Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent, February 18, 2024

Genesis 9:8-17+Psalm 25:1-9+1 Peter 3:18-22+Mark 1:9-15

The wilderness can be a dangerous place. Lack of water, blinding sun, no place to find shelter, poisonous critters lurking amidst the rocks.

The wilderness can also be a beautiful place. Once your eyes have adjusted to the light, the blandness takes on shades and subtle colors, the silence gives way to the sound of the breeze and the animals that call the wilderness home.

Mostly, though, the wilderness is not home. It is an in-between place, coming from somewhere but not quite at the destination.

The people of the 21st century don't do wilderness very well. We are people on a mission to get from one place to another. We return to work too soon following an illness because to do otherwise would show weakness. We call an end to a pandemic because we have to get back to "normal" even with thousands are dying every day from a virus that continues to morph. We rush through mourning the death of a loved one and never quite find a place for that grief so that it, too, continues to morph and interrupt our lives at the most unexpected moments.

The wilderness makes frequent appearances in scripture, and they all carry significant weight. The people of Israel wanderee for 40 years through the wilderness, and most of the time, they hated it, complaining about the food and the heat and the weariness and longing to return to Egypt where at least they had a place they called home. Sometimes we interpret those 40 years as punishment for not having enough trust that God would, in fact, deliver them into the Promised Land, but I'm not sure that's quite right. The Hebrews who came out of Egypt behind Moses were not ready to be a new nation. Their identity was too mixed up with 400 years of enslavement under pharaoh, and to have them simply go from that to building a new home in a new land would not have allowed them the time to know, to remember, who and whose they were.

For the people of Israel, the wilderness was a place of transformation.

For Jesus, the wilderness was a place of transformation.

In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, this forty days in the wilderness immediately follows the baptism, and as we just heard, it is at the baptism that God says, "You are my Son, the Beloved" (Mark 1:11). The forty days, for Jesus, were a time of wrestling with what that meant. He was not just a man from Nazareth with a group of friends gathered around John the Baptist. He was the Messiah, the Son of God, and maybe he knew this already, but this is where it became an identity to be fully embraced. This is where the rubber met the road. "You are my Son."

That time in the wilderness was a time of transformation for Jesus, confronting the temptations of the devil and accepting care from the angels, so that when he returned to Galilee, he immediately launched his mission by calling disciples and proclaiming good news.

How might we also be transformed by the wilderness? How do we create space to experience the untetheredness of the desert where we are free from distraction and can tune our hearts to God?

English poet Edwina Gateley found her wilderness living in a hermitage in Illinois for nine months. Having served as a missionary in Uganda, she found herself in that liminal space, that in-between what was before and what lay ahead. After that time of solitude, this Catholic lay woman wandered the streets of Chicago, befriending the homeless and the prostitutes, and ultimately founded Genesis House as a place of refuge and hospitality for women whose lives were spent walking the streets and selling their bodies. Gateley's wilderness was a time of transformation, but she did not go into it lightly. It might have been easier to stay where she was, but she knew that it was time to go out into the in-between.[1]

Her poem, Letting Go, describes what it is like to go from where we are to that liminal space between here and there:

It is time to go.
I can smell it.
Breathe it
Touch it.
And something in me
Trembles.
I will not cry.
Only sit bewildered.
Brave and helpless
That it is time.
Time to go.
Time to step out
Of the world
I shaped and watched
Become.
Time to let go
Of the status and
The admiration.
Time to go.
To turn my back
On a life that throbs
With my vigor
And a spirit
That soared
Through my tears.
Time to go
From all I am
To all I have
Not yet become.[2]

Friends, the wilderness can be a dangerous place, and it can be a beautiful place, and it is the wilderness that beckons us now as we begin this journey through Lent. From all that we are to all that we have not yet become.

[1] https://www.catholicwomenpreach.org/preacher/edwina-gateley

[2] https://www.journeywithjesus.net/poemsandprayers/563-edwina-gateley-letting-go