus, have been washed in the water and God has spoken and said, “You are my beloved child, and I’m pleased with you. I’m not pleased with you because you’ve been so good, or because you did everything right and earned a gold star. I’m pleased with you just because you’re my child, and it’s my joy to call you mine.”
The Spirit will drive us all out of here into days and places that sometimes feel like comfort and ease and sometimes feel like wilderness. We’ll be tempted by Satan, which will not mean that a guy with horns and hooves and dressed in red will try to get us to do bad things. It simply means that we will have experiences and get messages that tempt us to believe that we’re not really beloved children of God, but that we’re something else: consumers, taxpayers, unemployed or rich, successful or struggling, addicted or clean-living, that all of those things are who we are. But the voice that spoke as we came up out of the water said something else: we are all just plain old no-questions-asked beloved children of God.
Over these next forty days we will also…do dumb things – each one of us - and probably hurtful things, and we’ll all be part of a system of money and power that just hurts so many people. And when we realize that we too belong to the company of people called sinners we might feel that we are in a wilderness of our own design. That’s when we will hear a call to repent, to change, to turn around, and at that same time there will be that voice that keeps telling us that we are beloved children of God. And that voice will also help us remember that it’s OK to be honest about who we are and what we’ve done. Even in the face of all that, we sinners hear that we are still saints; God’s beloved.
Over the next forty days there will be things that make us afraid, or we’ll have the best days ever, or any of us might feel like this day is just too hard. And there will be angels. There will be people we know or do not know who will remind us that even in the wilderness we are beloved children of God.
What do we expect to happen in the next forty days, or the forty after that? Or after that, or…? Let’s go and see. While we do that it’s OK to be afraid or uncomfortable or clueless in the wilderness – what else do you do when you’re going somewhere you’ve never been – like the next forty days? I haven’t been to the next forty days; have you? Lent assures us again and again that in the wilderness we are loved. Repenting, we are loved. With wild beasts and angels we are loved. In good days and bad days and anything that forty days can bring, we are loved. And Jesus, beloved child of God who heard the voices and who wondered and hungered and who was waited on by angels, goes with us into God’s beloved wilderness