Mark 1:9-15
February 26, 2012
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Last Spring, I was brave enough to take our 5-year old granddaughter Sage by myself to Yosemite. I knew that once I get there I would have many aunties and uncles to help me watch over her. At the registration desk where we picked up our room keys, there were signs and videos that warned us to not leave any trace of food in your car or the bears may break in your car. Before they give you your room keys, you have to sign a waiver that says that you won’t hold Yosemite responsible for any damages to your car. That night, Sage was worried if a bear might break into my car. We know one did not long ago when a black bear ate leftover rice in Joe Chan’s white van.
Wild things fascinate us and we fear them. When a coyote crosses the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco, it’s in the newspapers. Since environmentalists have reintroduced the grey wolf into the western states to control other wildlife, farmers are now up in arms to get rid of them. I bungee cord our garbage can the night before the refuse company picks up our trash so that raccoons can’t rummage. One time when I was driving into my carport, I saw a wild turkey right in front of our house. And it wasn’t Thanksgiving either!
As human beings dominate the earth, we have pushed away anything that’s wild and beastly out of our civilized and orderly existence. Last week, there was an article that reported genetically farmed Chinooks were so prevalent in the returning to lay their eggs in the Spring that they may have reduced any salmon born in the wild. We may have inadvertently in our attempt to save the salmon run destroyed wild salmon altogether.
Genesis
Our story begins in Genesis. God, according to the first book of the Bible, meant for us to live in a lush garden. We were naked and unashamed, on our own, and yet unafraid in the good garden. In Eden we lived in harmony with the world, delighting in all the wonders of creation. In fact, God let us give names to all the animals, passing all of the beasts before us as we named each one of them: “lion,” “tiger,” “ocelot,” “elephant,” “ant,” and on and on.
One of my favorite children books is Does God Have a Big Toe? by Marc Gellman. One of the stories is Adam’s Animals. Here is the story.
Yet things did not go as planned. Unwilling to be beloved creatures, we decided to be gods unto ourselves. We rebelled. We took matters into our own hands and made a grand mess of things. We thus lost the paradise that God intended for us. Cast out of the garden, alone in the trackless waste of a barren landscape, there was enmity between us and the rest of God’s creatures. We were at war with the beasts who were once our friends.
Today’s text begins with Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan and when it seems like he was still dripping wet, Jesus entered the wilderness for 40 days. Typical of the Gospel of Mark, the story is pared down to bare essentials. In the other Gospels, the wilderness is a place of conversation between Jesus and Satan, a location for verbal sparing and biblical debate. Here, all we have is Jesus, Satan and these curious “wild beasts.”
I confess that I have always associated those wild beasts with Satan. Satan brought the wild beasts, or else wild beasts cluster around Satan. After all, one reason that the wilderness is a place to be feared is that it is a place of human exposure, human vulnerability to the violence of the wild beasts. Sage knew that. Wild beasts, in my previous interpretation of this passage, are powerful symbols of threat and evil.
But now I’m not so sure. Perhaps these “wild beasts” serve some deeper purpose than to be there as images of violence and threat.
Mark’s Genesis
Let me lead you back to the beginning of Mark’s Gospel. He writes, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Just as the creation story begins in the first book of the Bible with “In the beginning,” so Mark begins the story of Jesus with, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ…” Get it?
Mark is saying that Jesus Christ is like God starting all over again with creation, finishing the work that was begun in Genesis. God intended for us to live in harmony with creation. The man and the woman were meant to live with all the animals. But of course that’s not what God got. What God got was a man and woman not content to be creatures and rebelliously desiring to be creators unto themselves. The sad disorder of a degraded creation is all around us. We are afraid of the coyote, the raccoon, the wild turkey.
On this First Sunday in Lent, Jesus out there in the dark wilderness is not alone. He is there with the comforting, peaceful, reassuring beasts. In Jesus, a wounded creation is being healed.
Remember how we begin Advent: “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…They will not hurt or destroy all my holy mountain” (Isaiah 11:6-9). Isaiah speaks of God’s restoration of creation to God’s primal intention. That restoration of the world begins with the wild beasts being reconciled to one another. In God’s healed, redeemed creation there will be no hurt and no destruction but rather gracious shalom when God gets what God intends to have in the world.
Mark says that Jesus was with the wild beasts. Unlike when we gather around the campfire at Yosemite and we are looking all around us whether a bear or a deer is coming for us. The wild beasts are not on the edge, out beyond the campfire, cautiously peering in toward the light. Jesus is with them and they are with him.
If you have ever been to a fine arts museum, you probably would have seen one of Edward Hicks paintings. He has a little child standing in the center, surrounded by all sorts of huge, wild beasts, now content, now being led by the hand of the little child. I think this is what was happening there in the wilderness once Jesus got there. Jesus came to bring healing and wholeness to a disordered and violent world.
In many of the passages that we read in the past few weeks in Mark’s Gospel, they tell us about Jesus healing a disordered world, a world where sickness, storms, and deprivation run wild. In Jesus, the wilderness—a threatening place of fear and tooth-claw-and-nail cruelty—is being healed. Things are being set right; maybe not today, maybe not even tomorrow, but someday, because Jesus is present in the wilderness with us. Jesus doesn’t just come to heal us; he comes to heal the whole of creation.
Isaiah said, “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” (11:7-9).
Green Grass
Our text reads that after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming good news of God. In the next few chapters in Mark, we see Jesus calling his disciples, healing the sick, and teaching about the Kingdom of God. When all the clamor for Jesus’ healing touch got so overwhelming that Jesus leads his disciples out to the desert for rest, he found the people have followed him. In Chapter 6, the desert is anything but deserted.
The hurting masses have followed them out to the desert and are begging for attention. Jesus looks upon them as wandering sheep in the wilderness without a shepherd. So Jesus asks everybody to sit down on the green grass so he can teach.
Noticed in Chapter 6, verse 39—“green grass.” Repeatedly in Mark, we are told that this is a dry desert waste. What does this mean?
Israel’s long-awaited Messiah is called the shepherd. Psalm 23 speaks of God as the good shepherd who leads the helpless sheep in “green pastures.” Isaiah said that when the Messiah comes, creation will be restored. All will be set right and “the desert will blossom.” Even the driest, dead places shall be green gardens again.
Wherever Jesus sets foot, surprise: all miraculously bursts into bloom. Life, abundant life is restored.
C.S. Lewis, in The Chronicles of Narnia, lures us into a world where there are witches, strange creatures, and danger. We become children, wandering in an alienating landscape. We are vulnerable children of the wilderness. When we get deep into the story we meet redemption in the flesh, the Savior, the one who shall rescue and make everything right. In what form does that redemption comes? The Christ-like Aslan looms before us. Our redemption comes in the figure of this wild beast. The fearsome lion is our loving Savior.
Stuffed Animals
Those wild beasts whom we have learned to fear—the beasts with whom we now have such enmity—shall be transformed from threatening enemies into comforting friends. Just as Jesus’ miracles are signs, foretastes of what God is doing in the world through Christ, so Jesus’ communion with the wild beasts in the wilderness is a sign of the restoration that is coming and is yet to come in Christ.
Most of you by now know that I am a vegetarian by conviction. This means that while eating a plant-based diet, I am healthier; it’s not why I am a vegetarian. When I studied the Scriptures like some of the ones we heard today, I want to live my life as much as I can in what the Kingdom of God is like. I don’t see the wild beasts as not a part of God’s wonderful creation. They are because God created each one of them. When I continue with my commitment to being a vegetarian, I am in a very little way trying to restore what God originally intended.
Have you ever noticed that some of our children’s favorite toys are stuffed animals? They tend to be teddy bears. Besides the fact that teddy bears were first named after Teddy Roosevelt, almost every child is given a teddy bear, asks for a teddy bear, sleeps with a teddy bear, and is usually a child’s most loved toy.
Maybe our love for teddy bears and other stuffed animals is rooted in the truth that as human beings, we as God’s creatures want to restore our intended relationship with the wild beasts. While we can’t at this time, hug a real black bear in Yosemite, maybe deep down in our creatureness, we still have a divine desire to do what Jesus did when he was in the wilderness for 40 days.
Undoubtedly, Satan tempted Jesus with privilege, power, and fame but it was the wild beasts along with the angels who came to comfort him, nurse him, and to minister to him. Jesus was reconciling his relationship with the wild beasts.
We would find it a bit odd as adults to be walking around with our teddy bears and stuff animals. I know that when our youth go for a sleepover, they still grab their stuffed animals along. But maybe we just should. Maybe if we gave ourselves the grace and permission to have our own teddy bears when we are in our 40s, 50s, 60s, and beyond, we might begin to envision what God’s intended creation is and will be.
Jesus is alone in the wilderness, exposed and vulnerable. And here in the wilderness the wild beasts are there to offer friendly comfort, care, and protection. The problem between us and creation is being healed.
After Jesus completed his 40 days in the wilderness, he came to Galilee proclaiming the good news of God. He said, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”
Let us go to proclaim the good news that Jesus Christ is restoring our relationship with the wild beasts as God, the Creator intended.
Let us pray.
Everlasting, ever-loving God, guide our paths during these 40 days of Lent, that we might not only be brought to honesty about our condition as guilty sinners, but that we might also come to a sure and living hope in your forgiving and redemptive work among us.
Still our tormented, rebellious, conflicted spirits so that we might know the peace that you bring to us and our troubled world. In place of our constant conflict and vindictive desire, put peacefulness in our hearts. Teach us to live with one another and with your whole creation with gratitude for the gifts of other people and your beautiful world, and in harmony with all your creatures. Restore in us that primal vision of a peaceable kingdom where all your creation is at peace. In the name of Jesus, prince of peace, we pray. Amen.