First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

Mark 1

“A Test of Character”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

March 1, 2009

I had heard the legend. The Northwest is a place of legends: people who survive avalanches, whose boats are swamped at sea, families living off the grid in quiet valleys. The rugged terrain fosters tales.

When I would take my eldest two into the Olympic Mountains they always came back with a story. Usually Kathy would pale as they began with a common declaration, “we could have died.” Being in the wild seems to make this clear. 10,000 feet above sea level, just above the tree line where clouds can come and cover the path to confuse the way, you learn to respect that nature has no interest in you- I think this is what Jack London was trying to say. Here there is no public safety, no infrastructure but only what the wind and snow has made from the beginning of time.

I had heard the legend of the people who walked these mountains with the most meager of supplies, people who truly walked lightly upon the earth. There were people, so I had heard, and to some extent took as true, who left no trace but the impression they made upon you. I believed it more after I saw it.

We were in one of the most beautiful places on earth. There are alpine bowls in the Northwest where the mountains ring a valley and its meadows are a kind of world unto itself. Streams cut the fields of flowers surrounded by glacier peaks that form a windbreak to the harsh elements. This was the place of our second night into the park, which meant we were more than twenty miles from anywhere. We pitched our tents with our sleeping bags, ground pads and tarps. In a common area we made our kitchen complete with two stoves, water bottles, filtration devices, coffee pot and pans that doubled as plates and bowls. In the midst of this kitchen were pounds of food. We had beef jerky, soup, pop tarts, nuts and dried fruit, fresh fruit, coffee and tea and oatmeal. There were power bars and candy bars- anything that would give quick energy.

There were also walkmans and novels and cans of kerosene and toilet paper and our special medical kit. The clothes of the day were being hung out to dry so our bodies didn’t chill as the sweat of hiking just became damp. Each of us were carrying at least 50 lbs. of stuff. There were five of us.

Close to sundown a man came and sat down near our camp. Since he had no gear I figured he was day hiking from a camp nearby. Over his shoulder was a small sack, not a pack or a bag, a sack. At such an altitude the night comes swift, so it wasn’t long before I saw him string a line and hang a tiny tarp a few feet off the ground. Then he simply wrapped himself in a Mylar blanket and went to sleep on the ground. He had no tent, no sleeping bag, and this was a place that got cold at night even in August. There were glaciers a hundred yards from us.

In the morning I took him a cup of tea, which he accepted with thanks. We shared our breakfast with him as well. As we chatted I realized this was a man in his early sixties, clean cut, dressed in chino pants with a kind of workman like shirt, a ball cap, sturdy shoes and a watch. He offered me some of his berry, granola, seed mix that was in his tiny bag. I refused, embarrassed. While we were still breaking camp he headed out with his sack.

He was a survivalist. He took nothing but the barest of essentials and he only took that so he didn’t have to make his shelter by tearing up the brush and the trees it would have taken to make a place to sleep. He broke all the rules by walking alone without gear. But I want to say he never went home and told his wife, “I almost died.” Maybe I am part of the legend making, but this guy would have survived when all the others didn’t.

He didn’t look like what I expected. I imagined the survivalist would be a kind of Grizzly Adams hippie who emerged from the bushes with leaves in his dreads and spoke and asked for an update on the world, as he had not spoken to anyone for quite a time. The survivalist I met would easily blend in a coffee shop reading a New York Times. He looked cleaner and more kempt than I did. And he had been in the park he said a few weeks where this was the beginning of my third day.

The trip into the wilderness is as ancient as people. The need to step away, to take a walk, to clear your mind is a component of every culture. For some like the Native Americans it was a ritual, a rite. They called it a dream quest. Essentially you went out into the wild until you knew who you were, until you could see yourself in your dreams.

Seeing yourself as you are is something I found to be a component of heading into the mountains. Mind you I did carry a lot of extra stuff and a lot of creature comforts, but at some point the clarity can push pass even this. It renders you transparent. Walking for seven, eight hours with no phones, no televisions, no other people is always a kind of stripping experience. The garments of worry or work, the blankets of commitments and task are shed with each step up the mountain. And then hunger and thirst set it. For so many of us, we have forgotten what it means to hunger and thirst. The psalmist says my soul thirsts for you O lord. On a mountainside having gained seven thousand feet in the course of a day with fifty pounds on my back and an extra thirty on my waist I encountered thirst. But more importantly I encountered me.

Our lesson from Mark this morning is about this encountering. Jesus is baptized, hearing the words of being beloved. He is known at that moment, recognized, acknowledged, identified, and then driven out into the desert to be tempted, or I would rather say, to be tested, to see what this identity means. He spends forty days in the wilderness to see what it means that he is the beloved. Some might suggest he didn’t need to do this. What was he really going to hear in the desert that he couldn’t hear back in Nazareth? Can’t you be tempted and tested in your own backyard? Why go out in the middle of nowhere to see who you are supposed to be at home?

And those are great questions. And they beg an answer because as soon as his time in the desert is done he goes home. Truly what Jesus seems to have engaged in is a kind of religious pilgrimage or quest: a journey south to the Jordan and then to the wilderness before he headed home. There was nothing really strange, or unique, in what he did. The gospels make it clear that lots and lots of people did what Jesus did in terms of being baptized by John. And the Bible has other people who fled into the desert to find refuge, strength, or just a respite from whatever chaos their life had become.

But what the text doesn’t make clear to those who have never stepped out like this is that the chaos that drives you out to the wilderness is nothing compared to the chaos you find within once you are in the middle of nowhere. The challenges of the day are nothing compared to the unbridled, teeming struggle that is the soul- who we really are. And by suggesting that for forty days he stayed out in the wilderness, it is clear that there was chaos, the confusion that seeks clarity, in the soul of the one who is our Christ. There are those who read this passage as a kind of perfunctory hoop Jesus endured to show that he has compassion for the human condition. But to have compassion for weakness is not the same as being tested.

Being tested sounds cruel in our culture today. We don’t really value it. Being tested comes across as manipulative, mean spirited even. I have read many novels where the main characters recounts a kind of test, a kind of childhood hazing that has scarred them. There is often a kind of quiet message, or sometimes a loud one, I won’t do that to my kids. I am not going to be cruel like this. What is the point? All they really need to know is that they are loved.

Yet, our passage today seems to contradict this cultural impulse. Jesus just heard he was beloved and then he is driven to the desert to be tested for forty days. In addition to our lack of appreciation that Jesus could be tested and be God as well as the notion that being tested is a kind cruelty, there is a third hurdle to see the meaning in our story and it’s the highest. For the most part we are seduced today with the power of our minds and the freedom we have to act; so much so that we feel no compulsion to see how little we are in control of our thoughts and actions.

Part of the long walk into the woods is to listen to the voices. Soon you discover how hard it is to sustain a beautiful thought, hear a voice that is hopeful. It doesn’t take but a few miles and the measure of your deeds appear. What really impressed me about the survivalist is not that he carried so little gear, but that he was able to sustain so many days of solitude, so many days where he reckoned with himself. For when you do step outside of the walls we have made to keep doubt at bay, the mounds of stuff we have heaped to keep our self-esteem inflated, then your soul starts to emerge in striking transparency. Four days for me was tough; forty days is Herculean.

Early in June, not long after arriving in Malawi, I drove the Land Rover into a ditch. That the ditch was a berm separating the quasi road from a cliff and the cliff led to a gorge a hundred feet below didn’t escape the seven other people in the car and they were quick to get out.

It took hours to get the car out of the ditch given how precarious it was. Those were hard hours of worry for me. The unforgiving quality of the African bush came quickly. For just a moment I had possessed confidence and a sense of place. And just that fast it was gone. As the darkness fell hard in village where I awaited the owner of the car I struggled with many demons, many unpleasant voices. What are you doing here in the bush? Why have you brought your family here? What sort of fool are you?

Often times when people ask me about our summer in Africa I don’t know quite what to say. It was beautiful and filled with moments of splendor. It was. But for the most part it was a relentless challenge, a testing. I felt tested, challenged. And then, like Jesus in the mountains below the Wadi Kilt, I went home.

Sitting in the dark in a remote village in the bush the owner of the Land Rover Jim McGill came to me and said, “you need to drive the car back.” No one else in the car shared his opinion- especially one passenger who happened to be one of the best drivers in the country. Driving in the dark in Malawi is especially dangerous and I had just about driven our car over a cliff when there was plenty of light, how would I do when you could barely see ten feet? As the passengers got into the Land Rover this was an unspoken but obvious question.

In that moment, in the dread and weight of being tested, I wasn’t learning about Africa, I was learning about me. Let’s just say it was a quiet car as I navigated the hour-long drive through the winding rutted cart path that led to the tarmac road, which held its own challenges.

Temptation is a test. And the other Gospels crowned the story of Jesus forty days in the desert with three temptations offered by the devil. But not Mark. Mark simply has forty days of testing. That is a long time of doubt and wrestling with the demons that lurk all about. I appreciate Mark’s desert journey more than the others because it is clear: after he was baptized Jesus was out in the desert struggling with what it meant for him to be him and then he went home.

Four, five days of climbing in the mountains, a week in Mexico, three weeks of traveling about Africa were desert journeys I took before this summer. A week into our summer it was clear to me I was in for a quite a testing, quite a challenge. In the end, true to form to our passage today, I learned more about me than I did about Africa.

I like to take people on short-term mission trips because it helps. It helps the people in places like Ekwendeni or Tijuana. It does. Houses get built and hope breaks the monotony of despair and grinding poverty. And it helps the people that go. All of sudden their soul comes into sharp relief. They are tested. Not by what they encounter, but by who they are. Weakness and spiritual emptiness becomes clear. The comfort that keeps fears at bay, once discarded, appears as a kind of crutch, an aid we do not need.

Probably the worst part of the summer was the impatience it has created. We want to change the world but we can’t even pray as a church each week. We want to combat extreme poverty but we withhold our gifts from the church believing someone else will give and it’s just to add to unnecessary affluence. We talk about faith and then live defined by resignation. Our stocks dip and there is a mood that the sky is falling. Week after week of being with people dying of treatable maladies and hoping something, anything would be better has left me quite impatient with our lack of character.

Lent is supposed to be a time of testing our character. Give things up, take things up: it is really a test to see how strong you are or how weak. What do our souls look like? Are they strong? Have they been tempered, tested, honed? Take some time between now and Easter and look at your soul. It might be a walk, a withholding, a moment that will measure. How long can you pray? Can you worship in this sanctuary each week, six weeks in a row? How long can you speak kindly to those who deserve less? Are you becoming something worthy of Christ’s gospel or are you slipping into another round of depression or confusion or addiction?

Those are just a few voices that can arise in the desert. Trust me when I say, months of hearing them is a challenge. They become relentless and remove the layers of our costumes. Be bold and daring. Ask God to show us our soul; show us the condition of our spirit. Be certain and forewarned, God hears those prayers.

There will be another lent, but let this one be a time of testing. Amen.