"Preparing for our Hardest, Holiest Days"

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.”

We have arrived at the season of Lent. There are lots of fun, shiny, beautiful moments in the church calendar. The beauty and anticipation of Advent, magic of Christmas Eve, the celebration at Pentecost, and of course, the joy of Easter morning. But don’t get those days during Lent and we don’t get them without Lent either. Instead, during this season of the church year, we turn the metaphorical lights down and we walk through the painful, lonely season towards our hardest and holiest days of Christ’s betrayal, crucifixion, and death. We are walking toward the cross and the tomb. Darker days are still ahead and there is no way to the other side except by going through them. 

Perhaps you feel like Peter when he first heard Jesus say that he would be betrayed and crucified. It was too terrible and awful to imagine that he became angry with Jesus and rebuked him for even saying it. Maybe you’re sitting here today just wishing that we could avoid all heartache and pain. Why is any of this necessary? Can’t we just focus on the good things in church? Can’t we skip to Easter morning? 

Unfortunately, the answer is a resounding no– we cannot skip to the good part. We can’t skip past the suffering and pain and loneliness in our lives or in Jesus’s. There is no Easter without Good Friday. There is no Good Friday without Jesus’ ministry and the gospels are surprisingly clear that there is no ministry of Jesus without first going into the wilderness. 

As per usual, Mark’s account of things is short and to the point.  What takes Matthew and Luke 11 or more verses to describe, takes Mark only 2. “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.” In the wilderness, Jesus faces some of the worst human experiences—loneliness, physical suffering, temptation—yet he is nurtured by angels. The wilderness is lonely but he is not truly alone. 

The wilderness is a common setting in the Bible for big moments for God’s people. My favorite children’s curriculum, ‘Godly Play’, even has a “desert box” that is used for telling stories since so many stories are set there. Hagar escapes the wrath of Sarah by running to the wilderness, Jacob wrestles with God, the Israelites wander for 40 years, Elijah encounters the divine still, small voice. I could go on and on.

In story after story, the wilderness is a place of testing, revelation, and healing. In the wilderness you learn who God is—sometimes through a little wrestling, sometimes with fire, sometimes in a whisper, and sometimes after 40 years of waiting.

We, too, know the wilderness, although we might have different names for it. We call it the diagnosis, the divorce, the death, the troubles, the trenches. It’s best not to compare our wilderness to another’s for we will always find someone whose wilderness seems worse than our own. The point is not to play the suffering Olympics to see who has suffered the most but to acknowledge that we have all experienced a season where life has forced us out into the scorching, unrelenting wilderness. Perhaps you are in it right now.

Whatever forces us into the wilderness, it does not feel good to be there. The wilderness reminds us just how fleeting and fragile life is. In the call to worship this morning, Candice read the word “finitude” which might be unfamiliar to you, but it’s one of my favorites. In her book, Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day!, Kate Bowler says that “finitude” refers to our limited nature as humans. There are seasons in life when we believe that life has an infinite horizon, the world is our oyster, and we can choose from the seemingly unending good available to us. Then, there are seasons when life comes undone or when tragedy strikes, and we become aware that we are locked inside our resources, health, body, relationships, or zip code. The life we actually have to live is finite. In this season, we come to the realization that, unlike God, we are bound by time and space. We are finite. Our lives will come to an end and not one of us knows the day or the hour. We are made of dust and someday, we will be dust again. 

It is terrifying to be finite. There’s never enough time with the people we love. I’ve done a lot of funerals in my short time as a pastor and I know that there is no age that someone can live to where their loved ones automatically stop being sad when they die. Life is so finite and that is why it is so precious. If it were infinite, we could take it for granted or throw it away. It’s like oxygen– most of us don’t think much about the air we breathe but if you’ve been playing in the waves at the beach and got swept under for just a moment too long, that first breath after you make it back to the surface is the most precious thing in the world. The fear and the danger make you realize just how precious it is. Life is fragile and finite so we must find a way to savor and celebrate.

The wilderness is a place of intensity and deprivation, where some comforts are stripped away and yet other truths make themselves known, too. We learn, often the hard way, just how limited and fragile we are. And, so too, we discover that our lives are sacred and holy and special. 

This is why I like Lent. It takes seriously the pain and beauty of our lives. If we weren’t able to talk about heartache and brokenness and fragility in church, then what would we even be doing here? A faith that ignores pain and suffering is one that is disconnected from the lives we really have. God knows this and I think it is why the Spirit forces Jesus into the wilderness. In order for the incarnation to have meaning, Jesus must experience all that we experience including pain, suffering, loneliness, temptation, and isolation. A savior whose life was perfect and easy is not one that I can relate to. But a savior who experienced all the pain that the wilderness has to offer and comes out proclaiming the Good News of God? Now that’s someone I’d like to talk to. 

Lent is not a season for happy, shiny people to pretend like everything is fine and dandy all the time. It’s a time for us to prepare, as Kate Bowler says, for Christ’s “hardest and holiest days.” Perhaps his time in the wilderness is how Christ knew he could face the suffering on the cross. He had gone through suffering before and God had not left him alone– the angels attended to him, even in his suffering and trials. The wilderness was not an accident or inconvenience but a necessary part of his story. Perhaps you, too, know that your hardest and holiest days are ahead of you. They certainly are for my family! And so I am spending this Lenten season trying to lean into the discomfort. Trying to build up my tolerance for silence and my ability to sit with pain– my own and others. Trying to see how God might use my time in the wilderness for good.

One last thing, before I go because it’s so important that it’s worth taking the time for a final tangent. When talking about “wilderness” or suffering, we have to be so careful when we theologize our stories and even moreso when theologizing other people’s stories. By that, I mean, making theological meaning out of the events we witness. We naturally crave meaning and we want to make sense of things, especially of pain and suffering. It is natural to want to see how the awful, terrible things that happen to others “fit in” to God’s plans but it can easily turn into cruel lies like, “Everything happens for a reason” that just leave people feeling more alone and hurt. 

It makes me think of another character who spent time in the desert– Joseph. The first Head Pastor I worked for, Doug Kelly, is a great preacher but I’ll be honest– I only remember one thing that he preached on. It was about Joseph. After everything Joseph had been through– being sold into slavery by his family, being falsely accused and thrown into jail, and thinking he’d never see his family again, at the end of his story Joseph said to his brothers– “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good.” Here is what I remember Doug saying— “The only person that can say that is Joseph. No one else gets to claim that the horrors perpetrated against him were for good. Only Joseph.” It’s stuck with me all these years later.

As you walk through Lent and through the wilderness, you may come to see how God used it for good. If so, that will be your testimony alone to share. No one else gets to say it to you. You don’t get to say it to anyone else, even if it feels so obvious. Jesus doesn’t how he viewed his time in the wilderness. All we know is that comes out saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” Somehow, after surviving pain and suffering and temptation, Jesus was able to come out the other side proclaiming the good news of the gospel. May all of our lives bear such a testimony.

In this Lenten season, may we recognize together that we will have beautiful days and terrible ones. Sometimes, they might be hard to distinguish from one another and so on those days, we will say, “Have a beautiful, terrible day.”