Forty Days

(Scriptures: Genesis 9:1-17, 1 Peter 3:18-22, Mark 1:9-15)

We are now in the season of Lent, that season of forty days during which we are invited to renew our walk with God and deepen our commitment to following in the way of Christ. The designation of forty days reminds us of the 40 days Jesus spent in the wilderness, wrestling with his identity and his call, and being tempted by Satan. In the same way, we are called to focus on, and perhaps wrestle with, our identity as Christians and our faith in God through Jesus Christ. Christians do this in many ways. Giving up something for Lent – meat, or desserts, or some addictive substance such as cigarettes or alcohol – is one way that Christians remind themselves of the privation Jesus experienced in the wilderness. (Of course, I guess I should caution against giving up church for Lent.) Some Christians seeks relationship with God via the inward journey of prayer and meditation. Others seek relationship with God through the outward journey of doing works of justice and mercy. So while some Christians give something up for Lent, others take something new on for Lent. In many ways, Christians seek to remember and even emulate the practice of Jesus by resisting temptation and drawing close to God.

Characteristically, Mark’s version of this formative period in Jesus’ life is very brief, very compressed – in the words of Sgt Joe Friday: “Just the facts, ma’am”. Mark talks about Jesus being in the wilderness for 40 days, but it takes Mark about 40 seconds to tell us about it. Within a few lines of print we move from the baptism of Jesus to the temptation of Jesus to the beginning of the proclamation of the Gospel by Jesus.

The Revised Common Lectionary associates this brief text from Mark’s gospel with two texts that refer to the story of Noah. The Genesis reading is taken from the end of the Flood account, when Noah and his family and all the animals and birds are out of the Ark, and God promise them never again to destroy all life on earth by flood. And then there’s the text from I Peter which links all of this to the sacrament of baptism.

I have to confess – and part of this is likely due to my being a fairly new pastor, only partway through seminary – that as I prepared this sermon, I really struggled to understand why the creators of the lectionary chose to set the Mark text side by side with these two texts. OK, the Mark text talks about the baptism of Jesus, and the I Peter text explains Christian baptism in terms of the flood account. In the flood account it rained for 40 days and 40 nights, and Jesus was in the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights being tempted.

I suppose what finally brought the three texts together for me was the message of Jesus as contained in the last line of our reading from Mark: “The time has come. The reign of God has come near. Repent, and believe the Good News.”

What is the Good News? Namely, God’s passionate love for humankind and for all creation – although from the Genesis account, this may not be the most intuitive conclusion. Genesis tells us that within a few generations from the creation, God despaired of humankind, observing that “every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually” and that even the very earth itself was corrupt. Gee, Mr. Writer of Genesis, don’t hold back – tell us what you really think. We’re told that God was sorry he ever created human beings, as the interactions of humans with one another and with other life on earth had begun to spin out of control like a science experiment gone horribly awry. Despite this, we’re told that God resolves to save the best of humanity – as represented by Noah and his family – along with representative samples from all forms of plant and animal life, erase everything and everyone else, and begin afresh. It’s sort of a divine do-over, or what golfers call a mulligan. In today’s reading the floodwaters have receded, Noah, his family, and all the animals and birds are out of the ark, and God gives Noah and his family the same command he gave Adam and Eve – “be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth….” Perhaps with the Cain and Abel history in mind, God also very explicitly commands them this time not to kill one other. And then God for his part promises that he won’t kill them all either, that he will never again wipe out all life by flood. All this God did to maintain relationship with the human beings God created in the Divine image.

Our reading from I Peter uses the Noah story as a metaphor to explain the meaning of baptism. Just as God had through the raging floodwaters washed the corruption from the earth and saved those whom God favored, our sinful nature is drowned in the waters of baptism. Just as the blessing of Noah after the flood represented a sort of second creation, so in baptism we emerge from the water as new creations in Christ. And in a few truly strange verses, the writer of I Peter tells us that not even death ends God’s passionate love affair with humanity, that as Jesus proclaimed the Good News at the beginning of his ministry, after the crucifixion Jesus made proclamation to the Spirits in prison, who in the time of Noah did not obey. So our Good News is that God’s love for humans created in God’s image transcends humanity’s self-destructive impulses, transcends the raging floodwaters, transcends death itself. In Jesus Christ, God quite literally went through hell and high water in order to rescue and save us. Truly, this is good news.

What is our response? For much of the world, their relationship to God, to the Holy, can be characterized by the phrase “out of sight, out of mind” – that is to say, it’s not a priority. And for us in the church, while our relationship with God through Jesus Christ is our reason for coming together, we may be too quick to say “out of sight, out of mind” to those on the outside. A very old fashioned theological tradition compares the church – “big C” church - to the ark, providing a place of refuge and sanctuary from the rising floodwaters of sin and death outside our doors. Not to say that the church is perfect – it has been said, half-jokingly, that if it weren’t for the flood outside, we’d never put up with the stench inside.

One problem with the tradition of the church as “ark” – or, to use the phrase from Luther’s hymn, “a mighty fortress” – is that it doesn’t say much about those outside the ark, outside the fortress. Jesus gives us different images of the Reign of God which he preached – a banquet, a wedding feast, to which we are asked to go into the highways and byways to compel people to come in. Perhaps this is where that strange passage from I Peter comes in, about Jesus in the Spirit making proclamation to the spirits in prison. If Jesus, in the words of the Apostles Creed, “descended into hell” to proclaim Good News - would it be too much trouble for us to venture outside our doors to proclaim good news to our neighbors?

Just as Jesus struggled for forty days in the wilderness with his identity and vocation, so during these 40 days of Lent, we are called to wrestle with our call, as individuals and as the gathered church, with our vocation. Just as Jesus had to reject various temptations to claim glory for himself in ways that bypassed the cross, we in the church face similar temptations to bypass our call to discipleship.

“Lord, who throughout these forty days for us did fast and pray.
Teach us with Thee to mourn our sins and close by thee to stay.” Amen.