Reminders

Charlotte Collins Reed
Christ Church Episcopal
February 21, 2021

1 Lent B 

          My sister was iced in at her home in northern Virginia last week, so she spent some time going through old family photos.  She texted a particularly unflattering one of me when I was about 9 years old that had our grandmother in the background, and our great-grandmother barely visible behind her.  Our father did an excellent job of creating photo albums of our family when my brother, sister, and I were growing up and this photo was from one of those collections.  When Dad died, we found that actually only a fraction of the photos he took made it into the albums.  There were drawers, boxes, and envelopes stuffed with photos from decades ago.  We have always treasured those photos, but now that so many of the people in the pictures are gone, we treasure them all the more.  The photos are a way to remember those who have gone before us, the wonderful times we had, the love we experienced, and to pass all of that down to our children and grandchildren.  What we remember, we can pass along to future generations. 

          So when I read our scripture passages for this morning, I had been thinking about the way we remember important people and events through stories and photos.  Our lovely reading from Genesis about God’s covenant with every living creature is sandwiched between the story of the flood and the destruction of all human, animal, and plant life not on the ark, and a story about Noah and his sons and grandsons that is best left out of a G-rated sermon.  I have always thought that God set the rainbow in the sky to remind we humans of God’s promise that never again will God cause a flood to destroy all flesh.  But listen to what God says in this passage: “When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh….when the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” 

          The rainbow, according to this passage, is created to remind God of God’s covenant with humankind!  When God sees the rainbow, God is reminded of the anger at humankind that caused the flood, of God’s promise never to do that again, and of God’s love for all that God created.  The rainbow is both an image and a story that promises us that God will never forget the wilderness of the flood.  God will always remember God’s compassion and love.  God wants to remember the whole story including God’s promise to all living creatures so God set the rainbow in the sky as a reminder.  To God.

           In the context of God’s desire to remember God’s covenant, rooted in God’s compassion and love, which we heard about in the psalm a few minutes ago, we hear the story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness this morning.  We hear this story every year on the first Sunday of Lent as we begin our journey in the Lenten wilderness.  Mark does not give us a lot of details about Jesus’ time in the wilderness.  Matthew and Luke later fill in those gaps.  But Mark tells us so little, that everything Mark does say is important.

          What does Mark tell us?  First, after Jesus has been baptized, we hear the voice of God say “this is my Son, the Beloved, with you I am well pleased.”  God claims Jesus as God’s own son and since there is no birth story in Mark’s gospel, this is the first story in which we hear of the unique relationship between God and Jesus.  Jesus is God’s beloved.

          The very next thing we hear is that immediately the Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness.  The Spirit did not lead Jesus to the wilderness, nor did the Spirit call Jesus there.  The Spirit drove Jesus there.  We are not told why Jesus was driven to the wilderness.  But we do know that Jesus is not in the wilderness because he has done anything wrong or made God angry.  There has been no time for that.  Immediately after hearing that Jesus is God’s beloved Son, he is driven to the wilderness.  Perhaps Jesus is driven to the wilderness to figure out what God means.

Then we are told that Jesus was tempted by Satan, and was with the wild beasts, and angels waited on him.  The wild beasts remind us of Isaiah’s vision of the peaceable kingdom in Isaiah 65: “The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox; but the serpent—its food shall be dust! They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the Lord.”  Even in the midst of the wilderness, there is evidence that the Kingdom of God has arrived.  And in 1 Kings (19) an angel of the Lord waits on Elijah, providing Elijah with food and water that gave Elijah strength for the 40 days and 40 nights it took Elijah to get to Mt. Horeb.  Even in the midst of the wilderness, where Jesus is tempted by Satan, God’s love and compassion are evident.  Jesus learned in the wilderness that he could trust that love to sustain him through all that was ahead.

          We enter our Lenten wilderness where we deny ourselves certain pleasures or take up certain disciplines, as Robin told us on Ash Wednesday, not as punishment for our sins, but to learn to trust in God rather than ourselves, our possessions, or our appetites to bring us wholeness.  We enter the wilderness of Lent knowing that God has promised to always remember God’s great love for us, and that there will be signs of the Kingdom of God in the wilderness, our own versions of wild beasts and angels, if we open our eyes, ears, and hearts and look.  This particular Lent, as we also live in the Covid wilderness and wildernesses of illness and other great challenges, we can draw on the strength of the Lenten wilderness that knows the promise of God.  We know how to do wilderness because we do wilderness every year.  We survive, perhaps even thrive, in the wilderness because we have the stories that tell us of our God who is determined to remember God’s covenant with us, stories that remind us of God’s love and compassion for us, and stories that call us to open our eyes, ears, and hearts to see that whatever the wilderness, whatever temptations we face, we are not there alone. 

                                                                             Amen.