Genesis 9:8-17; Mark 1:9-15
Presented March 5th, 2006, by Jeanne Davies
The First Sunday in Lent
I first learned to appreciate the holiness of water when living in Oregon almost twenty years ago. I spent time there with Native Americans, and learned from their rituals of suffering, including the inipi, or the sweat lodge. The inipi is a low enclosed space. You must crawl on your hands and knees to enter. Inside it is very hot and steamy. You sit and sing and pray and suffer together; and there is an intensity to the prayer that is not always present in your average Sunday worship service. Now, I always joked that I had an advantage in the inipi coming from the Midwest. Those poor Northwesterners, I’d say. This is just like July in Chicago – unbearably hot and humid. But the truth is that I suffered as well and when I got out, I was grateful for a cool drink and even more grateful for a shower, an abundance of life-giving water flowing from the tap.
My mother used to say, “Why do you do that? You don’t need to go looking for suffering. There’s plenty of suffering in the world. Suffering will find you.” I know that is true. There is no shortage of suffering in the world. But the inipi teaches us to suffer well, which is worth learning. The sweat lodge, they say, is to prepare you for the big sweat lodge, which is out here. In our Christian tradition, we used to have rituals of suffering – fasting and penitence. But these have long gone out of fashion and the goal of our culture and our faith has become avoidance of suffering as much as possible.
There is a clarity that comes from suffering, a stripping away of all that is unnecessary, and we see the life that really is life. It is in our suffering that we understand what is our true joy.
So, then, if suffering is useful, does it come from God? Does everything, as they say, happen for a reason? It might be reassuring to believe so, to feel that everything is a part of God’s plan. But I can’t believe that God visits pain, destruction and death on us in order for some greater good. It was not God’s intention that Janice Kline’s car meet a truck head on any more than it is God’s intention that children suffer abuse or disease, or that thousands die in a tsunami, a flood, a mudslide, or a war.
In our Old Testament lesson today God assures us that never again will we be punished with death and destruction, as we were in the great flood. We may suffer these things but it will not be as punishment from God. In poetic stories of the ancient near east and Israel, the rainbow was a divine weapon and lightning bolts were arrows of divine judgment. In this first covenant between God and humankind, God transforms this symbol of judgment into a symbol of everlasting relationship, a sign of hope and love. God demonstrates his trust in humans, and promises to continue to work in and through them – to not give up on us, no matter what we do. And our salvation will not happen through divine judgment and punishment but through God entering into our suffering and death in the person of Jesus.
In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus begins his ministry with a gesture of repentance, baptism by John in the Jordan River. God uses the waters of chaos as a life-giving force, into which Jesus is immersed. He emerges from this holy water with words of kinship and affirmation, “This is my son, the beloved, in whom I am well pleased.” Then he is driven into the wilderness. The word is ekballw, “cast, “ “thrown,” “flung.” The waters of baptism are not to be entered into lightly. If we choose the life that really is life, we are choosing not to live in denial, to look reality full in the face. But while Jesus suffers in the wilderness, he is ministered to by angels. God does not desert him, or leave him to face the demons alone.
On this first Sunday of Lent, we begin a time of self-examination, of acknowledging our brokenness, of the many ways that we and the world fall short of Creator’s desires. The traditional words of the liturgy when ashes are put on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday are, “From dust you come, to dust you will return.” For many of us that is repellant. Why focus on sinfulness? On suffering? On darkness? But in a strange way, I have always taken comfort in that ritual. There is something good in acknowledging where we stand, even if it is painful. Admitting illness is the first step in healing. Acknowledging brokenness is the first step in wholeness. Voicing need is the first step in having that need supplied.
We live in a culture that denies death and suffering but it reaches us all sooner or later. It’s impossible to avoid it. So it’s important to learn to suffer well. Jesus leads the way, arising from immersion in the holy waters of life, through the wilderness to a life of ministry, through the suffering of the cross and the darkness of the tomb to the glory of resurrection. We get through our darkness, through doubts, temptations, sadness, suffering and apparent failures because we know that God claims us, affirms us, and loves us with a love that will not let us go.
One of my favorite stories is called The Big Wave by Pearl Buck. It is a short novel that I read as a child that stayed with me because it is so profound. Pearl Buck was the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries in China. This story is about a boy, Jiya, who lives in a fishing village in Japan. The fishermen and their families live in houses on the beach. But none of the houses have windows facing the sea. Jiya asks his father why. “The sea is beautiful,” Jiya says. His father says, “The sea is our enemy.” They all know the risk of the big wave, a tsunami.
In the story, a tsunami does indeed come. Jiya is sent up the mountain to safety behind the walls of a rich man’s house, who takes in the children of the fishermen during the storm. After that he goes to live with his friend, Kino, whose family are farmers.
Kino’s family adopts him and he grows up in their household, working on their farm. Much to Kino’s puzzlement, Jiya eventually falls in love with Kino’s little sister, Setsu. “Why do you want her?” Kino urged. “Because she makes me laugh,” Jiya said. “It is she who made me forget the big wave. For me – she is life.” “But she is not a good cook,” Kino said. “Think how she burns the rice because she runs outside to look at something!” “I don’t mind burned rice, “ Jiya said, “and I will run out with her to see what she sees.” Jiya has learned, out of his experience of grief, what is life-giving.
Jiya decides that he will return to fishing. Gradually, fishermen and their families are returning to the beach. New houses are being built, with no windows facing the sea. Jiya marries Setsu and they move to their new house.
When the wedding was over and the family took the newly married pair down the hill to the new house on the beach, Kino began to feel sad. The farmhouse would be very quiet without Setsu and he would miss her…. He would even miss her teasing. He grew very grave indeed. What if the big wave came again?
There in the pretty little new house he turned to Jiya. “Jiya, what if the big wave comes again?” he asked.
“I have prepared for that,” Jiya said. He led them through the little house to the room that faced the sea, the one big room in the house, where at night they would rest and where in the day they would eat and work.
All the family stood there, and as they watched, Jiya pushed back a panel in the wall. Before their eyes was the ocean, swelling and stirring under the evening wind. The sun was sinking into the water, in clouds of read and gold. They gazed out across the deep waters in silence.
“I have opened my house to the ocean,” Jiya said. “If ever the big wave comes back, I shall be ready. I face it. I am not afraid.”
Anxiety about success and security keep us from taking hold of the life that really is life. But there is no insurance policy we can buy that ultimately keeps us safe from our own fallibility or mortality. We can either spend our lives running from it or we can turn and face the wave. We look for rainbows and watch for angels, signs of God’s comfort and reasssurance in the wake of all disasters, confident that we are claimed and loved by God, who offers us the life that really is life, eternal life in relationship with the Holy.