The Sauntering Pilgrim

One of the good jokes I like to tell is memorable for two reasons: it tells a story, and it’s about sudden and unexpected change. Few things are as painful as great and sudden change, so a good way to cope is to tell a joke about it. And the more painful the change, the funnier the joke needs to be. Another way to cope with change is to tell a defining story about it. Good stories help us make sense of things we can’t explain. When change drives us into a wilderness where we have no map and no guide, a good story helps us hold on until the change starts to make sense.

That was the case with the early church, the Jewish community for whom Mark wrote his gospel. Their disastrous three-years war with Rome had just ended; Jerusalem, their political, religious, and cultural center, had been sacked; and their temple, the one place where tradition said God would meet them in the end, had been destroyed. They were a rudderless ship in a storm with no sea anchor to steady them and no port in sight. Their situation was too serious for a joke, so Mark gave them a story.

Almost as soon as the story begins, Mark writes, “the Spirit immediately drove [Jesus] out into the wilderness,” where he was tested by the dark side of life and where agents of God attended to his needs (Mark 1:12-13). The way the text is written, we assume it was the Holy Spirit that drove him, but it doesn’t say “holy.” It says simply “spirit,” the Greek word for “wind” or “breath,” which translators have capitalized. And there, Mark’s introduction to the story ends. The next part begins when “Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God,” that the waiting was over and the life they’d been waiting for was at hand (vv. 14-15).

Dealing with the speed and degree of change today, we can imagine how those early Christians felt. We’re changing in ways we could hardly have imagined a generation or two ago. In this country, for the first time in history, those of us claiming some relationship with the church are now a minority of the population. Organized congregations and denominations of almost every size and label are shrinking. The church’s pastoral and prophetic voice, once a significant public influence, is increasingly ignored.

You’re experiencing that change here in southern Erie County. Your declining organizational health – not your spiritual but your organizational health – is challenging your ability to sustain an effective pastoral and prophetic ministry in Christ. And now you have in me a brand-new pastoral leader who has to start from scratch to build an effective ministry with you. By what I believe to be God’s grace, you have begun to collaborate with three of your sister congregations to embrace these changes and address your situation faithfully and creatively.

There are many ways we respond to change and learn to live with it – after all, it’s happening all the time, and there’s no avoiding it – but most of us don’t like it when it’s imposed on us by outside forces, no matter what we say in theory about its goodness or necessity. That puts us in good company with the early church. So what can we learn from those early Christians that might help us through the changes we’re facing?

First, we learn what they learned from Jesus, that in our wilderness of change, we will be tested by the dark forces of life – Mark called them “Satan” and “wild beasts” – and we ought not be surprised when that testing occurs. We see those dark forces at work all through the Christian scriptures, especially in the tendency toward self-centeredness and division, which were special concerns for the church in Corinth. “I appeal to you,” St. Paul wrote to them, “to stop arguing among yourselves. Let there be real harmony so there won’t be divisions in the church. I plead with you to be of one mind, united in thought and purpose” (1 Cor. 1:10 NLT).

The first and best thing we can do, especially in the midst of a wilderness of change such as we’re experiencing, is to be united in thought and purpose. As Stephen Covey wrote in his book First Things First, “the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” And the main thing for us is something like what St. Peter wrote, that “you are a chosen people. You are a kingdom of priests, God’s holy nation, his very own possession. This is so you can show others the goodness of God” (1 Pet. 2:9 NLT). Even if everything else changes, we need to remember that’s why we are Lutherans in Erie County, to show others the goodness of God.

The next best thing we can do, I believe, is remember that in Jesus’ wilderness experience, “the angels waited on him” (Mark 1:13). In his wilderness, in his confrontation with the darkness of life, Jesus experienced the sustaining attention and care of God’s angels. We don’t need to wait for God’s help on the other side of the wilderness, we don’t need to look for God’s help in another place or season. It is precisely here, in our faithful wrestling with the darkness that confronts us, that we experience the blessing of God’s angels and hear God’s message to us.

And who are God’s angels, the spiritual beings who act as agents or messengers of God? The French priest and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” Maybe you and I are the angels God sends to support us and care for our needs. Maybe you and I carry in our community with each other the divine message we need to hear today.

Maybe it’s our grounding and stabilizing task, in the wilderness we’re all in today, to wait on each other as the angels waited on Jesus in his wilderness, to prepare ourselves to return to our own Galilee, our own homeland, with the good news of God’s goodness, and to make that good news known to a hungry and hurting world.

In the spirit of a prayer by Thomas Merton, I’ll end with this. I have no idea where we are going. I don’t see the road ahead of us, and I don’t know for certain where it will end. But our desire to please God does please God, and if we have that desire in all we do, God will lead us by the right road into the future God is preparing for us. So let’s take the next steps faithfully, in joy, and with deep gratitude for God’s grace at work among us. ▪