With the Wild Beasts and Angels (Lent 1B)

 

 

With the Wild Beasts and Angels

First Sunday of Lent (Year B)
18 February 2023; 11 am Sung Mass
Homily Delivered at The Mission Church of the Holy Spirit

Sutherlin, Oregon

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP. Ph.D.  

Genesis 9:8-17; Psalm 25:1-9; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:9-13

 

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen.

 

 

One of the details we usually miss about the story of the Great Flood, whose conclusion we read today as our Hebrew Scriptures lesson, is the reason that God decides in that story originally to destroy the earth and all flesh:  it is the violence that has become so common and the cries of those suffering from it.  God can't stand the screams of the victims and decides to unmake the world by letting the great Deep loose from below and above, causing the Flood.  This is not so much, I think, a story of God's intentional harm of his creation, but rather his desire to protect it and preserve it.  That is clearly the point of God's covenant with all creation that we read about today--the rainbow is a sign that God will never again destroy the earth.  God loves his creatures, but hates violence and injustice.  He is not its source.  

 

The reading from Peter links the Flood with baptism, and with the idea that God redeemed his promise to care for all creation by sending the slain Jesus, while his body was in the tomb, to preach the Gospel to the souls of those killed by the waters of the Great Flood.  Baptism is a sign of hope: not a washing of dirt from the body, 1 Peter says, but rather an appeal for a clear conscience.   And in the Gospel reading, Jesus in his own baptism hears the Voice of God declaring his love and acceptance--a verbal affirmation of the hope of God's bow set in the clouds.  

 

The baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist is one of the few events told in the Gospels that almost all biblical scholars and historians agree actually happened.  The story shows up in too many varied forms in too many differing early traditions to ignore.  And the various retellings and versions of the story show an acute embarrassment among some early Christians at the story of their sinless Lord and God seeking “baptism of repentance” from another religious teacher.  Such embarrassment makes it unlikely that early Christians made the story up.  

Mark’s story of Jesus’ baptism and temptation is short and sweet: Jesus comes to John and is baptized.  Coming up from the water, Jesus sees the heavens split apart and the spirit of God descends on him “like a dove.”  Then Jesus hears God’s voice, quoting the Psalms and prophets, “You are my son, this day I have fathered you. I love you, you make me happy.” Immediately, the Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness where he remains for forty days, tempted by the Slanderer, living with the wild beasts, though “angels ministered to him.” 

 

What would receiving baptism from John have meant for Jesus and why would he have immediately thereafter gone to the desert to be alone with God?

 

John preaches in the wilderness of Judea, near the north of the Dead Sea. He is within a few kilometers of the community that wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, and there are clear links between him and that community.

The Judaisms of the period all agreed that impurity both ritual and moral could be driven away by following the prescriptions of the Torah—usually to wash in pure water and wait until sundown. As a result, mikvehs, or ritual baths are common objects in the Jewish archaeological sites from that period.

 

The Dead Sea Scrolls sect, with its dispute with the Temple leadership, believed that simply being born Jewish wasn’t enough to be part of God’s people.  You had to accept the right beliefs and practice the right rituals. They required a ritual washing in order to enter their exclusive community. Their rulebook says that this washing had to reflect a change of heart to be truly valid.

 

Both John the Baptist and the Qumran covenanters fled to the desert to escape what they saw as the corruption and false religion of the Jerusalem elites.   The desert is where God met with his people. God met Moses on Sinai and purified his people there as they wandered for 40 years after leaving Egypt (Exodus 2:11—4:31).  God met Elijah there (I Kings 19:1-18).  

 

John appears preaching what Mark and Luke call a “baptism of repentance unto the forgiveness of sins,” that is, “a washing showing your change of heart that results in your sins being set aside.” 

Why would a thirty-year old building contractor (that’s what the Greek word tekton means, not “carpenter”) from Nazareth be interested in this?  The Judean wilderness was a long way from Galilee for someone on foot.   Why would Jesus want to go to the Baptist, especially if he were not unduly burdened by a sense of guilt or sinfulness?  As a Jew, he would have been unable to avoid incurring ritual uncleanliness in the course of day-to-day life. But the regular washings prescribed by the Law would satisfy that. Why undergo John’s washing to signify a change of heart?

He was attracted to the Baptist’s message:  the Temple and political leadership are hopelessly corrupt and detached from God.  His baptism is something like what the Qumran covenanters practiced, but popularized and meant for all, not a hermetic ritual into an exclusive sect.  Masses of common people flock to Jordan for John’s baptism. 

 

Matthew and Luke give a fuller telling of the Baptist’s preaching: “Go and produce tangible evidence in your acts that you have indeed had a change of hearts.  If you are a soldier, don’t commit unnecessary violence and take advantage of people; if you are a tax revenue agent, only collect what is required and don’t skim the proceeds to line your own pocket.” 

 

The Baptist is preaching basic justice.  He is calling people to take God’s love of fairness personally, to make God’s will their own.  This personal involvement with God, this demand for social justice as evidence of our change of hearts--these are all elements that would remain part and parcel of Jesus’ own proclamation that the Kingship of God had arrived in our midst.

What would John the Baptist say today if we asked him to give examples in our society of tangible evidence of a change in our hearts. Would he ask us to stop walking past beggars without assisting? Would he insist that we stop paying less than living wages to those we employ?  Stop abusing spouses and children?  Looking down on those who differ from us?  Stop frequenting enterprises or buying goods and services based on the exploitation of, or the trafficking in, persons? 

Jesus seeks baptism at John’s hand because he takes to heart John’s message of justice, personal responsibility, and relationship with God.   He is himself having a change of heart.  He is moving from one part of his life to another: from his private life with his family and friends, his assisting in the carpentry/house building business, to his public ministry.   

 

Jesus sees in John’s baptism a call to refocus, to reorient, to redirect his life. For him, the “fruit worthy of a change of heart” would be the living out of the task to which God was calling him. 

 

Despite the pressures on him in Nazareth to do the conventional, to follow the norm, to settle down, possibly start a family of his own and make something of himself, Jesus makes the long journey to see this Wildman of God in the Judean desert.   His neighbors in Nazareth think he has abandoned his Mother and siblings.  Yet Jesus in baptism hears the voice of God.  The result is clear in Jesus’ public preaching when, alone of the religious voices of the day, he calls God, “Father” and says He is above all a loving Father.    

 

This is why he must leave for the desert, where must be tested, “live with the wild beasts” and sort out things to find out what his identity revealed in baptism means. 

 

When Jesus later returns to Nazareth later, his Mother and siblings try to get him to come home and start acting normally again, because they think he has gone insane (Mark 3).  He is no longer the Jesus whom they had known and loved.  He now is clearly a man willing to give up everything for God’s reign to be made more clearly visible, willing to die if necessary. The time in the desert has left its mark.

 

Wherever we hear and accept the Good News of God’s love, we find that the good news makes us look crazy to others.  Jesus puts us at odds with the economic and political systems of our world.  This gospel forces us to act, interrupting the world as it is in ways that make people—especially pious people—indignant. 

 

Friends, we are not what God intended when he created us.  We need all the more to have a change of heart and manifest it in our actions.  We too need to seek in quietness our true baptismal identity, and God willing, have angels minister to us also as we struggle with the wild beasts.  May we, like Jesus, remain undeterred from the mission on which God sends us, no matter how crazy this appears to those we love.

 

In the name of Christ, Amen.

 

Who Knows? (Ash Wedsnesday)

Who Knows?

Ash Wednesday (Years ABC)
14 February 2024; 12:15 p.m. Said Mass with Imposition of Ashes 
Homily Delivered at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church

Grants Pass, Oregon  

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Joel 2:1-2,12-17; 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10; Matthew 6:1-6,16-21; Psalm 103:8-14

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen. 

 

A few years ago, I read in the blog of a friend, a priest in Nahelem, that she was not “doing Lent” that year.  She was gravely ill with a degenerative respiratory illness, and did not, in fact, make it to Easter.  As I recall, she said, “I may be having a real life—make that real death—experience of ashes to ashes and dust to dust in the next few weeks.  I don’t need any extra reminders, since it is about all I can think of.  And I’m not sure that 40 days of effort are going to make any headway on my besetting sins—they are what they are and if I haven’t changed yet, I doubt whether one last heroic effort of a month or so will change anything.  And my time is so limited that I feel that a better spiritual practice for me is to enjoy the good things God gave that I know I love and value.” 

 

I felt very sad to hear how sick she was, but was in awe of how well she understood Lent and what it’s about. 

 

We often get Lent and Ash Wednesday completely wrong.  I’m not talking about the naughty choir boy’s snickering at the line in the liturgy, “Remember you are BUT dust.”   Our misunderstanding is far deeper and pervasive, and comes from not understanding the context of all the scriptural talk about sin, punishment, the wrath of God, and penitence.  We think it’s all about heroic efforts to convince God to not be so angry at us.   At a more pedestrian level, we think that it’s about showing to ourselves and others how pious, how spiritual, we are.  We keep those ash marks prominent on our foreheads and go boldly back into the world to let others see.  Or some of us wrongly think that we can take the ashes out into the world and give other people a chance to show off their spirituality without the inconvenience of actually getting their behinds into a church:  ashes to go, indeed.  But it’s all there in today’s Gospel:  Jesus says if you do a good thing for show, the show is all there is: “they have received their reward.”

 

For Jesus, it’s all about doing good things in secret, without trying to have anyone know.  “God, who sees in secret, will bless you.” 

 

Many of us usually start Lent out by making confession.  Many also don’t.  That’s OK:  we are Episcopalians and “All may, none must, but some should.”  I am usually in that last group and when talk with my Spiritual Director and make my confession, it is always greatly centering and soothing.  As we talk, and I go between my sins and the things in my life that drive them and trigger them, I find myself confessing like many other people I have heard over the years:  I told not only the hurts and harms I had done other people, but wondered about the hurts and harms done to me.  For, as much as we want to keep these two separate in terms of accepting responsibility and making amends, from the point of view of our heart, of how we feel, they often are one and the same.   This is not simply because of the collective, the corporate nature of sin, and the fact that all sin of all people is interconnected.  It’s more personal, deeper.  My own failings are often reactions, hurt reactions, to the failings of others.  And as most counselors and Twelve-Step sponsors know all too well, much of the harm we do is the result of addiction, compulsion, and things beyond the control of our wills.  An alcoholic will drink.  A junkie will shoot up.  A hurt person will lash out.  A person with low self-esteem may overcompensate and act with the self-absorption of a blissfully clueless narcissist.  Even though we are responsible for our actions, often our actions are beyond our control.  Again, the hurt we cause and the hurt we feel are in a real sense one and the same when viewed through the heart’s lens.   When we confess our own sins, it is important to focus on what we are responsible for, and not what other people are.  But that said, we often find that in plumbing our own hearts for the sources of sin we find the hurts we have suffered from others.  And in discussing such a thing in confession, we are actually talking about our need to make amendment of life and make restitution to those we have harmed, but also and, I think just as importantly, our need to forgive the others who have hurt us.

 

Our English word “confess” is odd, just like the Latin it translates, Confiteor.  It means not only fessing up and accepting responsibility for and rightly naming our misdoings, but it can also mean extolling and proclaiming our faith, like the Augsburg Confession or the Westminster Confession of Faith, or St. Augustine’s faith proclaiming spiritual auto-biography, the Confessions. 

 

We often misunderstand all these scriptures about penance and sin.  We think it is about judicial angels, no harps and angelic choirs, but with wigs and gavels and the occasional sword or trumpet to announce punishment thrown in.  But no:  these scriptures express how when we are hurt, or scared, or sick, we want the world to be orderly and make sense:  this hurt or sickness simply must be a punishment.   It must be from an angry God.  That way it at least makes sense:  having a mean angry God seems better that the void of randomness. So we think we need to change to make nice with the big guy up there who is putting us through the wringer.  Sickness feels very close to guilt, doesn’t it?  This emotional truth is what is behind the Great Litany’s conflation of all these things.  “Spare us Good Lord!” “Good Lord, deliver us.”  Not just from sin, and temptation, and rottenness, but from sickness, plague, flood, and fire, war, and “dying suddenly and unprepared.” 

 

But the heart of the matter is always this: God is love, not rage.  The passage from Joel expresses it well in passing: God is punishing us, right?  But if we repent and turn from our evil ways, “Who knows?  Maybe God will relent and turn.  And he may just leave us, from among the offerings we have put on the altar to placate the Deity’s anger, something for us to eat.”  Who knows?  Maybe God is kind and loving, just like Jesus taught.  Maybe those images of God’s wrath are more about our own feelings of conviction and self-blame than they are about the heart of God.  Maybe he already loves us and accepts us, and wants us to pull up our socks and get on with life.  Who knows?  Maybe God is better, kinder, and gentler than we ever imagined.   Jesus taught us to look for and follow our loving Abba, our papa. In this, there is hope indeed.  

 

In the name of Christ, Amen.