Starting from Beloved

Mark 1:9-15

If you blink, you might miss Lent.

Or, at least, you might miss the two-sentence story in Mark’s gospel that teaches us about the event in Jesus’ life that we refer to to establish our own practice of Lent,

our own season of forty days for “wilderness” and prayer, in preparation for Easter. 

 

Mark, who tells all his Jesus stories economically and “immediately”, doesn’t make a whole episode of the story of Jesus in the wilderness. He packs in a few telling details – wild beasts, Satan, and angels – and moves right along. The few details Mark chooses are theologically rich: there’s a direct and personal encounter with the forces of resistance to God, personified as Satan,
and the companionship with the wild beasts and ministering angels are signs of Jesus’ closeness to God – in relationship, and in his own being.

 

But there’s not enough of it to satisfy our “story” instincts, so the lectionary folks, who choose what scripture we hear each week, have to give us two other episodes of Major Jesus Events (his baptism and acclamation by God, and the start of his public ministry) in order to make what we need to hear today fit our usual sense of story. 
As a result, this morning it sounds almost like Jesus’ epic forty day wilderness retreat happens not far and separated from everything else, but in right in the middle of all the busyness and events of life.

 

Which is, maybe, more like our real lives than the gospel stories usually sound.

No matter how committed you and I are to our spiritual lives, we mostly don’t get forty days off to go on a wilderness retreat (and some of us are delighted not to spend six weeks in the wilderness anyway).
You and I practice Lent – we take our time for reflection, fasting, and prayer – right in the middle of all the busyness and events of our regular lives. You and I, in general, must deal with Satan – with the forces of resistance to God – right in the middle of big personal moments and important or everyday work.  We “give up” dessert, or “take on” an extra habit of prayer, or of caring for others, in the middle of birthday parties and cultural holidays and election-cycle news and turning in reports and putting out the garbage.

 

And maybe that’s how it should be. 

Jesus certainly models for us the need to take serious time “away” – whether that’s “away” in a desert retreat, or just “away” from your desk or phone – in order to get deeper into our relationship with God, but Mark shows us that that happens right in the middle of everything. No long lead up and planning, no wind down – just do it. 

 

And one thing I’m noticing this week is part of the “everything” that happens right before Jesus goes to the wilderness. As Mark tells it to us, the Spirit “drives” Jesus to the wilderness right after he rises from the water of his baptism, right after seeing heaven opened and hearing God’s voice proclaiming “You are my Son, the Beloved. With you I am well pleased.”

 

(Setting aside gnarly theological questions about how God-in-heaven and God-in-Jesus relate to one another when they are both the same God), I find it interesting that Jesus’ wilderness “test” – an experience of trying out the depths of his identity and soul – is essentially launched by the experience of being affirmed as Beloved. As joyfully and delightedly loved by God. 

 

And I wonder what happens to us – to you and me – if we enter Lent this year as God’s beloved children. What happens if we come to our annual encouragement to “self-examination and repentance; prayer, fasting, and self-denial;” and study of scripture, to quote the Prayer Book, not as guilty people who need to do better, not as ordinary unremarkable people, but as God’s specifically beloved children?  

I mean, we can be all of the above at the same time, but what if we let the belovedness define us, and our experience of Lent, instead of being defined by the other truths about who we might be and how we live.

 

It’s easy for me – maybe for you – to treat Lent as a sort of bonus “new year”, with resolutions I make because I want to improve my life, or myself. I want to be better at regular times of prayer, or better at not needing chocolate to feel better.
Most of the time, those choices of what to “give up” or “take on” for Lent carry an unconscious assumption that what I do and am is not “good enough” – either for God, or for myself, or for someone else’s expectations.

 

But I wonder if starting from belovedness – from the deep truth that I, like you, like Jesus, are God’s beloved child already, before Lent, before improvement, before crucifixion and resurrection and Easter – would start me on different practices of prayer, different habits in my relationship with dessert, or something else altogether.

 

I wonder if starting from belovedness would mean a whole different experience of “temptation” – if I’d encounter the forces that tug me toward little acts of indifference, selfishness, dishonesty, negligence, and see them clearly as not me – because they so obviously just don’t fit with who I am as child of God.  
I wonder if you might encounter the pushes and tugs toward little acts of pride, or achievement, or one-upping a neighbor, or self-indulgence, and find that you just don’t need that, at all, because you are already so deeply and compellingly beloved of God. 

I wonder if we, together, might find it more natural to care for and love others (including others we don’t like), because we are so filled up with God’s love for us.

 

I wonder if you and I might experience the Spirit’s push to get closer to God as a joyful “retreat” from the pressures of the life we are right in the middle of, and not as one more thing to have to take on in the midst of it all.  Feel the pull and tug of more time of  prayer and thanksgiving as a delight;
experience “self-examination and repentance” as delightful discovery,
and the relief of turning with our wounds and needs and failures to the One who can’t fail us. 

 

I don’t know for sure, but I find I love the wondering.
So I know I’m going to try to shape my Lent this year by paying more attention to God’s love, to work on trusting that belovedness – believing it in my gut, not just my head. 

I’m still figuring out if that means I should be having more dessert, or less, but I know it means more giving thanks, more pausing to notice God’s gifts, more taking seriously what it means to be loved – deeply, enthusiastically loved – by God.

 

Will you wonder with me, this year, in the midst of everything?
Listen now to the Spirit, pushing us into a place of wildness, into our need for right relationship with God. And listen first to the voice of God, quietly thundering from heaven, “You are my beloved child. With you I am well pleased.”

 

 

Uncontained

Mark 9:2-9

Today’s story from Mark’s gospel is one that we read quite often in the Episcopal Church – a story told in Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels, as well as Mark’s – it actually gets more ink and attention in the gospels, taken as a whole, than the Christmas story does.

So I’ve gotten pretty used to this story, over the years, and I’ve also gotten used to thinking, as I read it, that when Peter squints at the dazzling glory of Jesus, holding mystic conversation with the most famous prophets, and says “It’s good to be here – let us build booths for you!” it’s because Peter wants to stay. That he wants to hold on to the moment, to stay in the place where all the glory of God is revealed.

 

I have a friend who talks all the time about how easy it is to want to stay on the mountaintop, to hold onto the moment when God feels powerfully present, to bask in the emotional high of a powerful insight, a miracle, a wonder you’ve just discovered. She’s reminded me over and over that no one gets to stay in those glorious moments forever, which is good advice, just annoying when you’re in the middle of enjoying a great experience.

But this week, I started to wonder – what if Peter is not trying to hold on to this mountaintop moment?
What if this idea of building booths for the dazzling trio of holy men is actually a gut reaction of trying to get a bit of separation from the moment, distance from the whole eyewatering glory of God? 

 

Is Peter maybe trying to contain this revelation instead of stay in it? To put a few walls around this dazzling, heart-stopping power and presence, before it overwhelms him and his friends? 

(Given that the full glory of God can straight up kill you if you get too close, according to the clear and strong tradition of God’s people, this is a pretty reasonable thing for Peter to suggest in his moment of terrifying awe.)

 

I wouldn’t be surprised, now that I think about it, if Peter is trying to put some safety barriers around the experience he’s having. To create a safe, sacred place for the full raw encounter with God – just like his faithful ancestors did the last time they bumped into the full, raw, dazzling power of God on a mountain (the mountain where Moses received the commandments). 

 

I wouldn’t be surprised if many of us do the same, honestly.
You or I, surprised by a powerful experience of God, a dazzling revelation 

– or a quieter but deeply raw emotional connection with the creative force of the universe taking a personal interest in you – 

might try to contain that experience a bit. To create a safe, sacred space in our hearts or lives that we separate from the “normal” – the way we live day by day.

 

Because the raw, whole, knee-knocking, indescribable presence of God frankly does not fit in most of the spaces and habits, and even hopes and dreams, of our normal lives, after all.
It’s hard to get the groceries, pay the bills, finish the report, [the homework, get through the practice session], or take an evening really off to relax when the direct presence of God is rearranging your experience of time and meaning and personal space. 

 

So maybe you just don’t talk about having a visual experience of God, because it feels weird, or too hard to describe.
Maybe I tell myself that a sense of hearing the voice of God was wishful thinking, or too little sleep. Maybe someone else convinces themself that we only really encounter God near the altar of the church, or in a particular garden, or only at sunrise – not anywhere and anytime.  

 

I suspect that if you or I are doing that, that we do it mostly unconsciously. A natural protective reaction. Just like Peter, who Mark tells us “did not know what to say.”  I suspect he didn’t even quite know what he did say when it came out of his mouth. 

 

He’s in luck though. What his uninhibited mouth calls on in that moment of amazement is a deep tradition of his faith. 

For centuries, God’s people depended on the tabernacle to create a safe, sacred place for the presence of God. A place where God’s people could count on finding the presence and power of God near at hand – which also – maybe primarily – served to keep the disruptive, powerful presence from erupting through all the ordinary and daily activities of God’s people.  

On that other terrifyingly dazzling mountain generations before, God gave Moses specific instructions of how to create the tabernacle – because the mountaintop glory is absolutely too much for God’s people to handle – God told Moses to create this dwelling for God. 

And that’s the exact word that springs to Peter’s lips in our story today – “Rabbi, let us create tabernacles for you, and Moses, and Elijah” – safe, sacred spaces for the unbearable fullness of God.

 

Peter probably doesn’t realize in that moment what Mark, and other later interpreters of this story, want you and me to know. That what God is doing in Jesus is to make it actually safe to see God’s face, to hang out with the fullness of God.

God in Jesus is making it possible for God to accompany us through all the ordinary places and experiences of our lives – dinner, daily work, travel, funerals and weddings and sickrooms and the “marketplace” – the closest first century Israel gets to our frenetic media environment.  

 

In Jesus, the whole powerful, glorious presence of God is, in practical terms, just as disruptive as an eye-watering mountaintop thundercloud, but not as terrifying. A shakeup of our expectations and habits that comes in the form of a friend – a loving, generous, humorous (and kind of fanatical) friend who coaxes and inspires us into miracles and challenges we’d never take up for ourselves. Into getting close to the presence of God.

Just because it’s God’s desire to be with us everywhere, in all our humanness. 

 

And Peter – evoking the tabernacle that used to contain the dangerous disruptive glory of God, kept it separate from our everydayness – winds up unconsciously calling on exactly that eternal desire of God not to be boxed up apart from our lives, but to be with us wherever we go. 

 

Generations after that tabernacle was first put up in the wilderness, after the glory of God moved off the mountain and settled into a safe, sacred space near to the camp of God’s people, King David got the bright idea to build a Temple, a permanent stone building to safely, sacredly house the glory of God. 

And God turned David down flat.

No, God said, I belong in the tabernacle, the tent that moves around with my people. My presence, my glory, goes where my people go.  The tabernacle where God could once seem to be safely contained is actually a vehicle for God accompanying us.

 

And even after David’s son did build a Temple in Jerusalem, that’s been true about God – that the eternal desire of God is to be fully with us. To go wherever we go. To go with us maybe not quite in the terrifying bright thunder of mountaintop glory, but absolutely to go with us in all God’s own fullness of presence, whether we’re ready for it or not. 

 

So no tabernacle gets built on this mountain to contain Jesus (or Moses, or Elijah). And the fullness of God – less dazzling, but equally powerful – actually comes down the mountain with Peter, as Jesus walks beside him and James and John, helping them come to terms with what they’ve just experienced.
The glory none of us are equipped to handle just walks calmly off the mountain with them, back into a life where it keeps coming up that they need God with them – with us – even when God is too much for us to handle.

 

God walks down our mountains with you and me, too - disguised as the friend we have the best conversations with, or the moments of little wonder when things fall into place, or the relief when our heart-wounds are healed, our burdens released, our spirits set free to love one another.

 

Because, whatever Peter thought he was trying for when he proposed his tabernacles, God can’t be held onto, can’t be contained – but always holds on to, always makes a dwelling for, us.