Being Waited on by Angels

A Reflection for I Lent                        All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, N.C. 

February 22, 2015                               Thomas E. Wilson

Genesis 9:8-17 Psalm 25:1-9 1 Peter 3:18-22 Mark 1:9-15

Being Waited on by Angels in the Wilderness

From Mark’s Gospel lesson for today: “And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.”

Last week I shared with you that Pat and I studied in Israel years ago; while there, we wanted to have the experience of going out into the Wilderness. We went on a hike and we had a guide, took plenty of water, had been well-fed at breakfast, and had some food packed for lunch. There is now a path, but if you wander off the path, you will get into trouble. In 1969 Bishop Pike decided to go into the Judean wilderness to follow the footsteps of Jesus and was unprepared and perished when he got lost. His body was found at the bottom of a steep canyon into which he had stumbled due to weakness resulting from dehydration.

It is a dangerous place and you do not go into it alone. There were about 20 of us in the class as we hiked across the rocky land, and while we did see a young Bedouin woman herding a small group of goats in the distance, we saw no wild animals. During the time of Jesus, the wilderness was a place from which the wild animals would come to raid the sheep folds and farms on the border. The wild animals were frightening, but when the prophet Isaiah had a vision of the peaceable kingdom, he wrote a song of a time when:

The wolf shall live with the lamb,
    the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
    and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze,
    their young shall lie down together;
    and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
    and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
 They will not hurt or destroy
    on all my holy mountain;
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
    as the waters cover the sea.

I think that Mark is suggesting that Jesus is living into that vision of unity with all of God’s creatures. Mark’s Gospel has an underlying question that it asks its listeners - “Who do you say this is?” The story begins when Jesus comes out of the water at his baptism and God declares to Jesus, “You are my child, chosen and marked by my love, pride of my life.” Later there are stories of Jesus telling the demon to be quiet when the demon says “I know who you are!” There are the stories of the disciples wondering who this Jesus is. The Pharisees, the Sanhedrin, and Pilate all demand of Jesus his identity. Finally the Centurion at the foot of the cross says at the time of Jesus’ death, “Surely this man was of God.” The Gospel of Mark ends at the empty tomb where the women run away afraid, which raises the question again “Who do you say this Jesus is?”

My thought is that Jesus is how we are united one to another and to the wild beasts and the entire cosmos. If each week we take the body of Christ into ourselves when we eat the bread and wine of the Eucharist and thereby become what we eat, how are we like Jesus? Do we hear God saying to each of us, “You are my child, chosen and marked by my love, pride of my life.”? God has been saying that same thing to me in so many ways since I was born, but it took me years to hear it. Some, in fact most times, I preach what I need to hear. I just came across a poem in which there are a couple of lines which made me stop dead still and made me wish I had written them. It is by Christian Wiman, he is a poet who edited Poetry Magazine for a decade and then stepped down as he faced what he called "the bright abyss" of a diagnosis of an untreatable and unpredictable cancer which allowed him to  go into the wilderness within and deal with his faith and write about it. He now teaches at Yale Divinity School. This poem is  titled The Preacher Addresses the Seminarians:

“I stand before you in a rage of faith and 
have all good hope that you will all go help.untold souls back into their bodies, ease the annihilating No above which they float,”

( for the entire poem see http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/249782 )

Twenty-one years ago when I walked into the wilderness following the footsteps of Jesus, I thought that the wilderness was “out there somewhere”, but the devastating wilderness is “in here”, in that annihilating No above which my soul floats at times. I long for my soul, the who I am at the core of my being, to be reunited with the “rage of faith” of being loved by God and connected to this man Jesus from 2000 years ago and today, and with all the wild beasts as we are all fed by the angels.

Do we play it safe and never go near the edges of our comfort or do we follow the footsteps of Jesus into unfamiliar territory and maybe then look back, like Robert Frost in the last stanza of his poem the Road Less Taken?

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

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