Reading the Gospel of Mark is like flying down on a roller coaster. There’s no slow cranking up that first hill to gain momentum. It’s all momentum. We’re still in the first chapter, friends. So far, Jesus has been baptized by John, rushed straight from there to spend forty days in the wilderness where he is tempted by Satan, then he goes to Galilee to proclaim the good news, so he gathers up a couple of disciples, and then a couple more, then he goes to Capernaum, teaches in the synagogue, heals a man with an unclean spirit, and after he leaves the synagogue he hangs out at Simon Peter’s house where he cures his mother-in-law, and then is inundated by all the sick and possessed people in the city, so he heals them, too, then he goes back out into the wilderness to pray, Peter tracks him down and says, “Uh. What are you even doing? Everybody’s looking for you!”, and Jesus says, “Meh. Let’s go somewhere else. They need me, too.” So then they leave Capernaum and travel all over Galilee “preaching in their synagogues and driving out demonic spirits.” Phew. Mark is not a Gospel that you can swallow whole. Mark’s Gospel is not one that you should stay up all night reading because the suspense is so great, no matter how much we might want to. Mark is like dark chocolate. We gotta take it in little chunks, savor each verse, think on each word; otherwise we’ll wake the next day with a mystery thriller novel headache and a kind of cloudy understanding of what just happened here. We could talk about all kinds of things just in our ten verses for today. We could talk about how Simon’s mother-in-law becomes the first deacon, we could wrestle with the idea that here we have yet another woman filling in a traditional female role of “service” and how maybe we ought to wrestle with that. We could talk about how healing and proclamation are so closely tied together. We could talk about how the message is the most important, but what comes out of the message is the healing. We could talk about how this Gospel has moved us from the wilderness, to the city, to the home, as if we are getting a telescopic view of the story and then zooming down, further and further, closer and closer, until we get to the intimate moment of Simon’s mother-in-law’s fever. We could talk about how this is the first “house church,” where preaching and healing is done, people are served, and then sent out to share the Gospel.
But there’s this one peculiar thing that jumped out at me on this go ‘round. It seems so strange to me. Why does Jesus go back out into the wilderness? It’s the same word - eremos - that is used in the previous verse when the Spirit immediately drives him into the eremos - the wilderness. And, I mean, he does this a lot. He goes off by himself to pray, out into the middle of nowhere - to deserted places. And we’ve often interpreted this to mean that Jesus needs time to rejuvenate, to connect with his Father, to press the reset buttons so that he can go back out and heal and proclaim and connect and touch and be touched. And, like Jesus, we need this time, too. They called it our “quiet times” when I was in high school. But I really think there is something more happening here beyond just the fact that Jesus was really good with his spiritual disciplines.
Maybe I have this on the brain because I’ve been working on the Ignatian exercises. I’ve been meeting with a spiritual director once a week - and, side note, everyone needs a spiritual director, how do we get more people more access to spiritual directors? - anyway, I’ve been working on these exercises for about, I don’t know, eight weeks or something. And this past week, I got held back. I need to go back and take remedial spiritual exercises for a week. Ignatius 090. No college or even spiritual “credits,” no sprucing up of my resume, just me, going back to what I “should” have learned a long time ago. Mostly, this is because I’m having a hard time, these days, truly feeling and accepting the love of God, like you know really feeling it, really knowing it in my heart, and not just accepting it in my brain. See, that’s what I tend to do when something feels hard. I go straight into my head. And this week, I’ve had to work on forgoing the logic and the reasoning and the maxims and the theological treatises, and just sit and dwell in God’s love for me. And let me tell ya, I’d rather be wrestling with Wittgenstein or parsing Greek verbs or cleaning out my cat box, than sitting around waiting on God. I mean, there’s so much to do! My church needs a brilliant idea so we can experience some revitalization. Folks are waiting in hours long lines at food banks. We need to dismantle White Supremacy and learn how to be anti-racist and sign up for COVID vaccines and get my kid through second grade phonics. Oh. And one more thing. In order to do this, in order to go back and listen for the sounds of God’s love for me, I’m going to have to ask for it. I’m going to have to go back to what it was like, so many years ago, when I feel like I asked God for this, I asked God to be present, to show God’s self, to reveal God’s love for me, to heal me and to take this cup of suffering from me, and I waited and I waited and I waited and I got, what felt like to me at the time, no answer. Just crickets. Silence. It was hard. It was a little traumatizing. I don’t like thinking about it. But in order to do my “assignment,” in order to pass remedial faith 101, I was going to have to return back to that time, and maybe even all of those times, when I begged for God, and all I thought I got was silence. I was going to have to go back to my deserted place - my wilderness.
Why on earth would I want to go back there? It was scary there. And dark. And lonely. I was all in my head, all the time. I asked and I asked and I begged, and I got…nothin. Why on earth would I want to go back to the place that was so hard, so empty, back to that place that hurt so much?
Why on earth would Jesus want to go back there? Back to the wilderness? Back to the place where he was tempted by Satan, back to the place where he was surrounded by wild animals, back to the place where this traumatizing event happened to him? Why does he keep going back?
Even Peter asks this, in a way. We soften the language in English of course. But katadioko is much more hostile a word than “hunted” or “searched for.” Peter can’t believe what’s going on here. Jesus has left his post. He’s stopped doing the good things. He thinks Jesus is lost and has forgotten his task. What are you doing here, Jesus? People need you!
Jesus, as usual, understands something Peter does not. He understands that in order to heal, in order to do any good of any form in the world, we need connect back to our hard stories.
And then I thought about Peters Creek, and how you all often refer to your rough experience as a church as “the wilderness” and about how now you all feel like you’ve gotten past that tough time of heartache and division and contention. You all want to be done with the wilderness as much as I do. We’re ready to build. To grow. To do something. Let’s put the past behind us. Let’s move forward. Let’s help. Let’s heal. And proclaim the good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ! Why on earth would we want to go back to the wilderness?
Well. I think it’s because we need it. We need our wilderness experiences. We need to be reminded of our wilderness experiences so that we can reframe the story, we can reframe the traumatic experience, we can tap back in to all that hurt and heartache and vulnerability. Because if we don’t go back to that vulnerability, even just a little, if we don’t go back to the hard stuff, back to the wilderness, we WILL forget the love of God. And we will forget how to heal. Because it is through our brokenness that we are connected to one another. It is through our vulnerability that we are connected to the vulnerability of Jesus. It is through our brokenness that we are able to offer the healing words of the Gospel of Christ to someone else.
I guess what I want to say is that Jesus touches back to his vulnerability, back to his hard experiences, so that he is able to heal others. It is through his stripes that we are healed. It is through the fact that Jesus has been in the wilderness, has heard the silence of God, has doubted God’s love for him, that we, too, are saved. There’s this really important connection between going back to our hard stories and healing. Sometimes we have to go back to the “place” where we’ve been hurt, we have to remember the hurt, so that we can connect with others and help heal their hurt.
Jesus goes back to the wilderness to be with God.
Jesus goes back to the wilderness so that he can continue to be with the broken and fevered and demon-possessed.
We, too, need to go back to the wilderness to be with God.
We, too, need to go back to the wilderness so that we can be with each other.
I participated in Leaderfest yesterday. We invited Ralph Lowe to come and talk to us about the issue of racism and our role at a church in fighting for these issues of justice. He talked about being “The Beloved Community” and about how we are all called to participate in dismantling white supremacy. But, I asked, “How do I, a privileged white woman, enter in to this fight? I know that there’s no magic wand I can wave to fix this. I know that I can’t be the “white savior” who swoops in and saves the day. How do I do it? How do I enter in to the pain of those for whom I’ve never experienced life like they have?” And he said, “You can tell the story of when you were wrong. You can tell the story of how you screwed up, how you didn’t do it right, and then what you learned from that, describe how you learned from that.” He was saying, essentially, I think, that in order for us to be a part of the healing of our communities, we have to go back to our wildernesses, go back to when we absolutely didn’t get it right, or when things were really hard, or when God was totally silent, and we have to tell the story. We have to return to our scars and wait and listen and find the healing that has come out of them. When we go back to our deserted places, other folks listen and watch and wait, too, and they learn how we got out, they learn how they might get out too.
When I was twelve, my little brother was killed in a car accident. I know I’ve told this story before. He was six. My mom was driving. It happened at an intersection pretty close to our house, one that we’d go through on a regular basis, maybe even twice a day. It was just our route. The way to get home from a whole number of places. When Jake died, my parents tried avoiding that intersection. They’d take back roads through other neighborhoods just to avoid going back to the place where the awful thing had happened. And then, they just, stopped. They started going the way they’d always gone, back to the intersection where our whole world crumbled. Maybe it was just because old habits are hard to quit. But I wonder if there was some kind of subconscious healing going on there, too. How hard it must have been for my mom to make that same left turn under those same traffic lights past that same pole with those identical looking cars zooming past? How did she do it? How did she keep going back to that place where she experienced such awfulness, day after day, twice a day, just to get us to and from soccer practice and the swimming pool and Girl Scouts? One of the businesses on the corner allowed us to put a black ribbon on the pole near where my brother was killed. Every year, or maybe when it just got worn out, I don’t remember, my mom or a friend would replace it. It was a symbol. It marked the place where Jake had died. And just its being placed there was a testimony that healing might maybe someday come, that something good might happen, even if it was just simply that we’d never forget that suntanned boy with dirt under his fingernails and a goofy grin. My mom went back to the place of her traumatic experience, and she survived it.
Later, my parents would petition the city to get the traffic lights changed to make it a safer intersection. They could have so easily just walked away, never turned back. They could have left their wilderness behind. We could have moved and never had to have seen that intersection for the rest of our lives. But instead, they went back, day after day, they went back to the wilderness, and then something changed, something good happened, lives were saved.
We go back to our wildernesses because each time we do, we bring a little healing back with us. We go back to our wildernesses because when we are reminded of our pain, we can enter in to other’s pain, other’s wildernesses, and I think that’s how healing works. I can accept Jesus’s healing because I know that he has been to the wilderness. I can hear the loving message of the Gospel because I know that Jesus has been to the same desolate places that I have, that he kept going back to those desolate places, and he took life from that, and he gave it to the people.
I think maybe God wants us all, from time to time, to pause, to enter back into our wildernesses, just to be with God, just to be with the one who suffered and died and descended into hell and on the third day rose again. Only then, after we’ve gone back to our hard stories, will we be able to carry the peace and healing message of Christ in a way that others can hear it. Maybe even so that we can hear it.
Thanks be to God.
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