The Rev. Clare Fischer-Davies
St. Martin’s Church
March 1, 2009
Lent 1 B
If you have had a small child in your household any time in this past generation, you are likely to have had at least one Noah’s Ark toy. Our house was full of them – what else do you give a preacher’s kids? We had the chunky plastic Playskool ark, and a Noah’s ark puzzle, and a quilted ark that unfolded to show you all the animals nestled inside. And we played with them – marching the animals around singing “Who built the ark?” and “The animals, they went in by twosies.”
But oh my, this is not a story for children. While we were marching the animals into the safety of the ark, the rest of the created world was being obliterated in the Flood. It is a ghastly story and if you want to refresh your memory of just how ghastly it is, go back and start reading at Genesis 7.
Today, we get the happy ending – when Noah and his family emerge from the ark into a world scoured free from evil and God says “I am establishing my covenant with you.” This is the first time the word “covenant” appears in Scripture, defining a relationship between God and God’s people that is a radical departure from the theology of the ancient Near East.
A god that destroys every living creature? Now that was normal in the ancient Near East – the gods were expected to be angry, capricious, unpredictable – you just did your best to appease and please them with sacrifice and took your chances. But a God that says, “I promise you that I will never again act in this way – and I’m going to give you a sign of that promise?” That is something entirely new. God makes a promise – a promise that foreshadows the covenants that will be made with Abraham, with Moses and with David – and ultimately the New Covenant that is incarnate in the life, death and resurrection of Christ.
A covenant is a two-sided promise – solemn and binding upon both parties. It creates a relationship – a dynamic, living relationship – and that living relationship between God and the people in covenant with God is a theme that echoes all through our Scripture. What begins with Noah and a rainbow continues all the way through to our most recent celebration of baptism. We are a covenant people, baptized into that living relationship and inheriting the covenants made with our ancestors.
One way to think about the season of Lent, is as a time – a 40 day span that echoes Jesus’ sojourn in the wilderness – a time to renew that living relationship, to remember and recall and recommit ourselves to the covenant made with each one of us in baptism.
The story of Noah and the Ark isn’t really a story for children, and we have to be careful that we don’t turn baptism into just a story for children, either. Every time we baptize a smiling, beautiful, winsome baby – we have to be careful that we don’t turn baptism into just a family celebration and a sentimental opportunity to dress the baby up and take pictures.
We hear the story of Jesus’ baptism again today – and it is full of details that remind us that this is a story for grown ups. As Jesus rises, dripping from the water, the heavens are torn apart and the Spirit descends, and Jesus hears a heavenly voice confirming his identity as God’s pleasing son. But then, the Spirit seems to turn from dove into harpy – expelling Jesus out into the wilderness for an encounter with Satan.
Jesus goes out into the wilderness to wrestle with Satan – and I think Mark wants us to understand that the wrestling match has only just begun. In Matthew and Luke, Satan tempts Jesus with three very specific tests, and Jesus passes each one. You get the feeling in Matthew and Luke that Jesus has to pass the test to get on with his ministry. But in Mark, I think we are meant to understand that Jesus will never stop wrestling – that the powers and principalities of evil are coming out in force against him – and that only on the cross will they be defeated.
The progressive, post-modern church isn’t very comfortable talking about wrestling with the powers and principalities of evil in individual human lives. We can talk about political oppression, and genocide, and economic injustice and sexual predation as evil and we can be very involved in working to make a better world – and that’s all very admirable, but we have an awfully hard time talking about how we wrestle with the same pride and greed and lust on the ordinary, everyday human level.
Part of being incorporated into the living relationship, the living covenant of our baptism is understanding that we will be driven into the wilderness, too. On Ash Wednesday, we prayed that we were “acknowledging our wretchedness.” Now that’s an unfashionable and unpopular word! But it doesn’t mean “worthless” or “scumbag”: To be wretched is to be distressed, afflicted, woeful, unhappy.
Who here this morning has not had an experience like that? Who here has not had moments, days, even years of feeling wretched – who here has not spent time in the wilderness?
It’s part of being human – part of the human condition. And I don’t think the church does anyone a service by not talking about so universal and so powerful a human experience. We all have to wrestle – with feeling wretched, with tragic events, with the consequences of our choices, with the anxiety settling over our country like a toxic cloud.
Jesus is driven out into the wilderness to meet the power of evil. It’s just the first round – Satan has more to throw at him: betrayal, abandonment, torture, even death. Jesus himself will know what it is to be wretched.
Lent begins with us acknowledging that we are wretched – Lent begins with letting go of the denial, the pride, the blindness that keep us from admitting that we need salvation. But it doesn’t stop there – our liturgy doesn’t stop there – our faith doesn’t stop there.
God makes covenant after covenant with human beings who are flawed, broken, even wretched. God keeps establishing a relationship with us, even when we break that relationship, or ignore it, or even rail against it. God keeps pursuing us, calling us to come back, seeking the renewal of that relationship – blessing and healing and reconciling every single one of us into God’s great compassionate heart.
God’s compassion is so deep, so absolute; God’s love for us is so profound – God finally chooses to live and die as one of us. God chooses to fight the same battles we fight – to experience what it means to encounter evil, to feel wretched, even what it means to die.
The early Church understood baptism to be a drowning - a death. We share in a death like Christ's in order to share in his resurrection. Baptism was taken so seriously, that candidates for baptism prepared for three years. You had three years to attend worship, to receive teaching, to understand what it would mean for you to join this dangerous new sect that preached a Gospel of forgiveness and new life, and that wasn't afraid of any human power.
That's the power of baptism that the letter of I Peter understands. Most scholars think that this is at least partly a baptismal sermon, written for a group of Christians who were experiencing persecutions. Baptism saves, not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience through the resurrection of Christ. "Good conscience" doesn't have anything to do with personal morality - it means a willingness to stand with Christ through persecution. It means steadfastness. It means believing that, even in the most wretched circumstances, God's power and grace will prevail.
Jesus goes out into the wilderness and says to Satan, "Bring it."
It is the next chapter in the covenant story that begins with the rainbow - with the sign that God promises to stand with God's people no matter what - to stand with us through persecution, through trials, through our wretchedness - even through our own rebellion and hardness of heart.
Paul will write to the church in Rome twenty years before the Gospel of Mark is written, writing out of his own Jewish understanding of covenant and will ask: If God is for us, who is against us? Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."
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