The Book

Yes, Polar Star Press published a sermon series I preached in the summer of 2008, "Affirmations."

The book is a collection of reflections on the Disciples' affirmation of faith - it's a beautiful confession, but we call it, somewhat over-cautiously, the Preamble to the Design.

This We Believe would be such a lovely statement, but we're a long way from anything like that ...

Anyway, your purchase of the book will support the work of the Disciples of Christ Historical Society. Thank you!

Baptism

On Easter Sunday we baptize new disciples.

Following their confession of faith in Jesus Christ, they are lowered into the deep water to die and rise with Christ, to be washed and renewed, to cross the sea and the river and enter the land of God's promise.

Baptism is nothing less than the whole story of God and the people of God condensed into one moment:

• It is the sea through which God’s people escape to freedom and in which the powers that oppress and enslave them drown.

• It is the river God’s people cross to enter the promised land.

• It is the flood from which a renewed creation emerges.

• It is the call of John in the wilderness and the obedience of Jesus.

• It is the water that breaks at the birth of a new humanity.

• It is the washing of feet at the end of a long journey and the bath on the eve of the great sabbath.

• It is the river of life that runs from the throne of God.

We discover the whole story of God and God’s people in the sacrament of baptism – not because water ties it all together so beautifully, but because Jesus does. In his whole life we find God’s purposes revealed and God’s promises fulfilled. Those who answer Christ's call to discipleship and kingdom mission leave their old life behind and live in newness of life, live in Christ.

In baptism, God acts by embracing us as God’s own, making us part of the body of Christ, and giving us the Holy Spirit;

the church acts by obeying the command of Christ and welcoming new disciples as brothers and sisters and equipping them for ministry;

and the individual believer acts by responding to God’s call in Christ, renouncing the false gods of this world, and committing to a life as a follower of Jesus Christ.

At Vine Street, we will have a retreat on Good Friday for all candidates for baptism, and the retreat will conclude with an evening pilgrimage through the church, in the tradition of the Stations of the Cross. More information about this concluding worship will be in our newsletter; we welcome guests to this and any worship service.

The Ten Commandments of Email

according to Thomas

1. I keep my messages brief and to the point. Sometimes what I need to say is more than three or four brief paragraphs. That’s when I write a letter or ask for an appointment.

2. I don't discuss multiple subjects in a single message. This helps with keeping them brief. If multiple subjects need to be addressed, multiple messages with clear subject lines make life easier for the recipients. It also makes it more likely that I get a response to each of my questions or requests.

3. I never put in an e-mail message anything that I wouldn't put on a postcard. Email can be forwarded, and I have no control over that. I do have control over the content of what I write in my email, though.

4. I send group e-mail only when it's useful to every recipient. I use TO: for the people I expect a response from. I use CC: for people who need to know, but from whom I don’t expect a response. I use BCC: for large groups (primarily to keep all the unnecessary “reply all” messages out of their mailboxes and my own), and I keep my mailing lists up to date.

5. I try to remember that email is a very limited communication device. Those who read my email messages don’t have the benefit of my pitch, tone, inflection, or other non-verbal cues. When in doubt, I make a phone call.

6. I don’t write in ALL CAPS, unless it’s AWESOME or GREAT. Other than praise, nothing should be shouted. The same applies to ?????? or !!!!!!!

7. When I’m angry, I take a walk before I reply. Firing back only creates more heat. If I reply at all, I keep in mind the postcard rule.

8. I use spell-checker.

9. I read my e-mail before I send it. I have created great nonsense by editing parts of a sentence without reading the rest. I have created great nonsense by using cut and paste clumsily. I have created great nonsense by dropping essential letters or entire words. I read my email before I send it.

10. I use “reply all” only when “all” need to know. When Bob sends the minutes of the last meeting to the 15 members of the Board of Directors, I send my “Thanks for the minutes, Bob. Brief and precise as always. thomas” to Bob.

11. I have broken every single one of these ten, but I keep trying.

I have gathered these from multiple sources (google "email etiquette") and modified them for my own use.

The Big Ten

Sermon titles can be deceiving. It’s the middle of March, conference tournaments are in full swing, and the sermon title is The Big Ten – but you wouldn’t really expect me to talk about Illinois, Northwestern, Michigan, Ohio or Purdue, would you?

And it’s not just sermon titles that can be deceiving – I counted the Big Ten, and there are actually eleven schools in that conference.

Today’s sermon title refers to the words spoken by God in the wilderness of Sinai and written on tablets of stone, ten commandments for the life of God’s people. They are not ten heavy, finger-wagging Thou shalt not’s that quickly add some severe restrictions to the freedom of these run-away slaves, but rather words of life that protect their freedom, words to help them live in covenant community with God and with each other – and not in the deadly systems of Egypt.

The big ten are the constitutional text of God’s people, if you will, a text that characteristically doesn’t begin with “We, the people” but with “I the Lord.”

I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

It all begins with this memory of liberation and the God whose name was revealed in it.
You raise one finger, and it’s easy – even without looking at it – to say “I”, but our freedom in the land of God’s promise depends on our ability to remember the name of the One who brought us out. Who we are is forever determined not by what we make of ourselves or of each other, but by who this Holy One is for us:

I. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out.
II. You don’t need any other gods.
III. You don’t need to manufacture images or dream up ideas to capture who I am, for I am who I am, the Lord your God, who brought you out.
IV. Remember my name.

The big ten are written on two tablets; one with particular attention to our relationship with God, the other with particular attention to our relationship with one another. The two are not separate, though, because together they serve a single purpose: to help God’s people live as God’s people, to help us remember the name of our God.

To me, the fourth commandment is something like a hinge holding the two tablets together.

Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.

Ed Hallowell wrote a book a couple of years ago, CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, And About To Snap. Strategies for Handling Your Fast-Paced Life. USA Today praised it, “Valuable advice… Too busy to read this book? Then you really need to.”

I wonder when ‘crazy-busy’ became part of our vocabulary; I suspect it wasn’t too long ago. The more time-saving devices we introduce to our daily lives, the less time we have, it seems.

“Too busy to read this book? Then you really need to.” That’s cute, isn’t it? You know what they’re going to suggest next: No time to read? Get the 3 hour audio book and listen to it while racing to get there – work, school, soccer, doctor’s appointment, whatever it is you’re racing to get to next.

Add church to that. Programs, committees, task groups, luncheons, surveys, and meeting after meeting.

Sorry, I can’t meet with you, I’m already booked on Tuesday.
No, next week I’m in Indianapolis.
Yes, Friday would work, but not before 7.
Is that am or pm?

No, I’m not kidding. We work as if the next sunrise depended on us. There’s so much to do, it seems, and so little time to do it; earn a living; get the kids ready for school and before you know it through college; take care of family members; nurture friendships; clean the house; cut the grass; paint the shutters; get some exercise – and don’t forget to become a better parent, a smarter investor, a more attentive lover, and last but not least a well-rounded human being.

We’re not just racing to get there; we’re racing to get there without knowing where “there” is anymore. We raise our finger and say “I” and what follows is usually some version of “just don’t have enough time” or “am constantly trying to catch up” or “don’t know where the years went.”

We live forgetful lives where “I” is no longer followed by “am the Lord your God who brought you out” or “am the One who created and delights in you” or “am the Lord your Redeemer.”

Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. Valuable advice, somebody quips at USA Today. Too busy to remember? Then you really need to.

Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work.

The very first story in our scriptures climaxes on the seventh day: life is complete not when the work is done on day six but when it is enjoyed on the seventh day. God rests and takes pleasure in life as it unfolds – no need to tweak this or improve that, no need to go back to Research & Development and create an even better world, Creation 2.0. - just rest and pleasure.

Of the big ten, the commandment to remember the sabbath is the longest; not because it requires lengthy explanations or sub-clauses with additional thou-shalt-not’s – it is the longest because it has to have a taste of wondrous fullness: on that day, you shall not work, you, your son or your daughter, the men and women who work for you, your livestock, or the immigrant in your towns – do your work in six days, and on the seventh day join God in taking pleasure in life as it simply and wondrously unfolds, all of you.

Working and resting, laboring and letting life be, in the rhythm of life that has been since the beginning of time, human beings are in the image of God. Crazy-busy is always racing to get there without even knowing where “there” is anymore; living with a sabbath rhythm is getting a taste of “being there,” a taste of wondrous fullness every week.

Kentucky farmer and writer, Wendell Berry, wrote a book of Sabbath poems; one of them, No. X from 1979, speaks beautifully of how the sabbath shapes our daily work.

Whatever is foreseen in joy
Must be lived out from day to day.
Vision held open in the dark
By our ten thousand days of work.
Harvest will fill the barn; for that
The hand must ache, the face must sweat.

And yet no leaf or grain is filled
By work of ours; the field is tilled
And left to grace. That we may reap,
Great work is done while we’re asleep.

When we work well, a Sabbath mood
Rests on our day, and finds it good.

In the wilderness of Sinai, God made a covenant with Israel, and remembering the sabbath is at the heart of this covenant. We know God’s name most fully through Jesus Christ, and through him we stand in spiritual and historical kinship with the Jewish people.

As Christians, we affirm the grateful relationship to the Creator that Jews celebrate each Sabbath, and we share the joyful liberation from oppressive labor first experienced by the slaves who left Egypt. But we add to these celebrations our weekly festival for the source of our greatest joy: Christ’s victory over sin and his resurrection from the dead. Every Sunday is a little Easter, that first day that is also the eigth day of creation, new beginning and fulfillment.

We need Sabbath time not just to stay sane – and we certainly need it for that – but to become fully human, to be transformed and grow into the image of Christ.

Dorothy Bass writes, “to act as if the world cannot get along without our work for one day in seven is a startling display of pride that denies the sufficiency of our generous Maker.”

For most of us, Sunday will continue to be our sabbath day when we gather in worship with fellow-Christians. We don’t do it because we can’t think of anything better to do on our day off; keeping sabbath is not about taking a day off. Keeping sabbath is about being recalled to the memory that is the source of our freedom and our humanity: not “I” but the One who says “I am the Lord your God who brought you out; I am your God who knit you together in your mother’s womb and delights in you; I am the Lord your redeemer.”

Without that memory we’re back in the crazy-busy brickyards of Egypt.

“After worship, what many of us need most,” writes Dorothy Bass, “is time with loved ones—not useful time, for planning next week’s schedules, but time ‘wasted’ on the pleasure of being together,” perhaps watching the men’s finals in basketball between Purdue and the Buckeyes.

Next Sunday, after worship, we’ll be wasting some time on the pleasure of being together by having a Wii bowling tournament in the fellowship hall. God’s people at play, young and old together. Worship and rest and play.

One day a week—not much, in a sense, but a good beginning.

One day to resist the tyranny of too much or too little.

One day to remember who we really are and what is really important.

One day that, week after week, anchors our life in the promises and purposes of God.

One day – not just for our sanity but for our very humanity.

Audio of this post is available.

Heart of the Desert

I'm reading In the Heart of the Desert by John Chryssavgis. It's an introduction to the world of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, a world that is gone, historically speaking; I am moved by their complete embrace of imperfection and their deep compassion. Abba Arsenius, Abba Poemen, Amma Syncletica, Abba Moses the Robber, Abba Macarius, and others whose sayings have been passed down through the centuries were men and women seeking to be fully alive by doing the work of the soul unflinchingly. This deep commitment to honesty makes them great teachers. Their world is the world of human beings who know that "forgetfulness of who we are is the ultimate tragedy (p. 47)." I'm enjoying this book immensely.

Longlife vs. good life?

This is a longlife bulb. There were six of them in the recessed light fixtures in my office. Each of these turns 200 watts of electrical power into light and heat every hour. So for six of them, that's 1.2 kwh. On an average day these lights were on for five hours - that adds up to 6lbs of coal. Somebody please tell me my math is wrong!

Today I got the tall ladder from the basement and replaced all six with six CFLs. Same lumen output, i.e. the room is just as bright as before. Each of these bulbs turns 18 watts of electrical power into light and a whole lot less heat. Same formula: 6x18x5=540 - that's the equivalent of .54lbs of coal.
That's a nice pile of coal that won't get burned this year.

Carbon or Coal Sludge?

I have watched Jeff Barrie's Kilowatt Ours twice, and the one bit of information that sticks in my memory is a simple equation:

1kwh of electricity=1lb of coal

Running a 500 watt space heater for a couple of hours is not just "like" burning a pound of coal. It actually does burn it - releasing CO2 and other chemicals, and leaving behind wounds in the landscape. Carbon footprint sounds way too friendly, though, when the results also include spills of coal ash sludge like the most recent one in Kingston, TN.

Part of my spiritual disciplines for Lent is teaching myself to really see what is coming through the outlet. Today three simple power meters arrived in the mail. I plugged in my little office fridge, and I'll soon see how much coal it takes every day to have cold sodas easily available. I want to be able to see through the smoke of convenience and habit.

The Hard Teaching

Audio of this post is available.

About half-way through the gospel, Jesus asks the big question. For eight chapters, the good news of God has been proclaimed, demons have been driven out, many sick have been healed, lepers touched and declared clean, sins forgiven, authorities baffled, stories told, the wind rebuked, a girl restored to life, and thousands fed.

We have come this far with him. Following him we have watched and listened, wondered, questioned – and now he turns around and asks the twelve trying to keep up with him, “Who do people say that I am?”

They tell him what they have heard along the way, “Some say, the Baptist, others, Elijah or one of the prophets.” Easy answers for them, there’s plenty of speculation coming through the grapevine.

Then Jesus asks the big question, “Who do you say that I am?”
And Peter answers, “You are the Messiah.”

Half-way through the gospel, the disciples think they know who this man is they are following. But then a curious sequence of conversations begins. Three times Jesus speaks of his impending suffering and death, and three times the disciples completely miss the point.


He began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.

They didn’t want to hear about suffering. Having called Jesus God’s Messiah – and Jesus didn’t object – Peter and the others had begun to map out the rest of the journey to Jerusalem, and the death of a suffering messiah apparently didn’t fit in the picture. Wasn’t the Messiah supposed to save God’s people from suffering? That thought may well have been the moment when Peter quit following, came up beside Jesus, and gave voice to Satan.

It is no subtle irony that the one who just confessed Jesus to be God’s Messiah now opposed the coming of God’s reign in the person of Jesus. It doesn’t matter if his motivation was concern for his friend’s well-being or if he thought there was a better, simpler way from the hills of Galilee to the throne in Jerusalem. Like all of us, Peter wanted a messiah who would fulfill his hopes and expectations. He thought he knew who Jesus was and wanted to make sure the Messiah stayed on the path to triumphant fulfillment.

Half-way through the gospel, we begin to learn that to call Jesus God’s Messiah means to let go of our wonderfully detailed job descriptions for him. When we call Jesus God’s Messiah and follow him, we don’t press him into the mold of our hopes for a good life; instead we let him shape our expectations.

The second conversation took place a little further down the road to Jerusalem, when Jesus again taught the disciples, saying to them, “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again (Mark 9:31).” They didn’t understand what he was saying; instead they argued with one another who was the greatest.

Again a little further down the road, Jesus took aside the twelve and again told them what was to happen to him in Jerusalem; and two of them, James and John, who had been with him from the first days on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, said to him, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory (Mark 10:33-37).”

Three times Jesus talks about being rejected, condemned, and killed, but the disciples only dream about triumph, greatness, and seats of honor.

What is so hard for us to hear and understand is that to say to Jesus, ‘You are the Christ’ is to let Jesus define what ‘Christ’ means. Jesus is not the fulfillment of our kingdom dreams; he himself is the kingdom in whom our dreams are renewed. He is not the fulfillment of our visions of salvation; he himself is God’s salvation who transforms our vision. He is not the fulfillment of our desire for this and that and the other; he is the body given to God’s desire for us, he is the one who goes ahead of us that we might follow him.

Half-way through the gospel, we come to a fork in the road and hear the hard teaching. We are utterly free to say yes or no.

If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who will lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.

You know this had to be the moment when the numbers of followers started to decline drastically. Self-denial has never been terribly attractive, and the only loss most of us want to hear about has to do with weight. Jesus tells us to let go not only of our ideas what a proper messiah is supposed to be and do, but also of our notions of ourselves. He calls us to let go of what we think we know and need and what we fear – and to find life with him.

C.S. Lewis wrote, in the last paragraph of his book Mere Christianity, “The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real, new self (…) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for [Christ]. (…) Give up your self, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead.”

The call to self-denial is not a call to pious exercises of denying oneself the pleasures of life. The call to discipleship is the call to let go completely of our concern with ourselves and our obsessive compulsion to secure our own life, prominence, likability, and even afterlife. The call to discipleship is the call to turn our eyes and attention away from ourselves and toward the One who is going ahead of us.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in his beautiful reflection on the life of discipleship,

“Self-denial means knowing only Christ, no longer knowing oneself. It means no longer seeing oneself, only him who is going ahead (…). Self-denial says only: he is going ahead; hold fast to him (p. 86).”

But self-denial has nothing to do with blending into the background so as to become invisible. Bonhoeffer knew very well that as a disciple of Jesus Christ he had to oppose the Nazi government and resist its murderous campaign against the Jews of Germany and Europe. He knew that love of God and neighbor meant speaking the truth without fear and even conspiring to murder the tyrant – but he didn’t know that from his own experience yet when he wrote,

“The cross is neither misfortune nor harsh fate. Instead, it is that suffering which comes from our allegiance to Jesus Christ (p. 86).”

When Jesus calls you to deny yourself, take up your cross and follow him, he may be talking about the possibility of your losing your life as a martyr. But the cross is never just the exceptional end to an otherwise quiet life of discipleship. The cross is the reality at the heart of discipleship; it marks the place where your old life comes to an end and your new life begins.

Again Bonhoeffer,
“The first Christ-suffering that everyone has to experience is the call which summons us away from our attachments to this world. It is the death of the old self in the encounter with Jesus Christ. (…) The cross is not the terrible end of a pious, happy life. Instead, it stands at the beginning of community with Jesus. Whenever Christ calls us, his call leads us to death (p. 87). (…) Jesus’ every command calls us to die with all our wishes and desires (p. 88).”

Half-way between Galilee and Jerusalem, we are faced with the hard teaching that Jesus is not our kind of Messiah and that the life we work so hard to protect and secure is the life we will lose. But in this very place we also begin to see, as in a sketch, the way of the cross as the way to life in fullness. Following Jesus, we are set free from anxious self-absorption, free to acknowledge and rejoice in the covenant of love God has established with us and between us.

A few years ago I heard a song about a disciple’s new identity, a song created by slaves, men and women from Africa, robbed of their freedom, their homes, their land, their families, their language – and eventually their names. No longer free, they were given new names by their masters who lived with the idolatrous illusion that they were their owners. But then these men and women, far away from home, far away from hope, encountered Jesus and they began to talk about the life their masters could not touch – and in freedom they made that life their own, refusing to surrender to the religion of their masters. This is their song:

I tol’ Jesus it would be all right
If he changed my name
Jesus tol’ me I would have to live humble
If he changed my name
But I tol’ Jesus it would be all right
If he changed my name
Jesus tol’ me that the world would be ‘gainst me
If he changed my name
But I tol’ Jesus it would be all right
If he changed my name

Certainly not a song of rebellion, but a revolutionary song nevertheless. The dignity of their new identity, their new name, gave these men and women the courage to hope. They knew that Jesus was no stranger to the depth of their suffering and that God had heard their cries. They were no longer prisoners of their broken past, but disciples of Jesus, God’s people.

They entered the new life on a vastly different path than most of us – but we do indeed all sing this song,

I tol’ Jesus it would be all right,
if he changed my name.
It is no longer I who live,
but Christ who lives in me.
Jesus told me that the world would be ‘gainst me
if he changed my name.
But I tol’ Jesus it would be all right
if he changed my name.
It is no longer I who live,
but Christ who lives in me.

Good News from the Wilderness

Audio of this post is available.

He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.

Alone in the wilderness – sounds like a PBS show, doesn’t it? Well, it is one; it’s the story of Dick Proenekke who retired at age fifty, built a cabin on the shores of Twin Lakes in Alaska, and lived there for over thirty years. He kept a journal, both in written form and with a small film camera, a chronicle of a life with only wild beasts for company and the occasional bush pilot dropping in to bring supplies and the mail.

Jesus didn’t go into the wilderness at the end of his career or seeking a break from it on a sabbatical of quiet solitude. His career, if you want to call it that, hadn’t even begun yet. He had just come down from Nazareth in Galilee and had been baptized by John in the Jordan.

Jesus didn’t choose to go away for a while; the Spirit immediately drove him out – the word has connotations of force and compulsion. The Spirit, having descended like a dove on Jesus at his baptism, quickly revealed another, less gentle side; if you want to stay in the metaphorical realm of birds, imagine some talon-armed raptor with powerful wings.

The way Mark tells the story, the sequence of scenes is cut faster than a car chase in an action movie. One moment there’s a heavenly voice calling Jesus Son and Beloved, and before he can draw another breath, the Spirit drives him out, still wet, into the silence of the desert. Dripping water in one scene, rocks and sand and dry brush in the next.

Forty days. Mark narrates at a break-neck speed, but this scene of very few words nevertheless lingers.

Mark doesn’t tell us any details like Luke and Matthew do, where Satan talks sweetly and quotes Scripture, and the devil’s agenda is obvious, and Jesus emerges victorious like a hero who has passed the wilderness exam.

Mark doesn’t give us any details, and we fill in the blanks. We know that Satan is nothing and nobody – nothing but the voice that speaks solely to drown out the voice and word of God.

Forty days of the devil whispering, arguing, shouting, and questioning in a million ways – all to make this human being forget or doubt the heavenly voice that spoke above the waters, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

Forty days with no company but the wild beasts, and Mark leaves it to our imagination to determine if they were friendly like wolf and bear in the prophet’s vision of creation at peace, where the wolf lives with the lamb, or if they were hyenas laughing in expectation of a meal, lions prowling around the solitary man in ever closer circles (Isaiah 11:6ff; 65:25).

Forty days in the wilderness, and the angels waited on him. This is where Elijah comes to mind. Elijah who went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a broom tree. And there he asked that he might die: “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.” Then he lay down under the broom tree and fell asleep (1 Kings 19:4-5).

Elijah went into the wilderness because the evil queen Jezebel was furious and wanted him dead, and he was afraid and fled for his life. He was tired of fighting, tired of being the lone voice of resistance in a culture that preferred idols over the living God, tired of pushing and pulling without a moment’s rest.

“It is enough,” he said, exhausted in body and soul, and he fell asleep. He slept until an angel touched him and said, “Get up and eat.” There was a cake baked on hot stones and a jar of water. He ate and drank and went back to sleep, and the angel of the Lord came a second time and waited on him, saying, “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.” And Elijah got up, he ate and drank, and in the strength of that food he went to the mountain of God, a journey of forty days. His body and soul were exhausted, but he found the strength to continue because the angels waited on him; he found the strength to live and to answer God’s call once again.

None of these details are spelled out in Mark’s brief description, but they are all there, layer upon layer, showing the story of Jesus to be the story of God’s people. The wilderness may be a place of solitude, but it is at the same time the place where all have been.

Remember Hagar, Sarah’s servant? She was driven into exile by her jealous mistress; her child, Abraham’s son, Ishmael, was about to die of thirst, when an angel of God showed her a spring in the desert. Hagar is there.

And Jacob, who received God’s promise in a dream in the wilderness with the angels of the Lord ascending and descending between earth and heaven.

Moses and Miriam and Aaron and the other Hebrew slaves who crossed the wilderness on the long journey from Egypt to the promised land.

Elijah, Hosea and Isaiah – the prophets who knew the beauty and the terror of the wilderness and who taught us to see it as the vast place between the life that was and the life that shall be.
The wilderness has written in its sand and rocks the stories and songs of all who have been there. Jesus lingers for forty days to take it all in, and we linger just long enough to draw some of the lines that connect his journey with the journey of God’s people.

In the wilderness Jesus faces all that we have ever faced or will ever face in our loneliest, hungriest, and most exhausted moments; days when we cannot hear the heavenly voice, and other voices fight for our attention; times when the promises of God sound like idle tales and all we seem to remember are the fleshpots of Egypt. The wilderness is that forty-day-place, sometimes that forty-year- or-forty-generations-place where life is at stake and nothing and no one can save us but the One whose Spirit hovers over the face of the waters and who speaks words of creation, delight, and redemption.

Mark paints this wilderness scene with just five strokes and two short sentences. And there’s no neat resolution about how Jesus defeated Satan and got him to stop chattering, whispering, or asking questions. But in the very next sentence Jesus shows up in Galilee; he comes 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.” He emerges from the forty-day-place with the good news that God’s promises are trustworthy and that God’s reign has come near. Jesus’ journey from baptism, through the wilderness, and to the proclamation of God’s reign recapitulates the journey of God’s people in a new exodus: from slavery, through the wilderness, to freedom in the promised land; from exile, through the wilderness, to the new Jerusalem; from sin and alienation, through the wilderness, to creation at peace.

The reason that Mark doesn’t end the wilderness scene with a neat conclusion, I suspect, is that Jesus still has to walk through the lonesome wilderness of the cross and enter the night of God-forsakenness with nothing to hold onto but the promises of God.

Lent is an opportunity for us to enter the forty-day-place by leaving the familiar pattern of our days behind for a while. We strip away perhaps only a couple of routines in hope that a little disorientation will help us re-orient our lives on the path of Christ.

Some of us seek to enter the silence of prayer more frequently, so that it doesn’t frighten us when silence comes to us un-announced.

Others eat less and read scripture more regularly, so as to give our lives a different rhythm, one more in sync with God’s desire.

Again others write and answer our email only once a day, and instead spend a little time every day journaling about the voices of temptation that fill our heads and hearts with noise.

Lent is an invitation to us to sharpen our senses so we can taste the difference between the bread of Pharao and the bread of heaven; see the difference between a holy vision and an unholy illusion; and hear the difference between the whisperings of the devil and the still, small voice of God who calls us to a future not bound by the past.

Silence, of course, is not easy to find, and when you find it, it’s not necessarily easy to stand. The husband of a friend went on a camping trip in the badlands of South Dakota near the Rosebud Indian reservation. The first night he could not sleep, he said, for the beating of native drums, the sound traveling far in the night air. The second night he discovered that the drum was inside his own chest.

The sound of your heartbeat is nothing, though, compared to the noise of your own thoughts, the twitter, jabber and chatter inside your head that sounds like a jungle come to life as soon as you turn off all your electronic devices and decide to spend a little time with nobody but God and yourself.

Lent is the church’s invitation to all of us to sit with the noise and let it be until it dies down and to do nothing but listen for the voice of God; to walk around Radnor lake and do nothing but listen for the voice of God; to follow Jesus on the way to Jerusalem and do nothing but listen for the voice of God, steady as a drum, the heartbeat of the universe, “You are my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”