Angels, Wild Beasts, and Questions

Mark 1:9-15; Psalm 25:1-10

Lent 1

Psalm 25:1-10

¹ To you, O Lord , I lift up my soul.

² O my God, in you I trust; do not let me be put to shame; do not let my enemies exult over me.

³ Do not let those who wait for you be put to shame; let them be ashamed who are wantonly treacherous.

{4} Make me to know your ways, O Lord ; teach me your paths. {5} Lead me in your truth, and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; for you I wait all day long. {6} Be mindful of your mercy, O Lord , and of your steadfast love, for they have been from of old. {7} Do not remember the sins of my youth or my transgressions; according to your steadfast love remember me, for your goodness’ sake, O Lord ! {8} Good and upright is the Lord ; therefore he instructs sinners in the way. {9} He leads the humble in what is right, and teaches the humble his way. {10} All the paths of the Lord are steadfast love and faithfulness, for those who keep his covenant and his decrees.

Mark 1:9-15

{9} In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. {10} And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. {11} And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

{12} And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. {13} He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him. {14} Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, {15} and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

The Sermon

To you, O Lord , I lift up my soul.

“Percy Harrison Fawcett was the quintessential dashing late-Victorian explorer... Tall, steely and virtually indestructible, he spent much of his life mapping the Amazon basin. In 1925 he set out to find a legendary city he called Z, a glittering oasis of civilization supposedly sequestered deep in the jungle. Whereupon the jungle, having nibbled at him for decades, ate him alive.” I am quoting a review of a new book out about Percy Fawcett. ( Lev Grossman , “Jungle Fever.” Time, Thursday, Feb. 19, 2009).

“Before he left, Fawcett remarked, ‘If with all my experience we can’t make it, there’s not much hope for others.’ About that much he was right. Dozens of search parties followed him in—Peter Fleming, brother of the writer Ian, was among them—and as many as 100 people died in the hunt.

“In the years that followed his disappearance, looking for Fawcett practically became a fad. One would-be rescuer, an English movie actor named Albert de Winton, was found by some Indians years later ‘floating, naked and half-mad, in a canoe.’ …In 1979, Fawcett’s signet ring came to light in a shop in Brazil. The man himself never did.”

That seems like the kind of story Mark can relate to. In fact, Fawcett seems like the kind of person Mark could relate to.

Mark’s gospel is the shortest of the four gospels, and it’s also the one with the least sophisticated grammar. And beyond the grammar issue, it’s also the gospel that spends the least amount of time interpreting itself. It just tells short bursts of exciting stories, and more often than not, leaves you wondering: what just happened here?

As a matter of fact, if I didn’t know that Mark’s was most likely the earliest of the four gospels written—probably somewhere around the year 70 A.D.—I would have thought he worked at the Kansas City Star along with Ernest Hemingway, who had his first job working there as a beat reporter in 1917.

Hemingway’s first job was to cover whatever exciting happened at the hospital or the train station or the police station, so what he wrote was typically a short burst of action, delivered just the way the style manual of the Kansas City Star instructed its reporters, which was: be brief and direct—just say what happened. It said, “Use short sentences.”

That’s where Hemingway picked up the style that made him one of the most iconic novelists of the 20th century (Information from various sources; see ernest.hemingway.com/reporter.htm ).

But it sounds just like Mark: jump in there, tell your story, make sure it’s about something quick and exciting, and don’t waste a lot of time trying to figure it out, or offering up day-dreamy thoughts about what might have caused it, or how things might have gone differently. Just say what happened and move on.

“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 on him. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’”

That’s the baptism; now immediately on to the next thing:

“And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.”

That is the entirety of Mark’s narrative on Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness. The next sentence is, “Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee.”

Wait a minute; what about Dr. Luke’s medical record on Jesus? “He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, Jesus was famished” (Luke 4:2). Luke takes 13 lengthy verses to tell the whole story; Matthew took 11. Mark just did it in two, and left out all the reasons, all the explanations, all the dialogue, all the interpretations. That’s up to the reader. That’s up to you and me.

And so I kind of wonder if Mark wouldn’t have been intrigued by this brash, daring, larger-than-life explorer, Fawcett, who waded into the Amazon and, as I just heard the author of this book describing it on the radio the other day, his men moved fast, and anyone who couldn’t keep up was left behind, to be swallowed up by the jungle.

The point of that, they said, was, in a way, humanitarian: he knew that every day he and his men spent traipsing through the deep wilderness was another day of risks of everything from animal attacks, to disease, to starvation, to who knows what. They needed to move as quickly as possible so the whole ordeal would be over with as soon as possible.

Only, they never made it out, leaving the rest of the world to wonder: what ever happened to Percy Fawcett and the adventurers who went with him in there?

It’s a particularly intriguing question now, because Lent is the time when we ourselves follow Jesus into the wilderness, only ours is the dense jungle of our own interior.

And, as Jesus did, sometimes we find wild beasts in there, and sometimes, we survive only because the angels come and tend to us.

A few years ago, the musician Peter Gabriel said that after his marriage failed, and then another relationship failed, he decided to undergo group therapy sessions. He said, “I started on therapy because my marriage started to go wrong…, [and] I wasn’t making much sense of my life in other respects either…

“I discovered the most unbelievable phenomena within myself, characteristics which I value for myself, but also characteristics with which I would rather not be confronted, like unlimited rage, or merciless hatred. I didn't know about these sides of myself at all, but they were undoubtedly there. And they’re still there today. The effect of the therapy was that I had to come to terms with this” ( http://www.petergabriel.com/us/index.html under the heading “Therapy”).

We may find angels in there; we may find wild beasts.

The challenge of seriously entering into the spiritual discipline of Lent is the same as the challenge of group therapy or a number of other worthwhile pursuits whose aim is to uncover nothing less than the truth, and to be able to face it with nothing less than complete honesty:

What am I going to find in there? And once I get in there, will I ever make it back out?

Every year at this time, we begin our trundle into the deep, dark interior, in part by pondering again the questions for Lenten reflection that Frederick Buechner devised a quarter of a century ago. I offer them to you now for your consideration.

Buechner says, “After being baptized by John in the river Jordan, Jesus went off alone into the wilderness where he spent forty days asking himself the question what it meant to be Jesus. During Lent, Christians are supposed to ask one way or another what it means to be themselves.

“...When you look at your face in the mirror, what do you see in it that you most like and what do you see in it that you most deplore?

“If you had only one last message to leave to the handful of people who are most important to you, what would it be in twenty-five words or less?

“Of all the things you have done in your life, which is the one you would most like to undo? Which is the one that makes you happiest to remember?

“Is there any person in the world or any cause, that if circumstances called for it, you would be willing to die for?”

“If this were [your] last day, what would you do with it?” (Buechner, Wishful Thinking. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1979).

“To hear yourself try to answer questions like these,” Buechner says, “is to begin to hear something not only of who you are but of both what you are becoming and what you are failing to become. It can be a pretty depressing business all in all, but if sackcloth and ashes are at the start of it, something like Easter may be at the end.”

I was having this conversation about Lent with a church member some years ago—someone who I knew very well had bravely gone deep into his own wilderness, and had not taken any shortcuts to do it. I said, “There are a lot of wild beasts in there; but there may be some angels in there too.”

And he said to me, with a hard-earned smile on his face that only wisdom could produce, “When I went into the wilderness, I saw that God was there.”

Make me to know your ways, O Lord ; teach me your paths. Be mindful of your mercy, O Lord , and your steadfast love, for they have been from of old. Do not remember the sins of my youth or my transgressions; according to your steadfast love remember me, for your goodness’ sake, O Lord !

To you, O Lord , I lift up my soul.

Keith Grogg

Carolina Beach Presbyterian Church

Carolina Beach, NC

March 1, 2009