Playing with the Wild Things - Lent 1 2012

“Playing with the Wild Things”, A Sermon preached by The Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, February 26, 2012 at St. Mark’s, Newark, NY

And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him. (Mark 1:12-13)

When my children were little one of their favorite books for me to read to them was Maurice Sendak’s classic tale, “Where the Wild Things Are.” In that story, a little boy named Max is sent to his room without his supper by his mother who loses patience one day with his “wild” behavior. As Max sits alone in his room, cut off from family and friends, with no supper to eat, his room becomes at first a forest and then the walls become “the world all around.” Then “an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max and he sailed off through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year to where the wild things are.” When Max gets to the place where the wild things are he is confronted with strange creatures who “roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws.” At first Max is frightened by these creatures, but then he shouts at them “BE STILL” and he tames them with a “magic trick of staring into their yellow eyes without blinking once and they were frightened and called him the most wild thing of all and made him king of all wild things.” I could not help but think of Sendak’s wild things when I read Mark’s gospel account of Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness. “He was with the wild beasts and the angels waited on him.”

In Mark’s gospel, the story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness follows immediately after the story of his baptism in the River Jordan by John the Baptist, where, upon coming up out of the water, Jesus sees the Holy Spirit descending like a dove upon him and hears the heavenly voice proclaim, “You are my son, the Beloved. With you I am well pleased.” Mark tells us that “immediately” after that voice came from heaven the Spirit “drove” him out to the wilderness where for forty days he was tempted by Satan. And he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him. Mark’s rendition of this story is spare yet powerful. Where Matthew and Luke tell us that the Spirit led Jesus to the wilderness, Mark says he was driven there. Where Matthew and Luke tell us specifically how Satan tempted Jesus Mark tells us only that he was in the wilderness forty days with the wild beasts and angels. We have no idea what that experience was like for Jesus but we do know that he was alone, in a place filled with wild things. Mark gives us a different angle on the wilderness experience and one that bears reflection as we begin another Lent.

Our Old Testament reading today from Genesis takes us again to the place of chaos and wild things. When the waters of the great flood covered the earth, Noah and his family survived that watery holocaust closed in the ark along with the wild beasts of every kind, clean and unclean. One can only imagine what that voyage must have felt like to its human passengers, encased in that ark, tossed about on the stormy waters of the flood accompanied by all the beasts, birds and creatures of every kind. Talk about confronting wild things! Noah and family had no choice but to look into the eyes of the wild beasts of creation and learn to live with them. Somehow they managed to survive living cheek to jowl with mountain lions and grizzly bears, rabbits and iguanas. And when that perilous journey was over, they emerged into the open air to the resplendence of the rainbow in the sky, the sign of God’s covenant with them.

We begin our Lenten observance with two powerful stories that offer us a vivid metaphor for our Lenten journey. Learning to live with the chaos and to befriend the “wild things” in our culture and our own personal lives is a worthy endeavor for this special season. With Mark’s version of the wilderness sojourn and the story of Noah and the ark as models for our Lenten observance we could take these forty days of Lent to go alone into our own personal wildernesses and spend time with the wild beasts and the angels that await us there. Perhaps life has already driven you to the wilderness, in which case your Lenten observance is right at your fingertips. If you’re not in a personal desert time right now, Lent is an opportunity to make the time for some serious introspection and self-examination, to go deep and find the wild beasts who challenge you in your life so that you can befriend them and go to Easter strengthened by the serenity that befriending the wild things brings with it.

In our comfortable middle class American way of life, we rarely allow the chaos and wildness of God’s creation to invade our reality. We live in heated and air conditioned homes, with electric lights to see by, and refrigerators to keep food cool and stoves to cook it on without serious effort on our part. We live in a well ordered society and those of us in this area have the luxury of being able to live in a place that is safe and where we can walk streets and neighborhoods without fear. We don’t really want to confront “wild things” whether they be in the form of external realities that are scary like people who are different from us or who challenge us, or diseases that grip our mortal bodies and do their relentless destruction, or whether they be internal wild things like our own fears, frustrations, anger, grief, loneliness or even despair. During Lent, however, we are invited to walk into the wilderness and live with the wild things for awhile.

What is compelling about the two Biblical stories of spending time with the wild things is that both Noah and his family, and Jesus appear to have been able to somehow befriend and co-exist with the wild beasts. Noah and his family were living through a time of complete destruction and chaos as the entire world was awash in the raging waters of the flood, and somehow in the midst of that chaos, they managed to survive along with the wild things God had also created and wanted to save. Notice that God did not want the wild things to be destroyed – indeed God went to great lengths to be sure they survived. In the wilderness, Jesus had to survive in a place without shelter, subjected to the intense heat of the day and the deep cold of desert nights, where flash floods and winds can erupt at any time, with no warning. This is not a climate hospitable to human habitation, so Jesus had to survive using his own inner resources and, presumably learning from the wild beasts how to weather the desert climate. There is no suggestion in Mark’s account that the wild beasts were necessarily dangerous for Jesus, simply that he had to co-exist with them.

Lent is a time for us to go to the wilderness of our own lives and live with the wild beasts that reside there. Each of us has a different version of the wilderness. For some it is depression, for some grief, for others anxiety or stress, still others fear for themselves or loved ones. For some the wilderness is a place where they are trying desperately to keep the wind and elements from blowing away the precariously built sand castle of their lives. These are folks who have so denied the pain and struggles of their own existence that they have completely shut themselves off emotionally from their families, friends, and neighbors and their own inner selves. For some the wilderness is loneliness, for others the diminished capacity of advancing years. Whatever form your wilderness takes, Lent is a time to consider befriending the beasts that reside there because those beasts are not going anywhere and you will find more peace by learning to live with them than by fighting them.

In the Sendak story, little Max first stares the wild things into submission, then becomes their king. Once he has put himself in a place where the wild things are not ruling him but he rules them, he is able to let them be wild. He plays with them. “Let the wild rumpus start!” he shouts and the book shows pictures of Max and the beasts living it up. When we truly confront the wild beasts of our own wilderness, we too can befriend them and then let them have their day. It’s when we try to avoid those beasts, when we try to deny their existence that we remain captive. One cannot get over grief, one has to live through it, embrace it even. Anyone who has ever been through the twelve-step process will tell you that you don’t overcome addiction by pretending it isn’t there. It’s only when the addict looks it in the face and embraces it as a destructive reality that it begins to lose its power over the person. A troubled or difficult relationship is rarely strengthened by avoiding the real issues between people. It’s only when those issues are brought into the open and stared down, through painful hard work sometimes, that they lose their ability to corrode the relationship and love between two people.

The important thing to remember about this sometimes painful wilderness sojourn to which we are called in Lent is that although it may be a solitary journey it does not have to be a lonely one. Each of us must do our own interior work to confront and befriend our own wild beasts. In the Sendak tale, Max doesn’t get to the place of the wild things until he is sent away by himself into his room. While he’s busy playing, he doesn’t find the wild things. We do not do that interior work alone, however. Each one of us is God’s beloved child in whom God is well pleased. When we embrace that foundation of love on which we rest, we enter the wilderness confident that angels will be there to care for us amidst the beasts. God protected Noah and his family even as God ensured the continued existence of the “wild things” and then God sent the rainbow as a symbol of God’s never-failing love and commitment to all God’s creatures. In the Sendak story, after Max cavorts with the wild things, he gets in his ship and sails back into “the night of his very own room where he found his supper waiting for him.”

When we return from our Lenten wilderness sojourn, supper will be waiting for us in the paschal feast on Easter Day. In the meantime, let us journey this Lent to “where the wild things are.”