February 26, 2012 – Mark 1:9-15

Mark 1:9-15

Never Alone

First Sunday in Lent – February 26, 2012

First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB

 

I’m glad that we get to hear about Jesus’s baptism again here at the beginning of Lent.

Lent is a time in the church of baptismal renewal.

A time when we are offered an opportunity to think about what our baptisms mean.

A time when we are invited by God to deepen our way of baptismal living.

Our lives are to modelled on Jesus’s, right?

So today the question is: how is this account of what happens to Jesus after his baptism

significant for us?

 

At the very beginning of course, in concert with the baptism, we hear a voice.

And the voice pronounces blessing: You are my beloved child!

You are hand-made by a gracious and generous God.

You are precious, full of wonder, full of possibility.

Made for grace, made for love, just as you are.

It’s another way of saying what I say to the children every week:

You are making this day special by just your being you,

            which I stole from Mr. Rogers, of course.

Before we do anything – before Jesus does anything – a blessing is given.

There is blessing in our relationship with God right from the beginning.

We don’t earn it: it is given.  It is a gift of grace.  God loves us as we are, right now.

Lent is a time to remember and reclaim this baptismal blessing, and rest in it and

be renewed by it.

 

But Lent is a time, too, to remember what happens to Jesus immediately after his baptism.

The Holy Spirit – the Spirit of God – drives him into the wilderness.

The word Mark uses is almost violent: the Spirit of loving grace that entered him at baptism –

the very Spirit of God, the very same Spirit given to you, the Spirit that was at work

in Jesus animating his entire ministry –

that same Spirit drives him into the wilderness.

The Spirit of God takes you to the challenging places.

I think it’s true to say that if the Spirit leaves you where you are,

it’s not the Holy Spirit that is at work.

We will see this throughout Jesus’s ministry: the Holy Spirit of love will take him to

the difficult places, places of suffering, places of despair, places of isolation,

places of grief, places of illness, places of poverty, and places of death.

It’s important for us to recognize that it’s not a bad Spirit that takes him – no compels him! – to

these challenging and often dangerous places – Satanic places – that seem to filled with

dangerous and wild beasts.

It’s not a bad Spirit that takes him there: It is the Holy loving Spirit of God!

God wants him to go to these places.

And these places are challenging places for Jesus to be.

He is tempted there, and what Mark means is that Jesus is tempted to give it all up.

To settle for something easier.

To not take the path that God has laid out for him, the path of service, the path of suffering love,

the path of entering into even the demonic with others.

It’s not hard to give that up.  In fact, it’s very tempting.

Jesus was tempted to give it up not just at the beginning of his ministry but

I’m sure throughout it.

The church throughout its long history has been tempted to take much easier ways than

Jesus laid out for us, and it has frequently succumbed to the temptation.

But Jesus we learn this morning resists the temptation.

And because he has resisted the temptation, we can resist the temptation.

He is fully human, we say, he is fully what we are meant by God to be.

He can resist, he can stick to the loving things God is calling him to do.

And so can we.

But, Mark gives us some good news to go along with this, the good news that

the Spirit doesn’t just drive him to the wilderness places and

leave him to his own devices.

The Spirit also sends him angels.

The Spirit does not abandon him to the presence of the demonic and the wild beasts.

The angels do not leave him.  The angels minister to him, they wait on him with food.

They provide a ministry of diakonia to him,

a ministry of accompaniment and presence and of waiting upon: they feed him and

they nurture him and strengthen him for his work.

The Spirit that right from the moment of his baptism drives him into the difficult places

does not leave him alone.

Yes: the baptismal life we are called to is hard: it’s always much easier to do nothing for

neighbours in need.

But the Spirit that calls us and compels us to it enables its endurance.

And this is great news.  Jesus holds firm.  And so can we.

 

I think this story and this good news can keep up us focussed today during our Annual Meeting.

Our congregation is full of the Holy Spirit these days.

I think we’ve heard the voice that names us beloved.

And I think we’ve been driven to some challenging places.

I also think we have discovered in each and every instance that when we’ve been driven to some

difficult places that we have also been accompanied by God’s very presence.

I think our LUM meal teams have found this.

I think our Kids Club staff have found this.

I know I have found this at food bank every other Wednesday: an angel named Rose

frequently waits on me with heavenly heavenly bannock at food bank,

made with flour she has received as a client there.

It’s a difficult place to be sometimes, but God is there because God has driven us there.

God’s Holy Spirit of love compelled a lot of people to be present with Rebecca and

Jared this week when their unborn infant died.

It was a desert place, but, Rebecca told me, “While we’ve felt a lot of different things this week,

one thing we haven’t felt is alone.”

Angels waited on them in the wilderness: this is good news.

And it encourages us to  hold firm, and stay fast, and continue to follow the Spirit’s lead as it

continues to lead us to desert places where we know angels will minister to us.

Faith is trusting that this will be so.

Part of the hope in our Amnesty International Letter Writing project during Lent is that

those of us concerned with Social Justice will connect and form an FLC

Social Justice Working Group, something I think the time is right for,

especially during Lent, a time when we consciously remember that in our baptisms God

calls us to a way of living that participates with God in God’s loving mission to

love bless heal and restore this world and every person in it.

 

It’s helpful, I think, for us to remember that this is not a recent invention but in fact

has deep deep roots in what the church has always felt is involved in baptismal living.

From earliest times, if you were a non-baptized person who expressed an interest in Christianity,

you first underwent a kind of examination.

You were examined to see if you had what it takes to be a Christian.

You might be surprised to know that that examination consisted of a single question.

“Are you willing to help out those in need?”

If you answered yes, you went through a period of baptismal preparation that could last

as long as two years.

The purpose of this was not so much learning and acquiring information.

You didn’t spend two years going to New Member Classes!

During this time you worked on caring for your neighbours, both the people you knew and liked,

as well as the people you didn’t know and didn’t like.

You were observed by a sponsor throughout this period to see how well you cared for

the vulnerable:

widows, orphans, the imprisoned, foreigners, the hungry, the naked, the poor.

When you’d made enough progress on this front,

you were invited to stand before the congregation.

Then your sponsor would say, “I’ve been watching this person and observed how he or she

has loved and cared for the sick and vulnerable and I see signs of progress in

his or her life.”

When you got that far you took a crash course at Lent:

this is when you did the New Member class and

learned the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostle’s Creed.

And then on evening before Easter, at the Great Easter Vigil  service, you were baptized with

all the other candidates and committed yourself to a whole life of baptismal living.

And then the first thing you did, just as the Holy Spirit given to you at that moment

was about to compel you into further acts of wilderness love, was to

share Holy Communion, to be waited upon by angels,

as you celebrated the new life of

loving living you’d been raised to with Jesus on Easter.

 

So let us on this day be strengthened by that witness and

by our being waited upon in Holy Communion.

We are not alone.

Let’s encourage one another.  Let’s continue to be thankful for one another.

Let’s remember who we are and what God is calling us to be about at our Annual Meeting.

And when the Spirit drives us into the wilderness and desert places of this world,

let’s be on the lookout for the angels God will send to minister to us: they will be there.

So together let us say, “ Amen.”

Pastor Michael Kurtz

Sermons

If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Comments are closed.