Stories to Repent By

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector

St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas

February 26, 2012, 1 Lent, Year B

Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(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 on him. And a voice came from heaven, "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, tempted 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."

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Today’s Gospel reading is almost like a novel in three paragraphs, or maybe a play or opera in three acts. 

Jesus comes to John the Baptist and is baptized.  We could create the first dozen chapters of the novel or a set of moving arias about how Jesus came to this moment.

John’s baptism was a baptism of repentance.  Did Jesus have something to repent?  Repent means “turn around.”  Did Jesus anguish about a decision to turn away from something?  Maybe he did.  Maybe he wanted to repent, to turn away from the conventional course of the life he was born into.  He was an eldest son.  He was expected to work in the family craft and take over the family leadership.  Did Jesus feel a call to leave Nazareth and to leave his family?  – an act that might have been interpreted as scandalous, rebellious, even disrespectful.  Elsewhere in the Gospels we hear hints of a simmering conflict.  Some thought he had lost his mind and urged him to leave his ministry and return to his family responsibilities. 

Did Jesus anguish over the direction of his life?  Did John’s preaching galvanize Jesus’ unconventional calling to do something else?  The Gospels record that in his baptism, Jesus experienced a profound sense of identity.  “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.’”

In his baptism, Jesus knows who and whose he is.  He senses deep affirmation and blessing.  What a profound experience that must have been.  He will not return to Nazareth as the family patriarch.  From that point he turns away from the call of earthy father and family.  He embraces a broader obligation to his heavenly Father, and a new familial identity with all of God’s children.  How exhilarating it must have been to experience that mystical sense of identity and calling.

Act II.  Jesus is immediately driven into the wilderness.  The same Spirit of God that so surely gave him blessing and identity, immediately drives him into a place of testing.  Dryness, chaos, and threat.  Aridity, loneliness, and wild beasts.  Maybe it was the desolate, rocky geography nearby that they still call “the Wilderness” in Israel.  Or maybe it was even more so an inner geography – a mental and emotional landscape of not knowing, of feeling lost, drained, disoriented, even depressed.  Maybe the wild beasts were his own thoughts and doubts and uncertainties.  Did I make the right decision?  Even if I did, what does it mean?  What am I to do?  Where do I go from here?  Who am I to become?  Is this sense of calling real, and if it is, is it something I am capable of living into?  Big questions.  Hard questions.

Forty days is Biblical language for a long time.  Jesus was in the wilderness for a long time.  Maybe you’ve been in the wilderness before.  I know I have.  Maybe you’ve been there a long time.  Maybe you are there now.  Sometimes we drive ourselves into the wilderness.  Sometimes the Spirit drives us there.  But there are angels in the wilderness.  They minister to us.  We can persevere in the dryness.  We can keep breathing in the darkness.

Act III.  It takes a crisis, a tragedy to propel Jesus from the wilderness.  His friend and cousin John is arrested.  Jesus realizes, this is his call.  John is gone.  Now Jesus must emerge and pick up the task.  He walks out of his wilderness and returns to his home region.  Now he knows what to say.  He has found his voice.  “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”  Crescendo.  End of Volume One.  The story will continue in thrilling sequels. 

There is another story, credited to Arthur Gordon and popularized by Steven Covey, about a man going through his own wilderness.   I’ve tweaked the story a bit.  It’s a story about a man who felt listless, lost, perpetually tired.  He went to his doctor, who could find nothing physically wrong.  The doctor asked the man if he could follow the doctor’s directions for one day.  “Yes,” he said.  The doctor wrote him four prescriptions and told him to spend the following day outside somewhere that has made him happy.  “Take these,” said the doctor, and he handed him four prescriptions in four envelopes labeled “9 a.m.”, “Noon”, “3 p.m.”, and “6 p.m.”

The next morning the man went to a beautiful Ozark river where he had canoed, fished, hiked and camped.  At 9 a.m. he opened the first prescription and read the words, “Listen carefully.”  So he began to listen.  At first he was distracted by the odd instructions, but then the sounds of the gurgling water began to soothe him.  He heard the birds singing from every direction.  The wind rustling the limbs and trees.  Three hours is a long time to listen.  He began to listen to the lessons the river and woods had taught him.  Go with the current.  Anticipate the boulders ahead.  Be patient for the fish to bite.  Don’t keep throwing in the same place when they won’t bite.  Be aware of your surroundings.  Watch with respectful awe.  Check the grounding of the rock before you put your weight on it.  Leap boldly when you must cross something.  Feel the spaciousness.  The silence.  There is peace.

At noon, he opened the second prescription and read the words, “Try reaching back.”  Try reaching back to what?  He thought of his childhood.  Playing in the woods.  Playing, sometimes fighting, with his friends.  He thought of those days and re-lived some of the happiness.  He recalled some of the hard and even bitter times, but seeing them now less threateningly from his adult perspective here in the midst of such natural beauty.  He sensed a presence with him throughout his past.  He sent his own adult Spirit back into those memories, to awaken or to comfort the little boy he used to be.  And in remembering, he felt a sense of security for having made it through everything so far.  He felt warmth, gratefulness. 

At three o’clock he read the third prescription.  “Examine your motives.”  This one was different.  This was harder.  He started looking back with some defensiveness over things from his past.  At first he justified his actions, they were means to an end.  But he realized, often his motives actually weren’t good enough – motives of power, desires for success or for the affirmation of others.  Maybe this was why he had been feeling so stagnant.  In a flash of insight, he realized, it’s all about motivation.  Whenever my motivation is self-centered, I’m always a bit off.  But whenever I’ve tried to serve others and to do the right thing, there seems to be something self-authenticating present.  He found himself reorienting himself toward the meaningful, toward being of service to others.

When six o’clock came it didn’t take him long to follow the final prescription.  “Write your worries upon the ground.”  He took a shard of rock fallen from the nearby bluff.  He found a sandbar, and there he knelt and wrote a few words that symbolized his worries.  He turned to walk back home.  No need to look back.  The next rain would wash the words away. [i]

It is Lent.  And the Church drives us into the wilderness.  The Church invites us into introspection – to “Listen carefully.”  We are asked to try to reach back, and to remember.  We are invited to examine our motives.  We are asked to take our worries and to give them to Christ, and then to turn around – to repent – and to walk toward our own identity and calling. 

And what is that identity and calling?  It was given to us at our baptism too, when the heavens split apart and the Spirit of God descended upon you saying, “You are my child, the beloved.  With you I am well pleased.”  What do you want to do about that?

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[i] Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Free Press, 2004 p.292.  I took considerable liberties with Gordon’s The Turn of the Tide story, including placing it in the Ozarks rather than at the ocean.