Times of Testing 2-18-24
Times of Testing
Ps 25:1-10; Mark 1:9-15
Ps 25:1-10
To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul. O my God, in you I trust; do not let me be put to shame; do not let my enemies exult over me. Do not let those who wait for you be put to shame; let them be ashamed who are wantonly treacherous. Make me to know your ways, O Lord; teach me your paths. Lead me in your truth and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; for you I wait all day long. Be mindful of your mercy, O Lord, and of your steadfast love, for they have been from of old. Do not remember the sins of my youth or my transgressions; according to your steadfast love remember me, for the sake of your goodness, O Lord! Good and upright is the Lord; therefore he instructs sinners in the way. He leads the humble in what is right and teaches the humble his way. All the paths of the Lord are steadfast love and faithfulness, for those who keep his covenant and his decrees.
Mark 1:9-15
In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove upon him. And a voice came from the heavens, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tested by Satan, and he was with the wild beasts, and the angels waited on him. Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the good news of God and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.
Prayer – Lord Jesus, as we began our 40 day walk with you toward your cross, we honestly admit that sometimes walking with you is not easy. Walking in the ways of the world can be easier than walking in your way. We’ve only got about an hour a week to be with you here in our church. When we leave this sacred place, the rest of the week we are subjected to many times of testing from following your path. And so we pray, be with us and strengthen us during these times of testing. Help us to resist detours to the way that you want us to walk. Keep us on course, drawing us nearer to you in love, giving us what we need to faithfully follow you – amen.
In the beginning you weep – because all the familiar landmarks are gone, because you don’t know where you are, because the only food left in your backpack is disgusting and the little bit of water in your canteen has turned green. You’re hungry, you’re tired, you’re lost, you’re alone. It’s getting dark and even if the sky is clear enough for stars tonight, you don’t know how to read them. You always meant to, but you never learned. So now what? If you’re a prayer, you pray. If you’re not a prayer, you pray. What else can you do, once you have come to the end of what you can do for yourself? It’s time to find what faith means, out beyond the boundaries of where you were warned not to go.
I know’ we’re using ‘wilderness’ as a metaphor this morning, but if it’s a good one, then physical reality can only help. I can imagine each of us have gone on ‘wilderness hikes’ with trails and bathrooms, perhaps carrying a backpack with lunch packed in Tupperware containers. It was a lovely day out in the wilderness, but it wasn’t the kind of wilderness we are talking about this morning.
Once, in a meeting of teachers on religion, someone gave an inspiring talk about how exciting his students had been with the wilderness rafting and camping trips he took them on. There was something about the riskiness of it he said that opened them up in ways the classroom never could. And even when they got back to the classroom, they seemed more willing to take risks with each other. When he was done, another teacher raised her hand and said, “Excuse me, but were your students ever in any real danger?” The first teacher replied, “Oh no, I wouldn’t let that happen.” And the second teacher responded, “Well, if there wasn’t any real danger, it wasn’t a real wilderness. Because in a real wilderness, there has to be something that can kill you.”
I think that’s the kind of wilderness that kicks faith into evolution; you know where the death of your identity, the death of your certainty, your old community, your life as you know it. Those deaths are all entirely possible. They’re all in mortal danger these days. And though the danger doesn’t have to kill you, it can. Otherwise, you’re not in a wilderness; you’re in a park, where there are rangers to keep the trails clear and to keep dangerous things at a distance so you can take pictures without becoming anyone’s lunch or dinner.
But since we are working with a metaphor here, let’s not forget the dangerous places where there are no mountain lions or grizzly bears. If you’ve ever spent time in a radiology oncology unit, that’s a wilderness. So is a neighborhood where parents have to teach kids what to do when they hear gunfire. A dying church, a wilderness. Addiction, wilderness. Losing too many friends all at once is a wilderness, especially when they are your age or younger. Aging is a wilderness. Deep love for a suffering planet is a wilderness.
Basically anything that show us how breakable we are, how breakable everything is, does the trick, which means, face it, wilderness, times of testing, is not optional, not today, not in Jesus’ time, never. It is part of the human condition, to be tested, and no one gets a pass. Sooner or later, everyone comes to a place of frighteningly diminished resources, where everything that could be done has been done, and things that could once be ignored can no longer be ignored. Even if you thought you had accepted the fact that none of us has control of our lives – only the illusion of control – still, the full loss of this illusion can take your breath away. So, this is how bad things can really get. So, this is who we really are when all the props are kicked out from under us.
If you’re a believer, there’s one more thing to clarify, which is God’s presence in those times of testing. Is this a trial, a test? Is it a punishment, a correction, an oversight? Is that a refiner’s fire? Or is it the definitive absence that we have feared all along? In the wilderness, answering these questions is the one thing left to you – to decide what it all means.
This, I think is when a religion comes in handy – not the posted rules or the marked trails; not even the friendly ranger’s best efforts to keep you mindful of them really for your own safety. These may all be helpful functions of religion, but the potentially life-saving feature I’m thinking of at the moment is the way religion can give you access to an ancient body of teachings about the wilderness experience, those times of testing; what it’s like, how it acts of the soul of a person or a whole person, the meaning they’ve found in it, the graves they’ve dug, and the records they have left that you might just find meaning in as well.
We as Christians have perhaps the most famous wilderness story when Jesus was tempted in the wilderness, where he decided what he would and would not do to manifest his vocation as God’s Beloved. Simply put, Jesus decided against all the obvious exercises of power to relieve his testing in the wilderness, such as making bread out of rocks, such as commanding angels to make sure he didn’t get hurt, such as taking control of all the kingdoms of the earth, which presumably included the desert that he was in. He turned all of those protections down and decided to go hungry instead, making himself empty enough, hollow enough, to be useful for whatever God had in mind next.
And when that happened – when the wilderness had hollowed him right out – the same Spirit that Mark says drove him into the wilderness, led him back out again, to become the most translucent person that a lot of people had ever met. He was so different from the rest of them that they thought up names to call him like Lord, and Master, and Lamb of God – but the name he called himself was ‘Son of Man,’ ‘Son of human,’ perhaps hoping they might get the hint that that’s what they were too. That what Jesus was, they could be too.
As singular as Jesus’ experience may have been and him in it, his Jewish roots had taught him names of those who’d gone before. Like Hagar, like Ishmael, like Job, like Moses, and Miriam, and Elijah; Jesus joined a long parade of people who both lost their lives and found them again in the wilderness, the place of testing. They went in one way and the came out another way. They went in heavy, and they came out light. If you track their stories through the Bible, you find their encounters with God happened in typical places – deserts, mountains, and in clouds with an occasional deep water to drown in – as well as specific time from 3 days to 40 days, it didn’t matter.
With that kind of tradition behind him, Jesus didn’t try to protect anybody from the wilderness. Instead, he led them into it, dragged them into it, every chance he got; because times of testing reveal something important. The longest sermon Jesus ever preached was from the top of a mountain. He fed thousands of people in a food desert with 7 loaves and a few small fish. He took his disciples out on a boat right into a storm. He took few up the mountain where a bright cloud swallowed him up. He took them all to the Mount of Olives and asked them to pray and they fell asleep.
Perhaps, like the disciples, we keep hoping that Jesus will make the mountains less steep, the desert less hard, the cloud and fog less scary, but he wouldn’t because those times of testing are the places where God changes people. After we run out of everything we could do for ourselves, after all of our old certainties have bit the dust – then and only then when we are empty and confused enough for something new to take root, it does. Perhaps it wasn’t even new; perhaps it was a saved seed of an old divine wilderness in us that has been paved over too many times, shoved down every time it raised its head, that needed a good long stretch in the wilderness to come to life again.
That’s what I’m thinking anyway. I’m thinking about how tired a tame Christian can get – tired of self-censoring, tired of swallowing the questions that matter most, tired of putting more energy into being good than being alive. Is it because we have bought too much stock in spiritual success, or is it because we want so much to belong that we’ll lop of anything, any part of ourselves that falls outside the lines? Is it because we are too well fed, or is it because we want so badly to be safe? Safety and belonging – those are not small things. It’s why so many of us are here – and why some of us are living on a lot less of both of those, safety and belonging, than we once did.
And so I wonder, I wonder if it is possible to cultivate a way of being with God and one another that is lean enough to live in the wilderness for as long as necessary. We’d have to stop being afraid of bugs and dirt – a diet of bugs is that is all there was – but not without finding some way to split it in half, to give the other half to somebody whose body odor was just as bad as yours and it was bound to cancel your vote out if there were an election in camp tomorrow. We’d have to make peace with pain and impermanence, not once but every single day. But above all, you’d have some, some, some kind of faith that God is in the wilderness – that the desert is for us and not against us – whether we survive or not.
Because that is what the religion of Jesus says – that the finding of life is all wound up with losing it, that there is no rising up without lying down, and that the steep path to God ends in the clouds of unknowing. There is no fat in that, no padding that would allow one to ask WHY things are so hard or so scary, those times of testing. We all want to rich in spirit. We all want the kind of faith that can move mountains, not the kind that moves in the shadow of one, or enters the cloud on top, with no assurance of coming out in one piece.
In the beginning, you weep, because this isn’t what you had in mind. It’s not what you had in mind at all. When you said you had faith, you meant that you had faith this wouldn’t happen to you, that being a Christian meant no times of testing. You had faith you’d find your way out sooner than this. You had faith someone flying over would find you in time, you had faith in something. You meant you had faith that God would come up with a better plan.
And you know what, the Son of Man knows all of that. He also knows this – that when that kind of faith falls off the wild edge of sorrow, a leaner, hardier faith rises up in its place, one that can make you translucent too. Jesus just failed to say it like that. What he meant to say was for those who have tried to make their faith secure, they’ll lost it; but those who lose their faith will keep it. That’s when the weeping stopes, and the wild beasts call it a night just for tonight, and the ministering angels suddenly appear.
I don’t know what your wilderness is all about today, but you do, and you’re the one who can decide whether God is in it or not. Even if you decide on ‘is’ instead of ‘is not’, you can still lose everything. But what you gain though is the re-wilding of your soul because there is the spiritual wilderness protection program, open to anyone and everyone willing to leave the pavement and be empty right, making room for God-knows-what is coming next – thanks be to God – amen.