From the Pastor's Study - March 2024

Do you ever hear an inspiring sentence or two from a story and have it catch your imagination? Maybe one inspiring fragment teases your curiosity, and you wonder what the rest of the story might be. This is the way that our story of faith so often greets us. As we delve again into Mark’s Gospel, we encounter this over and over. Mark’s Gospel is so sparse with details. It tweaks the imagination if we let it.

We’ve just begun the season of Lent and the text from the first Sunday always speaks of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness for forty days. Matthew and Luke describe that temptation with depth and soaring details. But with Mark, all we get are fragments of a story: “The Spirit then compelled Jesus to go into the wilderness, where he was tempted by Satan for forty days. He was out among the wild animals, and angels took care of him.” Our forty-day journey in Lent mirrors this time of preparation for Jesus before he would begin his ministry. It is a length of time that occurs often in scripture: forty days for Noah’s ark to weather the flood, forty days for Moses as he received the ten commandments, forty days for Elijah fasting and praying, forty years even for Moses and the Israelites as they journey in the wilderness toward the promised land. That number forty reminds us of all these stories of God seeking to align God's people with God's ways. And so, the early church established a period of forty days of fasting and praying prior to the good news of Easter (they exclude the feast days of Sundays). The time encourages us to consider how we would turn from the ways of the world and turn back to the ways of God.

I don’t know about you, but I know that habits are hard to break and that it might just take forty days or more of trying to realign my behavior. Jesus spends those forty days there in the wilderness with the wild animals and angels serving him. Mark’s text makes it sound like it could be an extraordinary time of sabbath that would realign Jesus with the very purposes of creation. Jesus was to be in harmony with the natural world to spend time with the wild animals, and to come to see and understand how all of creation is beloved by God and created to be in harmony. That’s not to say that all in the desert is peaceful, for some animals relate to others as prey and nights may be cold and long. But I hear in those simple words the possibility of Jesus returning to a vision of creation that is offered in the stories of Genesis, of a garden of Eden where everything existed in relative harmony. What an amazing fullness of time for Jesus to remember who he is in relation to all creation. He’s just heard that he’s God's beloved in the verses before this, and now he learns what that means in relation to creation itself. What would it mean to ground ourselves in remembering who we were created to be so that we could say a holy yes to the ministry and the path before us?

We live in a world where it seems that we are encouraged to forget who we are. We are pulled in all kinds of ways by temptations. We are swayed by people assuring us that if we just believe as they do and do what they do that we will be “right.” Mark offers those few words that can draw us back to the vision God had at the beginning of creation, so that when Jesus proclaims God's kingdom, it’s not just a kingdom that is for us as humans but rather one that includes a different way of being for all that is.

As we continue our Lenten journey, may we keep being shaped by remembering who we are, and whose we are. May we learn to live that vision of God's creation as we step out into our ministry in the world. May we nurture a renewed vision of who we are so that we are prepared to proclaim God's good news of Easter for all of creation!