Wilderness, Creation and Time

Sermon for 12 March 2000, 10:30am, St Mary Magdalen, Sheet, published on www.trikeshed.com

Gen 8:8-17, 1 Pet 3:18-22, Mark 1:9-15

Today is the first Sunday in Lent. Our Gospel reading today tells us about how Jesus was sent by the Spirit to spend forty days in the desert. In fact it’s amazing how much else is packed into the seven short verses we heard. I do love Mark’s Gospel because it is so action packed and fast moving. It’s so quick-fire. Did you know that Mark’s favourite adverb is "immediately" and it occurs 41 times in his Gospel? We actually have three episodes in Jesus’ life in this reading.

From these three episodes I’d like to bring out three things about Jesus which I hope will make us realise, if we ever had any doubt about it, that here really is the man who is worthy of our trust – the man to give our lives to.

John the Baptist preached repentance and forgiveness of sins and baptised people in the River Jordan. Jesus, comes along. The Son of God. No sin. No need for repentance, no need for forgiveness. No need to be baptised, surely. So why does Jesus go to be baptised?

Then immediately the Spirit sent him into the desert. We read that he was there for forty days, tempted by Satan. And then something which is unique to Mark, which is quite unusual. Only Mark tells us that "he was with the wild animals". It makes his loneliness seem even greater, somehow, imagining him with jackals and wolves and rock hyraxes. It also underlines how, by being out in the desert, far from human comforts, he was at one with the whole of creation. When Noah’s Ark landed, as it were, God made a covenant that was not only with Noah but with every living creature. The whole of creation. So it’s as if Jesus is reminding us that he has come to earth to put all of creation right with God.

About twelve years ago I was attending a conference in New York City and I was lucky enough to have a Sunday morning free. So I walked through Central Park to the edge of the Bronx, to see a building I’d always wanted to see – what was then the largest cathedral in the world, the Anglican cathedral of St John the Divine. And there was a service about to start, and it happened that the preacher or speaker was one Prof James Lovelock, the originator of what is called the Gaia Hypothesis. Put very simply, this is the idea that the earth can be thought of as one giant life-form – in a sense a single, self-regulating organism. It was still thought a bit of a cranky idea then, but it is growing in credibility. There’s more and more evidence that not only does the earth’s geology and climate and atmosphere affect what we think of as life – plants and animals – but also the other way round. In other words, God’s creation really is one in a way that we have been slow to realise. But somehow I think Jesus already knew this and was already showing us as he went through that desert experience. He was with the wild animals, and at one with the whole of his creation.

At one with people, at one with the natural world – what of the third episode, when he returns from the desert and preaches the good news? One thing no scientific theory tells us, even if it’s a very holistic idea such as the Gaia theory, is how God interacts and intervenes in our world. It’s fine to believe in the oneness of creation and to let the idea that the world is an organism deepen our understanding of our environment. Heaven knows we need to do that. But if that is all we believed in we would be missing the point. Even if we knew that somehow God was behind it all in a vague sort of way, we would be missing something very important. It is that God knows about time and space – I mean real time, like half past ten on the 12 March 2000, latitude 51 degrees north, 1 degree west. After these great events that announce Jesus’ ministry like trumpet calls, it all becomes very real and immediate (that word again). We hear "the time is now", "the place is here – Galilee", "The kingdom of God is near. Do something about it. Repent and believe the good news". Jesus identifies not only with all of humanity, not only with all of creation across all time, but with time and place. A real time, a real place. A man of history.

It is possible to place great faith and respect in a Gandhi who showed solidarity with humanity, or with a St Francis who showed solidarity with the world of nature, or with a Mandela whose actions at a certain period in one country have brought about so much good. But there is no one who embodies all three as Jesus does. Surely here is someone who is so much at the centre of all things that we should place our trust in Him and we can do so without fear that we’re doing something dodgy. He is, quite simply, where it’s at

At the other end of his ministry on earth, and for us the other end of Lent, these three aspects of Jesus come again, writ very large. He suffers the most incredible pain on our behalf, to be at one with us. He goes through the experience of death, one experience that is common to all creation from grubs to galaxies. But right in the middle of it all are once again hours and days, a place with a name, a tomb in a hill – Good Friday and Easter Sunday. It is said that arguments over the date of Easter have split the Church, and that the task of calculating the date was one of the few incentives to keep any kind of mathematical thinking alive in the Dark Ages. We might think this is silly, but perhaps we should not be surprised. It is a miracle that "God was man in Palestine and lives today in bread and wine."

Lord, as we admit our need to repent and be cleansed, as we struggle through our own wilderness times, and as we go about our daily lives at this time and this place, we place our faith in you because you have been here before and because you walk with us here and now.

© Mike Knee, 2000

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