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.”

From Gary Snyder’s book of essays entitled Earth House Hold:

“Comes a time when the poet must choose: either to step deep in the stream of his people, history, tradition, folding and folding himself in wealth of persons and pasts… to become richly foundationed and great and sane and ordered. Or, or to step beyond the bound onto the way out, into horrors and angels, possibly madness….possibly utter transcendence, possibly enlightened return, possibly ignominious…perishing.”

I was drawn to these words by Gary Snyder, wilderness poet and philosopher, because what he describes as a choice a poet must someday make sounds a lot like the transition that Jesus makes from his baptismal affirmation as God’s son and beloved to 40 long days in the wilderness surrounded by wild beasts and waited on by angels. Snyder speaks of such a transition as a choice a poet must one day make. Our Gospel presents it as something that Jesus has no choice in, having been “driven by the Spirit,” as Mark says, driven by the Spirit from baptism to wilderness..

And so here we are gathered here on the first Sunday of Lent, some of us having been driven into the wilderness by the circumstances of our economic, personal, or spiritual lives, and others of us standing at the threshold of a wilderness we can in this season choose to enter, asking ourselves whether we’re willing to enter it trusting that we’ll find not only wild beasts but angels there.

Our religious tradition, of course, has long confirmed that the wilderness is a place of both. In the Hebrew Scriptures, the wilderness is depicted as a place of threatening indifference, and, unexpectedly, a place of love. It’s the place where, under Moses, the Israelites, pushed to their limits, grumble and fail, and it’s the place where Yahweh yearns to be alone with his people the way that lover would seek to be with lover. Mark’s story of Jesus’ time in the wilderness continues in this vein with its temptations brought by Satan, himself, its wild beasts and its attendant angels, all of which prepare Jesus for his proclamation of the Good News in Galilee.

Wilderness geography, and wilderness spirituality, then, as writer Belden Lane says, hold two very different things in tension: “fierceness and beauty, terrifying loss and joyous discovery, the anguish of being ignored and the wonder of being loved.”

And so this morning where are you already in the wilderness or where are you being invited to make a choice to move more into the wilderness experience? What wild beasts are you encountering or do you expect to encounter there? Where might your attendant angels be hovering? To what new vocation that proclaims good news might you be called to out of your wilderness experience?

Belden Lane’s own story of a trip into the wilderness is a kind of paradigm for me of how our wilderness experiences work. The background to this story is that Lane, a well-respected scholar and writer, had carried a wound from childhood, the suicide of his father when he was 13, for all of his adult life. Then in his 40’s his mother died after a long and painful cancer. Both of these events together prompted him to seek a wilderness experience.

Lane went to a retreat center called Ghost Ranch in New Mexico. Once there, he decided to talk a hike alone into the wilderness. Listen for how his experience unfolded.

“With the sun still shining, I took the path into a box canyon several miles behind Ghost Ranch. Thunderstorms had been coming up every afternoon and people were reluctant to venture out very far. Yet I desperately needed the time alone, getting away far enough to approach the border of that interior landscape I had neglected so long -- the one accessible only through wildness. It was a beautiful afternoon. A slight breeze rustled leaves on the cottonwood trees. The smell of sage was made sharper by recent rains. I followed a small creek into the canyon, noticing deer tracks along its bank. Later in the week, tracks of a mountain lion were seen along that same trail. It was a fine place for a lion to trap deer -- up a narrow canyon with no escape.

By the time I had followed the creek to the canyon’s end, the cliffs had risen to some 200 feet on either side. The rock had chipped away from the edge at the top, leaving an overhang all the way around. There was no way out…

In the center of the space at the end of the canyon lay a large, flat rock. Nearby a trickle of water seeped out from under the canyon wall, feeding the creek I had been following. I lay on the rock for a long while, waiting for nothing in particular watching cliff swallows sweep over the canyon rim, noticing a hummingbird in the fir tree nearby, being aware of gradually gathering clouds…

As I lay in silence, dark, churning clouds began to fill the space of sky framed by the canyon rim. Then came the first loud crash of thunder, and I knew I was about to be caught by a cloudburst in the middle of the desert. As the initial drops of rain fell, I scrambled up a nearby ledge, looking for shelter, finding the small opening of a cave going into the canyon wall. It wasn’t large. I looked carefully to make sure it was empty and then crawled in, just as the heavy rains let loose. Soon they were followed by hail the size of quarters -- bouncing everywhere…There I lay, under the mountain, looking out, in the midst of this wild apocalypse, wide-eyed at its glory…

Soon sheets of water began to pour over the top of the canyon rim -- loosening the dirt and rocks high above. Then the sound of falling boulders echoed through the canyon like a shotgun blast, crashing right before me onto the path I had followed an hour or so before. I heard the sound of other rocks falling farther down the ravine. Torrents of water flowed wildly in every direction. What was it that had followed me into the remoteness of that box canyon -- having stalked me to its very end, hidden now in the cleft of the rock?

I learned later that there were Indian petroglyphs scratched on the inside of the cave where I lay. I never saw them, but I knew from the place that they must have been pictures of death. There was no doubt that this was a dying place, a place where things necessarily came to an end. That is the way of the desert. The pictures there in the cave would be ones of a deer stalked by a young brave or a mountain lion. They would tell stories I didn’t want to remember. Pictures of a young boy at the age of thirteen, whose father had been suddenly and violently killed. A boy who all of his life had sought the lost father. Pictures of that same boy much later in his forties, sitting beside a mother, waiting for a long and painful death to end. A boy whose parents had both died (or were dying) at times in his life when he was struggling most to be born. I knew the pictures! But I hadn’t known enough -- at first hand -- the grieving that had to go along with them.

As the rain passed, and the rock slides ended, I crawled out of the cave. The winds quickly carried the storm clouds away, and before long the sun was out again, shining on a world perfectly new. Water droplets on every leaf and rock were lit by the sun. The air was clear as crystal, cleansed by rain. Silence had come again.

Then gradually a trickle of water began to flow over the rim at the canyon’s end, cascading two hundred feet down in sunlit brilliance onto the rock where I had lain before. It grew in strength, becoming a massive waterfall of light-tan waters….These waters of life poured into the place of death. I stood there watching; then slowly I walked through the falling water, being soaked in its sand-filled wetness…

What was this place? Everywhere I walked, life burst out of the ground before and behind me….I began to walk back down the canyon…where a side canyon joined the one I had been walking. The place where the two canyons met was filled with vegetation, sparkling now with life.

This place answered the questions posed by the earlier place. How would I live again on the far side of the experience of death, surviving the loss of the father and the mother, discovering a new fierceness and rootedness?”

The wilderness experience we are already in or are invited to enter is full of sheer cliffs, threatening storms, temptations and wild beasts. Trust that even in the midst of these, the bond created by God in baptism with you is indissoluble. Trust that God a little angelic cave where you will meet yourself and where you will find protection and solace as the wild beasts howl and the storms rage about you. Trust that the storms themselves are the waters of baptism come to reinvigorate the dry and desolate, to give you a new, fierce and rooted ability to be the good news, in your life and for the world. Trust that this is happening in your desert and in the desert that is the world we are living in. Trust these things and enter in. Trust and enter in.

Works Cited or Consulted

Gary Snyder, Work, House Hold

Belden Lane, “Encounter at Ghost Ranch: Reflections on Desert Spirituality” in Spirituality Today, Summer 1992

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