Jesus vs. the Wild Things

I'm remembering a passage from one of James Michner's books about a foolish person who drove out into the desert without a plan or preparation, got stuck in loose sand, and sat there in the sun until he died and the vultures picked the flesh from his skeleton still seated in the jeep.

There is so much of Israel that has unrelenting brown of dust and dried out plant life, or the black of the basalt rock from the Golan.

One can visit the ruin of Chorazin, the town cursed by Christ, and wonder about the harshness of life there and how people were ever able to wrest a living from that scrap of land with little water and so many stones.

And then there is the aftermath of the flood in the First Lesson today, the chaos of destructive and overwhelming water.

Let's place these descriptions on a scale, with the chaos of flood at one end and the chaos of the absence of water at the other, and with the Garden of Eden type place in the middle.

Where is it that we are living at this particular time?

We may be at different points on various days and in differing situations.

There may be those times when we may feel as though we are drowning in the chaos of too much.

Too many demands being placed upon us, each requiring attention.

Perhaps we are losing the perspective which we need in order to be able to sort through them all.

The Congregation Council has recently been engaged in a discussion about the mission statement for the parish that will give us a way to measure what we are doing.

Do the things that are asked of us measure up against that statement?

How do they point us and our work to Jesus?

If they do not fit, then we ought not be doing them; if the do fit, then how can we best accomplish them?

It is a management question to avoid drowning in too much.

At the other end of the scale is the chaos of loneliness.

Are there times that one feels abandoned, disconnected from the body of Christ?

Are there times when it is hard to see the point of it all, when one may feel dried up, useless, of no account.

Am I beloved of the Lord Jesus?

Does anybody care? Is anybody there?

Satan is ready in the midst of our delirium to ever so quietly suggest the ways to feel better, whether by drugs or alcohol, or by striking out in violence against another, or by cursing God and bringing on self-destruction.

C S Lewis explored this so well in his famous little book called The Screwtape Letters.

Evil is clever, oh, so clever in its ways of leading us astray.

Satan even accurately quotes scripture in tempting Jesus, in Matthew and Luke's telling of the story.

Mark doesn't give those details, but merely indicates that Satan is always there, ready to take advantage of any situation.

Satan never leaves Jesus alone; and we are much easier targets than he.

The temptation to complain “Woe is me” is so strong.

To get a handle on what Mark is saying in this cryptic few verses, we need to step back to the very first verse of the Gospel, where Mark writes: The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

The word beginning was deliberately chosen, it seems, to remind us of the first time we heard that word, in the first verse of Genesis: In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth....

The Lord God is beginning again; it is a renewed creation in what Jesus says and does.

Remembering that, once before, God had started over after the flood, now in Jesus the Lord God not only promises and marks the promise with a rainbow as he did earlier, but makes and carries out his promise in person.

In the first creation, mankind was and is in conflict with the wild beasts; but with Jesus in the wilderness, the beasts are become his companions, with enmity no more.

Chaos is overcome.

Last month we heard several of the healing stories from Mark.

They are another instance of Jesus healing a disordered world, the world in which sickness, storms, and deprivation run wild.

In Jesus, the wilderness – that threatening place of fear and tooth-and-claw cruelty – is being healed.

It is chaos overcome, in God's good time, because Jesus is with us in this wilderness in which we live.

Jesus intends to heal not only us, but the whole of Creation.

On one Sunday in this July when we come to chapter 6 of Mark, we will hear of the crowd that has followed Jesus out to the wilderness, and they are hungry.

Jesus directs them to sit down on the green grass, and then feeds them in mind and spirit, and directs the disciples to share the miraculous bread and fish to feed them bodily.

But wait! If they are in the wilderness, it is usually brown, not green.

What is going on here?

Remember the image from Psalm 23 of green pastures and still waters, the very things that the chaos of wilderness would not have.

Where Jesus is, that wilderness chaos is overcome.

All will be set right and the desert shall blossom, as the prophet Isaiah had said.

Life, abundant life, Eden restored.

The image of the power of our God , the power to defeat the forces of chaos, is what our familiar hymn A Mighty Fortress Is Our God lays out for us.

He breaks the cruel oppressor's rod

And wins salvation glorious, we sing.

Though hordes of devils fill the land

All threatening to devour us,

We tremble not, unmoved we stand;

They cannot overpower us.

In this hymn, Luther is using a different image from what we have been exploring today, but still, we are singing about chaos being overcome by the creative word of God.

Where does chaos threaten each of us today?

It may be the chaos of drowning in too much, or the chaos of searingly lonely wilderness.

It may be the chaos of dreadful illness, or the chaos of broken relationships.

The variations are endless, but the final cure is the same,... the Lord Jesus, who puts things right.

God's judgment must prevail!

He holds the field victorious.

Amen.

Please note: The preceding sermon is provided as a resource for the thought, prayer, and meditation of the members and friends of St. Mark's. It is the residue of a verbal event, and thus it does not have academic footnotes and other details that would be expected in a written document. The writer gladly acknowledges the prior thought and work of many Christians before him.