Where the Wild Things Are: Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent B

When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak. There are only ten sentences in the entire story, which is why, when the book was made into a movie a few years back, a whole lot of detail had to be invented and added in. Mark’s gospel shares that characteristic when compared with the other gospels-- although Sendak’s glorious illustrations and incredible beasts made up for the scarcity of words. Sendak also had a main character whose imagination was running wild, which got him into trouble—unusual in a world at that time of vapid, whiter-than-white and blander-than-bland Dick, Jane, and Spot.

Where the Wild Things Are is the story of a boy named Max. One evening while wearing his wolf costume, he literally goes wild. His mother calls him a wild thing, and she doesn’t mean it as a complement. He responds by threatening to eat her, and so he gets sent to bed without anything to eat at all. As the minutes and maybe hours go by, the walls of Max's room disappear and become a forest, and he wanders through it until he finds a shore and a boat that takes him sailing a long distance to the land where the wild things live. 

Max quickly subdues the Wild Things and becomes their king. He enjoys bossing them around for awhile-- but eventually he starts to miss his home, and so announces his intention to leave. The Wild Things beg him to stay, and threaten to eat him up just as had his own mom. But he refuses them, climbs back into his boat, and sails back over that long distance. Even at sea he can smell the smell of something good to eat. And when he gets back to his room, he finds his supper there waiting for him on a table, still hot. (1) 

In Mark’s gospel, we get a lot of drama happening in just these first total fifteen verses, and our gospel today includes the last seven of those fifteen verses. And just like in the children's book, a whole lot takes place in these sentences in Mark.

All this happens in just ten sentences of the children's story: Max goes from miscreant, to prisoner, to escapee, to adventurer and king all by sentence number four. In our gospel passage, Jesus goes from leaving his hometown, his baptism and theophany in the Jordan by John, his being seized by the Holy Spirit to be driven into the wilderness, his 40 days of temptation by Satan, and his return to Galilee to begin his public ministry as God’s Son, God’s healer, God’s teacher, and God’s prophet. All in six sentences. Seven verses.

Often the wildernesses of our imaginations are the most frightening of all. Yet it is at times when we are thrown upon our own resources that we learn a lot about our own strengths and weaknesses, and about who we really are.

How does Jesus end up in the wilderness at all?

In the verses just before our gospel, it is stated that John had been baptizing people from throughout the countryside, predicting the coming of one more powerful than he. And here comes Jesus, the one who was predicted, and he steps up to take his turn to be baptized. Mark explained that John’s baptism was for repentance, and that people undergoing it confessed their sins. And thus, we see connected between all three of our readings, excluding the psalm, a discussion of water as enabling the remaking of creation, of a rebirth.

But why does Jesus need to be baptized, if we understand him as being without sin? Perhaps by undergoing this baptism, Jesus publicly aligns himself with the need for repentance; his baptism story does not include any confession, unlike the others mentioned in the narrative before our reading. This act demonstrates that God’s kingdom is breaking in, as demonstrated with the heavens being powerfully and maybe even bewilderingly torn apart in our gospel today. The term for this is used only one other time in Mark—and that is at the moment of Jesus’s death on the cross. The proclamation of God’s kingdom by Jesus will prove to be a dangerous political statement in a place ruled by a puppet king within the Roman Empire.

And when Jesus is baptized, he also receives the Holy Spirit, which hovers “like a dove” over him. With the arrival of the Spirit we see represented the complete Trinity—as St. Augustine of Hippo noted, God is the Voice, Jesus is the Son revealed in the Jordan, fully human yet fully obedient, and the dove is the Spirit. This Spirit empowers Jesus to embark upon his public ministry. The voice from heaven also speaks directly to Jesus, not to those observing, and declares that Jesus is God’s Son, “the Beloved,” who has pleased God by his willingness to undergo this baptism. This reference to pleasing God reflects one of the Servant Song in Isaiah 42.

Jesus is baptized in the Jordan—a place of significance in Israel’s history. It’s the place where, Jesus’s namesake Joshua (“Y’shua” is both Jesus and Joshua) led the people of Israel into the Promised Land after their own time wandering in the desert for 40 years. Thus we hear echoes of the Exodus story in this story from Mark.

But that Spirit is not content to hover there like a pretty little bird. It then immediately takes hold of Jesus and “drives” him into the wilderness. Jesus is then (immediately, again) driven out by that same Spirit to be tempted for 40 days—always a significant number, especially when referring to time. Jesus, just like us, in plunged into the wilderness, regardless of where he might have chosen that his feet would take him. Although in Mark we get no details of the temptations themselves, Jesus himself was vulnerable to those temptations, or they wouldn’t deserve the word. But he is not defenseless during this long time of trial. God is with Jesus—just as God is with us especially in times of disorientation, pain, and even suffering. Even tight-lipped Mark includes the reassurance that angels and wild beasts are “with” Jesus while he is in the wilderness, with the angels actually serving Jesus.

And that turn of the phrase is interesting, though if you slow down and look at it. Angels? You would expect them to wait upon Jesus, especially if you have read Psalm 91. But wild beasts? Less so. In most stories from ancient times, wild beasts were expected to live in the wilderness, which is a large part of what makes the wilderness dangerous. These wild beasts behave more like Max’s Wild Things, acknowledging Jesus as being at one with creation, in harmony with their wild, free hearts.

And of course, that is a great reminder to us. We are far too prone to try to “tame” or “domesticate” Jesus. Too many people try to make Jesus into a prop for their partisan philosophies by stripping out the absolutely radical political message of love, community, and resistance to oppression that Jesus brings to earth. Stripping out the wild, radical nature of Jesus’s gospel makes Jesus into a two-dimensional prop, when we all see over and over again that he lives in at least FOUR dimensions. It makes him palatable and toothless. It’s a point C. S. Lewis made in his epic allegory, the Chronicles of Narnia. When first asked to describe Aslan, the great character representing Christ, Mr. Beaver, one of the Narnian creatures is very clear about the wild, powerful heart of Jesus:

“Aslan is a lion- the Lion, the great Lion.”
“Ooh,” said Susan. "I'd thought he was a man. Is he-quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion…” and she trails off
"Safe?" said Mr Beaver... “Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you.” (2)

And so where does this lead us? As we enter more deeply into the season of Lent, we too are being encouraged to enter into the wilderness of our own souls. Not to domesticate them. But to do something far more dangerous: to open them to the unpredictability and yet the glory of life in the Spirit of God. A life that will not necessarily always take you where you want to go. But then again, we often prove ourselves to be spectacularly bad at choosing our own paths—perhaps because we try to hard to pay it safe, to maintain our own independence, to deny our dependence upon anyone, much less God.

With so many of us living lives shut up in boxes all day—houses, skyscrapers, classrooms, offices, even our cars are really just sealed moving boxes in which even the air is filtered and stale-- we need desperately to let go and enter into wilderness places that remind us of our wild beating hearts. Hearts that are called to connect to each other, to God, and to all creation and recognize our essential unity and solidarity. Lent calls us into that wilderness alongside Jesus, to confront all that might try to pull us away from God: our arrogance; our greed; our hard-hearted denial of any claim of our neighbors upon us—as we see tragically playing out right now in the crisis in Texas; our worship of money and the power we think it gives us, making it a god rather than a tool for good; our destruction of the natural world in pursuit of immediate comfort at the expense of the health of the planet for our children; our scoffing at science which is actually a scoffing at the Creator herself.

It is when we open ourselves to the dangerous beauty of the wilderness within us that we see that we are all only as safe as the most vulnerable among us. To understand, as this pandemic continues to prove to us, that we are only as healthy as the most ill person among us. That we are all bound together—and to rejoice in that rather than respond with denial that only makes us more vulnerable. To enter into what the agrarian essayist and poet Wendell Berry describes in his beautiful poem, “The Peace of Wild Things,” which has even been set to music for choral voices by choral composer Jake Runestad (3):

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. (4)

As our gospel, and Wendell Berry’s last line reminds us, the foundation of the wilderness places is not fear, but grace. No matter what wilderness we may be plunged into, God is there with us, just as the Spirit and the angels and the wild beasts were there with Jesus as he endured the temptations we’re just left to guess at in Mark’s spare telling. To enter into the beautiful, creative darkness so that those day-blind stars are revealed to our hungry eyes once more, reminding us that the ages of humanity are but a flicker in the eternity of God’s creation—and yet God seeks us out again and again, calling us back to covenant and relationship. To lean into the beauty of Lent and the beauty of life without being blinded to the beauty of NOW by the “forethought of grief.”

Our gospel today reminds us that even when you are in the Promised Land, you are never far from the wilderness. Yet that is a gift, for the wilderness keeps us honest and fully alive. As Anglican theologian N.T Wright notes, the way of pilgrimage is the way of risk. 

“In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.” (5)

May we embrace the wilderness journey alongside God this Lent. May we remember our essential unity with all creation. May we lie down in peace with all wild things, and embrace the wildness of the spirit that God seeks to awaken in us.

Amen.

Preached at the 10:30 online service at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO on February 21, 2021.

Readings:

Genesis 9:8-17

Psalm 25:1-9

1 Peter 3:18-22

Mark 1:9-15

Citations:

1) Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are (1963).

2) C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950), p. 79.

3) Jake Runestad, "The Peace of Wind Things," from American Triptych, recorded by Conspirare and Craig Hella Johnson, on the album The Hope of Loving (2019). See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CseiIKJC7wo .

4) Wendell Berry, "The Peace of Wild Things" from Openings: Poems (1968).

4) N. T. Wright, The Way pf the Lord: Christian Pilgrimage Today, (1998), p. 32.

Images:

1) Alessandro Bonvincino, Christ in the Wilderness, 1515.

2) Maurice Sendak, from Where the Wild Things Are, 1963.

3) Sir Stanley Spencer, from his series Christ in the Wilderness, 1954.

4) James Tissot, Jesus Ministered to by the Angels, (1886-1994).