You Can’t Get There from Here March 5, 2006, Year B, Lent 1 The Rev. William V. Livingston, Rector Church of the Resurrection, Starkville, Mississippi We begin our weekly staff meetings with Noon Day Prayers and include a discussion of one of the upcoming Sunday readings – usually the Gospel. At this week’s meeting, after I read the Gospel we just heard, Leanne asked haven’t we just heard that? Yes, we have, the first Sunday of Epiphany, except that then it ended with the accounting of the voice of God claiming Jesus as the Beloved. This reading, as we enter the season of Lent adds the verses about the Spirit driving him into the wilderness, Satan tempting him and angels waiting on him. Ever since Delta Airlines dropped Dallas as a hub, I have realized when I want to visit our youngest son in Austin, I can’t get there from here. A flight to Austin means a flight to Atlanta and then a flight to Austin. So it is with a journey to the Kingdom of God. You can’t get there from here – not even Jesus. It first requires the journey into the wilderness: where Abraham takes Isaac to sacrifice him but instead enters into a covenanted relationship with God, where Moses discovers his calling in a burning bush, where liberated Hebrew slaves must first wonder to become God’s people. It is traditionally the place where God is to be found. It was the place where prophets went to commune with God and early Christian hermits went for safety and for deeper relationship with God. And now Jesus is driven by the Spirit into the wilderness: a place of danger and horror where Satan is encountered but also where angels wait on him and God is experienced in a deeper way. The markan narrator says he was with the wild beasts. As I read that verse, I think of my friend Mary Glover, who as a child, when she would sing the verse “and one was killed by a fierce wild beast” from the hymn The Saints of God but had never encountered a fierce wild beast, thought the verse was, “and one was killed by a fierce wild priest.” Who knows, her version may come much closer to reality. Mark simply acknowledges their presence without saying whether they were an additional threat or another source of comfort. Perhaps they were both. Spencer Chapman in his book, The Jungle Is Neutral, describes life as a British officer who had escaped from a World War II Japanese prisoner of war camp and survived by living two years in the jungles of Singapore. The jungle contained life-threatening obstacles and animals of prey and poisonous plants. Yet, that same jungle provided safety from his pursuers and supplied food and water. This is the wilderness that must be traversed: the wilderness that tests and which is both threat and safety, in which only the Holy Spirit distinguishes between friend and foe, in which evil has to be confronted in order to reach the other side. Mark’s narrative does not describe the nature or mode of Satan’s tempting. We are left to assume that Satan tempted Jesus at his points of greatest vulnerability. I remember a few years ago one of those “Jesus movies” that comes out around Easter. I recall very little about the movie, which means that it probably offered the cinematic stereotypical Jesus: a little too pious, wondering around randomly spouting off profound proclamations but with no context in which to ground them and present Jesus as a pompous erudite – you know, not the kind of guy you’d like as your best friend. What I do remember, however, was Satan whom was encountered in two scenes. While Jesus and everyone else was dressed in Hollywood first century Palestinian garb, Satan looked like how many of us might hope to look: handsome, perfectly coiffured dark hair, wearing a dressy black t-shirt with black paints and shoes. Satan first appears in this wilderness journey described in today’s text. He last appears at the Garden of Gethsemane as Jesus asks God to somehow escape the crucifixion. Though no biblical text exists for what the director includes, the movie includes one of the most profound images of facing temptation. As it becomes evident that Jesus will be faithful to his journey, Satan Jesus asks why he wants to waste all he has done and then asks, “Are you doing this for humanity? Let me show you what humanity will do in your name.” Immediately the viewer is rapidly bombarded with images of the Crusades, the Inquisition, WWI gas smothered trenches, Holocaust concentration camps. We call on God in desperate times, but we wait in vain for deliverance because we wait for a ‘deus ex machina,’ a god from the mythological drama who will step in and save the day by showing mercy, but only to us. In our situation today we are frequently tempted to turn Jesus into an end time apocalyptic Judge with an attitude. Our own fears and anxieties seek deliverance from those foes that would deprive us of the security and peace that we feel are so necessary to our existence. We turn to cheap copies of Jesus delivered in facile sermons and sold in Bible book stores. This Jesus, it turns out, is nothing other than all of the old gods in Christian guise. And we think, “we won’t get fooled again.” That is not the God encountered in the wilderness nor the Jesus who went into the wilderness nor to Gethsemane. Jesus, who came to show us what God is like and what it means to be humans made in the image of God; this Jesus had to go through the wilderness, to be tested. This it the God of the Gospel, the One whose reign dawns before us, but is not like the other gods of our imaginations. This is the God of Lent which begins with ashes smeared on our foreheads reminding us that really living means getting dirty and ends with our bursting out of tombs that imprison us. Yes, as biblical theologian Frederick Buechner says, “If sackcloth and ashes are at the start of it, something like Easter may be at the end.” The problem is that we can’t get there from here. We, too, have to come up out the waters of our baptisms. Yet, as Martin Luther says, “Baptism takes only a few minutes to do but a whole life time to finish,” and so, we have to make the journey into the wilderness through which we make our way down a trail of muddy footprints and littered by the beastly issues of home and school and office, stress and sickness and sadness, confusion and chaos and violence. Knowing this but also knowing we can only traverse and survive in the wilderness for brief periods our Church founders wisely offer us Lent so that we can briefly but more intensely venture into the wilderness. Ah Lent, any good Episcopalian is thinking about penance. Suddenly, we are required to get penitential. Surely we've already decided what to give up for Lent: maybe chocolate or sodas; perhaps that second piece of cake. Take on whatever Lenten discipline you feel called to, but know that it is much easier to repent of sins we have committed than to repent of those we intend to commit and that Lenten penance may be more effective if we fail in our resolutions than if we succeed because Lent’s purpose is not to confirm us but to bring home to us our need for salvation. It is "tempting" to think that our Lenten practices are the whole task of Lent, but the essential task of Lent is to remind us we can’t there from here and that we too must venture into the wilderness to confront evil and undergo repentance. In such a wilderness we realize our insurance policies don’t protect us, and we learn what will harm us and what provides safety. In it we must discern between the voice of the Tempter (the voice of that which makes us less human) and the voice of the One who breathed life into us. It is only in the wilderness that we understand what it means to be loved beyond all our understanding, because that is what Jesus’ redemptive life offers us. My prayer for each of you this Lent is that you will venture far enough into the wilderness to try in our little ways to comprehend in our meager human ways, the incomprehensible love of the creating, redeeming reality, the mystery, we know as “God, ” that you will venture far enough into the wilderness to recognize that every day the sun rises on us, the dawning of the reign of God also occurs, that you will venture far enough to recognize every day is a new chance, a new opportunity to walk away from the darkness into the light, love and life of God revealed to us through Jesus Christ.