Lent 1b
February 18, 2018
Mark 1:9-15
If it feels like we have
heard this Gospel reading before it is because we have. Three times since
December 3rd, we have heard parts of this text. But, here we are
again, revisiting Jesus’ baptism, his temptation, the arrest of John and the
beginning of Jesus’ formal ministry. But with the déjà vu of having heard a
text repeated a few times, also comes the temptation to put details into the
Temptation of Jesus that aren’t there in Mark. We get them in Matthew and Luke
“If you turn these stones into bread, if you really are the son of God, throw
yourself down from here, I will give all of this to you if you bow down and
worship me.” These details are familiar to those who have studied the
scriptures or make a habit of being in church every year on the first Sunday in
Lent. However, if Mark wanted those details in there, he would have put them
there. Instead, he leaves out the details of the actual temptation of Jesus,
which leaves a lot of room for us to wonder just what could have happened and
how Jesus responded to the temptation of the Devil. What he does note, however,
is that he was driven by the Spirit into the wilderness. Not led by the Spirit,
like in Matthew and Luke, but rather, he was driven – cast out. There is a
notion of use of force involved. Not an invitation, a command you are expected
to follow immediately, whether you are prepared or not.
It was to the wilderness
that we were driven once again on Wednesday afternoon. A wilderness of
mourning, of anger, of questioning:
What happened that a 19
year old got an assault rifle into his school and killed 17 people?
What happened that this
was this 18th school shooting in 2018?
What happened that this
has become almost normal in our modern history?
What happened that no one
who has the power to do anything to stop this from happening again seems to be
doing anything but offering up thoughts and prayers?
These are questions which have
a variety of answers because we are a variety of people with a variety of
opinions that aren’t always going to jive. But I know that I am not the only
one who is completely done with being driven into this wilderness of domestic
terrorism. I know that I am not the only one who doesn’t want to have to name
the victims of such acts of terrorism that are now so common in our schools,
our churches, our movie theatres, our places that are supposed to be safe but
now aren’t.
When Eric Harris and Dylan
Klebold walked into Columbine high school on April 20, 1999, I was 15 years
old. A few weeks later, the entire student body of Grosse Pointe North High
School evacuated to the football field because of a bomb threat that turned out
to be fake. Even at 15, we all joked that if someone wanted to really do damage
to a student body, they would call in a bomb threat, wait until everyone was
locked into the football field bleachers, then open fire. Little did we know
that we were entering into an age where school shootings would become the norm,
where parents have spent the last 19 plus years wondering how to convince their
children that they are safe in school, where communities have spent the last 19
plus years picking up the pieces of tragedies that should have never been
committed – some of which could have been stopped – being retraumatized each
time another individual opens fire.
The temptations that arise
when act of domestic terrorism are carried out, I have observed, are to go to
our corners prepared to fight.
It is about guns – one
faction says
It is about mental health
– says another
It was bad parenting –
says yet another
But here is one thing that
I hope that we can all agree on – we shouldn’t have to live like this. We
shouldn’t have to live in a nation in which this cycle of violence is
inevitable because we refuse to change…because we refuse to repent…because we
refuse to cast off fear and, instead, run out and buy more firearms because the
growing arsenal makes us feel more secure.
In my old testament
classes in seminary, we learned that, in the Jewish tradition, Satan is someone
whose job it was to push our short comings in our face as a means of trying to
convince us to turn away to other gods. Gods that are easier to serve. Gods
that don’t require sacrifice and don’t inconvenience us so that we can become
better than we already are. These are gods that look and act and think like us,
they even hate the same people we hate for the same reasons.
And as we sit in this
wilderness, we are being tempted yet again. We are being tempted to let fear
drive us, we are being tempted to fear our neighbors, tempted to fear those who
look different from us, tempted to proclaim that our God has somehow allowed us
to draw the boundary lines of where God can roam – turning God into a vengeful
puppet master who uses the deaths of innocents to teach us a lesson.
Beloved, we have a choice
– to, as a collective, be afraid, or, as a collective people, to repent. To
repent of those ways in which we have looked away from Jesus and the God of
Abraham and to more convenient gods – the gods of fear, the gods of wealth, the
gods of personal security. These are gods that turn us in on ourselves and make
us think that we are, in fact, that only gods that we need. They convince us
that we are the ones in control, that drive us into isolation, that tell us
that we are the ones who are right and those who disagree with us are the
enemy. But we cannot afford to live in fear any longer. We cannot afford to
continue to live like this. We cannot afford to let Satan continually tempt us
away from our God and to gods that claim to protect us from bullets with
bullets of our own. We need to ask ourselves, individually and as a nation,
what is more important to us – constitutional amendments or the lives and
wellbeing of our neighbors, specifically the lives and wellbeing of our
children?
I don’t want to know any
answers, I pose this question because I think we need to wrestle, as a
collective whole, if we are truly going to be able to more forward together
into a better and more peaceful and understanding future.
However, until we – as a
collective- make changes to bring about a more peaceful and understanding future,
I don’t think that there is anything that we can tell our children that will
make them feel safer going to school. Telling them God will protect them is bad
theology because that leaves us with the question of why God didn’t protect the
400 children and teachers who have been killed in school shootings since Sandy
Hook? And these are not helpful questions to ask.
But what we can tell them,
with certainty, is that God walks with them, from the mountains to the
wilderness, from the rivers to the desert, and that God is present with them
each and everyday of their lives. God was present in Marjorie Stoneman Douglas
High School on Wednesday, not in the shooter or the weapon used, but rather in
the staff and teachers whose quick thinking and sacrifice saved lives, in the
first responders who arrived on scene with great speed, God wrapped his arms
around the victims and God weeps with that community, weeps with this nation.
We learn from the scriptures that God never abandons us, that God goes even where
we think God is not, and that no human being can put a boundary around where
God can go, not even Satan can do that. What we can do is to work together to
do our best to make sure that what happened at Columbine and Sandy Hook and
Parkland become an anomaly at worst.
This is the essence of
what John the Baptist proclaimed and what Jesus proclaimed in his ministry –
repentance. It’s not just about feeling remorse when you have done something
you shouldn’t. It literally means to turn around, to step away from the things
that caused us to sin so that we can more faithfully walk in the footsteps of
Christ. It isn’t something that happens overnight, it takes time, takes
discomfort and, in some cases, it can be painful. But we have the freedom to
take the bold step towards repentance because we serve a God who defeated the
devil’s ability to rob eternal life from us through the death and resurrection
of Christ. And so we can boldly embrace Christ’s call to repent, to allow the
sinful parts of us to die so that, having repented we can look forward to a
more vibrant future, believing in the good news that God is love that God will
not abandon us.
