[There will be NO in person service at Christ Episcopal today, Feb. 21, 2021 due to the inappropriate weather we have experienced here in our usually comfortable neck of the woods.]
Jesus, “was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts, ….” That is all the author of Mark’s Gospel tells us about what happened after Jesus’ baptism. And that couple of phrases tells us very little about what went on in the wilderness.
Mark tells us the Jesus was “driven” into the wilderness, where he spent forty days. The Greek word used for “driven” is the same one the author uses when he tell us about what Jesus did to the evil spirits that inhabited some of the people. So Jesus was “compelled, or driven” out of his world, into a place where He was cut off from everything. And He had to survive without the community. Like Moses, who wandered in the wilderness for 40 years, Jesus also had to learn to rely on the grace of God for His very life.
So Jesus was in the wilderness, driven away from all of the people and things that he knew, without food or water, surrounded by wild animals, for over a month. Think about the 100% human Jesus, and what a physical, mental, and emotional toll this must have taken on him. He must have been absolutely miserable by the end. Let’s face it, being in the wilderness is no fun!
This week, we in the South were part of the huge swath of the country that suffered through a winter storm of epic proportions. Although most of Louisiana did not suffer as badly as did Texans (who were burning their fences, or furniture, to stay warm) we did go without electricity for a while and potable water for even longer. And all of this in the middle of an ongoing pandemic. So I started to think about how much this is beginning to feel as though our whole nation has been driven into the wilderness, for a time of testing that seems never-ending.
Back in the dark ages of the 1960s, I grew up in a middle-class household, with two parents (and for several years, two grandparents) in the home. During my elementary school years, we were not rich, but we also never wanted for anything. That is, if we needed something, we got it. We went to church every Sunday — and I do mean every Sunday. If you weren’t on death’s doorstep, you got out of bed and went to church … at 7:30 in the morning no less. There were always adults around to be role models. Sure, sometimes they drank too much, or swore too much, or got a bit loud. But in the large, extended community in which I grew up, all of those adults were good people. They were not physically, mentally, or emotionally abusive — not to each other, and not to any of us kids. I was absolutely blessed to grow up in a community of people who were trying their hardest to follow Jesus and have a good time doing it.
In school, I was never the most popular, the most handsome, the best athlete, or any other “best” or “most.” But I was always a part of the group. I always found a way to fit in and be accepted. That skill came in handy, because after my father reached a certain level in his corporate career, we began to move every few years, as his promotion progression demanded. So I went to quite a few schools in my career. And during only one year did I feel like an outcast.
When I was in the eighth grade, we were living in Northern Virginia, outside Washington, D.C. It was 1969 and racial tensions were still running high after the riots in D.C. in the aftermath of the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. That was also the year that our school district finally ran out of appeals and had to comply with the Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education. So, in September, I got on a bus and went across town to what had been the historically African-American Junior High. I went from the 1968 school year in an all white school, to the 1969 year, in which I was one of the 10% white population with a 90% African American majority. Over the course of that year, I began to feel what it means to be driven out of my familiar community and into the wilderness.
The minority were treated by the majority in that school, exactly the way these same students had always been treated by a white majority in Virginia society. We were constantly treated as “less than,” the other students. We were looked down upon and pushed around — both physically and emotionally — by everyone with whom we came into contact. I was threatened with physical violence, strictly because of the color of my skin. And it took a toll on my psyche as the year wore on.
My eighth grade year was very much like a year in the wilderness. I was removed from the community support that I had known. The rules by which I had always thought that life operated, had changed. During my school days, I had no group of friends, as I had always had. Instead, when I looked around, all I saw was folks who resented my very existence. Not to compare myself to Jesus, but being in the wilderness is being in the wilderness. And following in the footsteps of Jesus, means trying to handle situations the way He did.
Being in the wilderness for 40 days was a learning experience for Jesus. He learned about the importance of being deeply connected to the Father of all. He learned about true, deep trust in the Father — trust so deep that he “knew” the Father would keep Him alive and healthy until his wilderness time was over. And He almost assuredly learned what His mission in the world would look like, from that time forward.
Wilderness time is never very pleasant. What makes it wilderness time is that we are suffering some sort of deprivation. But there is not much that can sharpen our ability to learn, more than spending time in the wilderness.
I am grateful that the 1969 school year resulted in some positive lessons. Rather than retreating to my own “white side of town” and becoming resentful of those who were treating me badly; I was able to talk with a couple of my teachers, one white, one black, who helped me understand that none of this was about me. They showed me that this was built up rage that was finding an unhealthy release. I lived through a wilderness time and learned empathy for people who had suffered in ways that I had never before even considered.
America in 2021 seems to be in a never-ending wilderness time. We are as politically polarized as at any time since the Civil War. As a country, we cannot even agree on what is truth and what are lies; what are facts and what are opinions. We have a pandemic that has now been going on for over a year, with businesses shuttered and almost half a million of our sisters and brothers dead so far. And last week we had winter weather that locked us down and continues to increase our sense of deprivation. One way to see this is as hopeless. Another way to look at it is, we are in the wilderness and can learn valuable lessons from it.
As a nation, we need to see what lessons are there to be learned from 2020-2021. What have we done that brought us to this place and what can we do to avoid it in the future? Those are national conversations that need to happen, using agreed upon facts as their basis. But we, as individual Christians, can learn lessons as well.
Like Jesus, we can use our wilderness time to learn to trust God. That doesn’t mean that we should just sit back and do nothing, while we wait for God to intervene and solve our problems. Instead, it means that we should trust that God is God and we are not. And God has given us all the tools we need to solve our problems. We just need to learn to use those tools the same way Jesus did — with love of God and humans — after going to the Father in prayer.
In the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
[Lent 1B 022121, Genesis 9:8-17; Psalm 25 or 25:3-9; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:9-13]
