tell them that the glass is partly full. It won't do, the beasts are real, they are often ravenous and quite merciless.

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1 WILD BEASTS March 1, 2009, The First Sunday in Lent Mark 1: 9-14 Michael Lindvall, The Brick Presbyterian Church in the City of New York Theme: The wild beasts of life can grow our souls. Unlock our imaginations by your Holy Spirit, O God, that the ancient story of Jesus temptation may find us here and now. Lead us not into temptation, we pray, but when we do face temptation, help us to recognize it for what it is. Then strengthen us by your word and Spirit that we may resist even the subtlest wiles of the Adversary. And now may the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Amen. In the passage that Everett just read, Mark tells the story of Jesus temptation in the wilderness in just two verses. Matthew s and Luke s versions of the same story are half a chapter long. Both of those longer Gospels offer familiar details about the temptation: turn stones to bread, jump off the temple to be caught by angels, take over the kingdoms of the world. Mark offers almost no details. But there is one detail in Mark that s unique to his telling. It s not in Matthew or Luke. Mark tells us that when Jesus was in the wilderness, he was with the wild beasts... Wild beasts Why would Mark, who never uses two words where one will do, tell us about wild beasts? Some people used to think of Mark as the "short and simple Gospel" the "Reader s Digest" version. I no longer think Mark is short and simple. Short, maybe; simple, no! Mark, I have come to believe, is short and subtle very subtle. Time and again, Mark sneaks up on you with a little twist or some beguiling ambiguity. These wild beasts, for instance. Such a subtle little detail. Bible scholars can't make up their minds about whose side the wild beasts are on. Mark's Gospel will unfold as a cosmic showdown between the forces of good and evil. It'll be clear whose side most everybody is on except these wild beasts. Some scholars argue that they re on the side of the angels, those angels we heard - 1 -

2 about who "wait on Jesus" in his temptation. If this is true, we re being offered a snapshot of the peaceable kingdom, an image of the Garden of Eden restored, the ancient animosity between humanity and the wild things transcended. I really like that, but I have to tell you that most Bible scholars are less rhapsodic about these wild beasts. They note that in the ancient world, the wilderness was not at all the romantic place it has become in modern imaginations. To the ancients, the wilderness was simply the haunt of all things dangerous and evil. These wild beasts, they argue, are not on the side of the angels. They are the opposite of the angels, symbolic minions of evil, in loco representatives of the Adversary, children of the Tempter whom Jesus is facing in the wilderness. They were, these scholars guess, jackals and hyenas in every sense Time and again in life, you and I meet our own wild beasts. Not jackals and hyenas, rather our wild beasts have names like depression or pancreatic cancer. They are fearsome creatures like widowhood or loneliness, jackals with names like multiple sclerosis, alcoholism, drug addiction, hyenas named unemployment, self-doubt, divorce. Every life has its wild beasts, every last one. There are, of course, lots of theories about evil, theories about the wild beasts, lots of ideas as to why bad things are forever happening to good people. Some of them are so glib as to be dangerous. Here are two popular wild beast theories that don t quite work. I call the first one the "Pollyanna Don Quixote theory of dispositional optimism." "Grit your teeth, it's really not so bad." "Look on the bright side." "The glass is half full, not half empty. It's "partly sunny, not partly cloudy." God knows I love chipper people; I work at it myself. But I am your pastor, and I know how fierce many of the wild beasts you meet are. I can t look a middle-aged woman facing radiation in the eye and tell her to "look on the bright side." I can t look a young couple with a child just diagnosed with cystic fibrosis in the eyes and

3 tell them that the glass is partly full. It won't do, the beasts are real, they are often ravenous and quite merciless. A second theory about the wild beasts of life is one that theologian C.S. Lewis named "God's alarm clock." In his early writings, Lewis made what he thought was a good case for explaining human suffering as what he called "God's alarm clock." He said that pain and suffering were God's way of arresting the attention of somnolent souls and alerting us to the deeper things. It was his wife's cancer and subsequent death that disheveled his tidy explanation of suffering. A play entitled Shadowlands that had a short Broadway run retold the story of Lewis' late-life marriage to Joy Davidman and her difficult death a few years later. In a powerful soliloquy near the end of the play, Lewis faces the audience with Joy lying in a hospital bed in the background. He slowly confesses that his "Alarm Clock" theology had been too glib. No theory explains what she has suffered. His theologizing was naive because he had not experienced what he theorized about so casually. Truth is, there are too many pains far too sharp to be justified by what they might teach us. The beasts are wild beasts after all. You know the names of your own. As your pastor, we have sometimes faced them together. I cannot look you in the eye and tell you to look on the bright side or that the beasts are for your own good. But there are two things I can tell you. I can tell you that no matter how fierce the beast, you do not face it alone. God will be with you in the encounter. And I can also tell you that, by the grace of God, you just may be able to wrench from the teeth of your beast something of value, some temper for the soul, some lost truth, some elusive insight, some soul growth. This is not to say that any good that comes from it justifies the encounter or makes sense of the beast, only that you just might come out of the battle as the moral victor

4 When you pass time with one of the beasts, you will most likely come through it a changed person. No choice about that. Some people grow embittered, jaded and broken, but others grow the other direction, deeper, better rooted in compassion, more firmly grounded in love. You have no choice about whether you face the beast, but you do have some choice as to how the beast changes you. The world breaks everyone, wrote Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms, and afterward some are strong in the broken places. It broke Hemingway, of course. It seems he never grew strong in his broken place, but what he wrote was truth nonetheless. Some do grow strong in their broken places. > John Milton went blind and then wrote his greatest poetry. > Beethoven lost his hearing and went on to compose anyway. > Louis Pasteur was a paralytic at the age of 46 and did much of his best work thereafter. > As a young man, the composer Verdi was rejected by the Milan Conservatory for "want of musical ability." > Nelson Mandela spent half a lifetime on a prison island off Cape Town during the apartheid era and then became the first black President of the Republic of South Africa. > As a child, Tolstoy flunked out of school and the tutors hired by his wealthy parents gave up trying to teach him anything. > Dickens went to school a total of four years of his life only to become perhaps the greatest novelist in the English language. > Dostoyevsky was sentenced to death, led to the gallows, pardoned just as the rope was to take his life and exiled to Siberia. He returned to write greater novels than ever. > The novelist Emily Bronte lived and wrote her masterpieces in a rectory in the bleak Yorkshire moors. Bronte lived her life with a half-demented father, two sisters dying of tuberculosis and an alcoholic, opium-addicted brother. She was a woman of faith, who in spite of or through it could write these words: "No coward soul is mine, no trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere; I see heaven's glories shine, faith shines equal, arming me from fear." > Terry Waite, a practicing Christian, was held hostage for years in Beirut, facing the possibility of execution daily. After his release he wrote: Christianity - 4 -

5 doesn t in any way lessen suffering. What it does is enable you to take it, to face it, to work through it and eventually to convert it. Our faith does not promise us a life with no wild beasts. We are promised two things: We are not alone when we meet them. And perhaps, perhaps, we will be able us to pull something of lasting value from the teeth of even the fiercest of the beasts. Let me leave you with another odd and ambiguous detail. I have long found this detail enigmatic, tinged with irony, almost funny, and quite provocative of thought. This detail is not from the Bible. It s a detail about (of all things) the Bayeux Tapestry. The Bayeux Tapestry is a 230-foot long piece of embroidered cloth that tells the story of one of the seminal events of European history. In words and pictures, it narrates the Norman invasion of England by William the Conqueror and the Battle of Hastings in the year Here s the detail. Several scenes portray William the Conqueror s brother, the warrior Bishop Odo. One Bishop Odo scene is especially curious. Odo is portrayed prodding his soldiers into battle with the tip of his lance. His lance is aimed at directly at their posteriors. That in itself is memorable, but it s the Latin caption to this scene that s most jolting. It reads Odo comforts his men It s the old meaning of comfort, in Latin con fortis, with strength. Just so, may God comfort and strengthen us as we do battle with the wild beasts of this life. In the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen