Genesis 9.8-17, 1 Peter 3.18-22, Mark 1.9-15
First Sunday of Lent,18 February 2018
Queen Camel, Weston Bampfylde
“He was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.”
We’re currently spending many of my Fridays off revisiting some of our favourite places in the South West. So a couple of weeks ago we were on Dartmoor, where the steep drop downhill into Widecombe-on-the-Moor, the most beautiful Devon village scene, soon gives way to the stark, rugged, awesome rocks of Haytor and the flat, wind-blown heights of the moor.
This is one of my most-loved wild places; one of the wildest outdoor places I’ve ever known. It brings me closer to nature, walking among the wild ponies in driving rain; it helps put life in perspective, standing above the grim granite blocks of Dartmoor Jail with the distant lights of Plymouth and the sea beyond.
Think, for a moment… of a favourite ‘wild place’ of yours … and the reasons why it’s special to you.
In our over-cultivated lives, we need some wilderness experience to enlarge our sense of ourselves and our place in creation. Back in my youth I and a small group of friends climbed Tryfan, the ruggedest, craggiest Snowdonian peak, in the dark - starting after midnight with just a couple of head torches to light our way up the rocks, scrambling to the top in time for daybreak. It was scary, it was invigorating, it was life-affirming.
Would it surprise you to hear me say that Lent is a season which invites us to go to our ‘wild place’; to go wild on God’s earth?
Two main themes of Lent are death and repentance. But they are not only about where we will spend eternity. They are equally about how we will spend our lives here and now. We are dust, Ash Wednesday reminds us. We are of the earth; and we live on the earth; with all God’s creatures on his wild earth. So if we give ourselves to prayer and study, this Lent, if we turn our hearts to heaven, let us not be surprised to find God inviting us to become earthed again. [1] By putting to death those things which contain us, hold us in, constrain us, by turning again to a God who will release and enliven us, invigorate our lives in the here-and-now.
God invites us to earth ourselves by going wild with Jesus - the pioneering wild man. Who first waded out into the middle of the Jordan river to be baptised by John, who was then immediately driven by the Spirit out into the wilderness, and “was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan; … was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.”
No party, no knees-up, no family reunion, for Jesus following his baptism. Instead the humbling, invigorating, experience of taking his place alongside the rest of God’s creatures, out in the wild world, and in that challenging situation to ‘wrestle and fight and pray’ [2] and in doing so, to enlarge his sense of himself and his place in God’s creation.
This willingness to walk on the wild side marked the whole of Jesus’ life and ministry. This refugee child, who with his parents escaping a genocidal king spent his early years wandering in exile; this precocious pre-teen who gave the slip to his parents on their way back from Jerusalem and spent three wild days in the temple courts, sitting among the teachers, listening to them, asking them questions, expanding his understanding of himself and his place in God’s creation; Jesus - whose whole adult ministry could be summarised as a wild mission to ‘comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable’. [3]
Lent invites us to renew our walk with Jesus - our walk on the wild side.
A term which has come into our language recently is Rewilding. It comes from the conservation movement and describes the large-scale restoration of ecosystems so that nature can take care of itself. Rewilding occurs where artificial processes are replaced with natural processes and missing species are returned to the land, allowing them to shape the landscape and its habitats. The Rewilding Britain website says that the aim of rewilding is ‘to let nature fully recover while providing communities with new opportunities. It brings an abundance of life back to the land – more animal and bird life, more trees and plant life, more opportunities for human life to flourish.’ [4]
Rewilding is not without controversy, particularly in farming communities, but the concept, I’d say, is a Lenten one. We might be open to the suggestion that going through Lent allowing God to reshape and reform us into the people he truly intends us to be: is us rewilding ourselves.
Before Jesus’ wilderness experience, the dove came from heaven and rested on him - the sign of God’s Spirit present with him in all that was to follow.
And that event recalled the other place in scripture where a dove appears - the dove which Noah sent out of the ark - that wild vessel which Noah’s family shared with the sounds and motion and stink of all God’s other creatures - the dove which Noah sent out at the end of their wilderness experience floating on the floodwaters of a condemned earth. When the dove returned with an olive branch Noah rightly received it as a sign of God bringing an end to his judgement on the earth, the sign of a new beginning. [5]
This is one of scripture’s seminal moments, for it describes a moment when God repents - when God turns away from the way of vengeance into the way of grace. In that moment God makes a covenant with Noah and all who follow him, and with every living creature, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth: ‘never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth,’ God promises. Of all the creation stories in scripture (check them out, there are a few), this is the one which says, right here in the muddy, watery wilderness in which you’ve landed, God’s Spirit is with you, eternally; the Spirit of love and grace, and everlasting forgiveness for all.
Thus the wilderness can be a place of grace. This is what we find when we step out of our comfort zone to take a deliberate walk on the wild side, with God.
On the BBC documentary The Vicar’s Life this week, Herefordshire vicar Ruth Hulse discovered that a local training centre for young people who have struggled in mainstream education, was threatened with closure due to funding problems, and Ruth resolved to increase the support it received from the church. And so it came to pass that an elderly member of Ruth’s congregation, recently widowed Rita, stepped out of her comfort zone to take a walk on the wild side, into a loud and lively youth centre, becoming a mentor of a young apprentice Keegan; a gifted woodworker who needed Rita's help to learn to read and write. It has become a rich relationship deeply rewarding to both of them. [6]
This Lent we’re being invited to follow God into some of those ‘wild places’ which others inhabit in our society, in our series of Lent meetings (staring this Wednesday) wherein we will be drawn into the world of those who have a disability, of those who have a mental illness, of the poor in our land and those marginalised for their gender or sexuality or race. These are lives which may be unfamiliar to us, in listening to the stories of those who live them we open ourselves up to ‘wrestling and fighting and praying’ about what we believe and how we respond. They should be very rich, illuminating conversations, and all the more so because we will have them in the knowledge that God’s Spirit is with us as we walk together through them. [7]
You know that when we go into wild places angels attend us - just as they attended Jesus in the wilderness. On another youthful mountain climb I and a friend encountered a ‘whiteout’ on the top of Carnedd Llewellyn, another high Snowdonian peak. Wherever we looked, at our feet below, at the sky above, into the driving snow which had just hit us, all we could see was white. Into that dangerous situation - for at any moment we might have stepped off the mountain’s edge - came a figure, a man who turned out, when he stopped to talk to us, was a Roman Catholic priest from Liverpool. And who told us panicked youths what to do to get down safely. Then disappeared in the opposite direction.
A century ago an influential Christian campaigner for women’s suffrage, for pacifism and for women’s ordination, Maude Royden, saw the Christian faith and journey to peace and justice as ‘the great adventure’ and derided the Church of England’s reluctance to walk on the wild side of reform. In one speech Royden reminded her listeners of Jesus’ question, ‘Can you drink of the cup that I drink of or be baptised with the baptism that I am baptised with?’ [8], and she went on to ask, rhetorically,
“Would it be safe? No, of course it would not be safe… we are afraid of such risks, afraid of such a terrible victory (as Christ’s)… we treat the Church as one long-accustomed to ill-health. Do not open the window! Do not bang the door! You cannot take risks with the invalid. Step lightly, speak softly, at any moment the poor thing might die!” [9]
In Romans 8 Paul reminds us that ‘the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God’. [10] Like Noah, with Jesus, we have a role to play in redeeming creation, and creation is waiting for us to do something about it.
This is our Lenten call to join Jesus out there, to join him on his walk on the wild side.
Notes
[1] Marcus Borg, Ash Wednesday: Death and Repentance, Pantheos Blog, 1 March 2014. This, slightly revised, was my Ash Wednesday talk in 2018.
[2] The trigger for this expression is Jacob wrestling with an angel, Genesis 32.22-32. It is a line in Charles Wesley’s hymn Soldiers of Christ Arise, and it was brought to my mind on reading, this week, Doug Gay, God Be in My Mouth: 40 Ways to Grow as a Preacher, p.76: “To read like Jacob is to ‘wrestle and fight and pray’, to believe that the one we wrestle with is able to bless us and to hold on as long and tenaciously as we can, in the hope that things will end well.”
[3] Finley Peter Dunne, 1902, 'The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable’ - a phrase which has been often used since by writers and preachers, about Jesus.
[4] Rewilding Britain: Rewilding.
[5] Genesis, Chapters 8 and 9.
[6] BBC, A Vicar’s Life. Series 1: Episode 6.
[7] Our 2018 series of Lent meetings, All are Welcome, All are One, is based on the Inclusive Church: Small Group Study Resources.
[8] Mark 10.38.
[9] Quoted in Jo Inkpin, The great adventure – Maude Royden. Making a Track blog, April 19, 2014.
[10] Romans 8.19.
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