Lent 1B-2021

1st Sunday in Lent Year B February 21, 2021 “’The wilderness is a dangerous place. You only go there if you have to.’ This is one of the key phrases teachers use in “Godly Play,” a popular Sunday School curriculum designed for young children.”i “’The wilderness is a dangerous place. You only go there if you have to.’ And yet we are invited into the wilderness during this Lenten season. In some ways it feels like we have never left the wilderness of last Lent. Certainly, we were forced into the wilderness in March 2020; we would have never chosen this life or all that we have had to learn to do differently. And this wilderness season has most certainly changed us. There will be no going back to how we were before this difficult season. Mark’s gospel uses the Greek word eremos which is often translated as desert or wilderness 10 times. In the rest of the New Testament, it is often used as an adjective to describe abandonment or as a noun to refer to a locality without inhabitants, an empty, abandoned, or thinly populated place. But in Mark’s gospel (and really all throughout scripture), the image of wilderness is ambiguous. ii The wilderness is a dangerous place because one is at the mercy of life’s extremes without our usual protections. There are wild animals, a harsh, barren landscape, and there’s an unpredictability to the wilderness that keeps it dangerous. The wilderness is a lonely place. It is a place where we only have our own souls and God to keep us company. It is far away from the trappings of every-day life and its distractions. The wildness is a monotonous place, where everything looks the same and every day feels like it slips away into nothingness. The wilderness is a dangerous place where temptations lurk and where we must face the deepest, darkest parts of our own hearts. And yet, Mark reminds us of the Biblical heritage that shows us that that there are gifts to be found in the wilderness. The wilderness is a dangerous place where God proves God’s faithfulness, over and over again. God shows up for God’s people, providing manna in the wilderness to feed them when they finally realize that are completely dependent upon God. The wilderness is a lonely place where Jesus retreats over and over again throughout his ministry to be with God, to stay focused on his mission. It is the place where Jesus first comes to know himself as God’s beloved, and he retreats there frequently to stay grounded in that identity. The wilderness is a monotonous place where a person can reconnect with the natural rhythm of our days, as the sun rises and sets day after day. It is a place where the few basic certainties of the landscape can give peace. It is a place where Jesus is allowed to rest from the demands and expectations of the crowds who flock to him for healing. The wilderness is a dangerous place because it is a preparing place. Jesus faces his temptations there as a preparation for his ministry and as preparation for the temptation that he will face at the end of his earthly life. “As Jesus knew, going into the barren and uncomfortable places isn’t about proving how holy we are, or how tough, or how brave. It’s about letting God draw us into the place where we don’t know everything, don’t have to know everything, indeed may be emptied of nearly everything we think we know.” iii This Lent, we are being offered the invitation by God to journey into the wilderness with Jesus. We are being invited to live into the difficulty of the wilderness and to embrace the strange gifts it has to offer. We are being invited to this dangerous, monotonous, lonely place as a preparation for Easter and for what comes next. ‘The wilderness is a dangerous place. You only go there if you have to.’ i. Thomas, Debie. Into the Wild. https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/1660-into-the-wild ii. These ideas are from the book The Spiritual Landscape of Mark by Bonnie B. Thurston. Chapter 1 (pp 3-5) iii.—from Lent 1: Discernment and Dessert in the Desert Jan Richardson’s The Painted Prayerbook, February 2008