First Sunday in Lent-Rev Melanie Lemburg
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
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