Genesis 9: 12, 16, 17; Mark 1: 12, 13

The desert imperative

Please forgive me if I sound like Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack, but there is a woman on yahoo travel who frequently has a video segment called “a broad abroad.” These are her words, not mine.  In one of her presentations she travels to the country of Oman in the Persian Gulf region.  It is a country that just lost its ruler after many decades. It seems he was a rather benevolent leader who had pretty much any building or venue named after him.  It is a place of endless deserts, hot, baking deserts with almost no life in it, it seems. But then she shows a beautiful, blue watering hole in the middle of the arid wasteland and in spite of her fear of heights she jumps in from a rock, fully clothed of course, because anything else would be improper. 

Once again our lectionary readings put the text about Noah and the flood together with Jesus’ entry into the desert.  How opposite they are, moving from a time of inundation with water to a time and place of dryness and drought.  This is something Californians can understand: drought, fire and flood.  They all threaten at one time or another.  What we want is a nice clear balance between dry and hot.  “It never rains in California, but boy let me tell you, it pours( Albert Hammond, Mike Hazlewood, Mums Records, 1972),” says the well known seventies pop song.  We are going to be really dry now and animals will suffer, farmers will suffer, grocery store shoppers will be hard pressed and we will have to change our ways to a certain degrees.  The way we use water on our church premises may no longer be responsible.  So how does our reality as a soon-to-be-parched state change how we look at today’s passage?   The flood has ended.  The rainbow of promise has been seen. That is one story.  But the other is a story of dryness, of desolation, of depletion.  And that is our theme for today:”depletion.”  Jesus has to go into the desert where the Spirit takes Him and He must face His demon and find His angels.  There is no other way.  And He finds out what matters to Him and what He is supposed to do.  He rejects power for the mission to which He is called.  In the middle of desolation and terror and depletion, Jesus finds a source within Him that will feed the people and that still feed you and me, one drop at a time.

Friends, you and I understand depletion.  We understand feeling dried out when we don’t drink enough.  We feel sapped of energy when we have worn ourselves out.  We understand feeling burnt out when our enthusiasm finally leaves us.  Depletion is part of life.  But could we say that perhaps sometimes it is necessary, friends?  Sometimes our faith even dries up, withers at the vine, and we think that is terrible, but could it be that it is necessary.  If our life was always flooded with joy and meaning and reward and energy, would we learn the lessons the desert experience teaches us?  In a sense Lent starts and ends with the depletion of Jesus, Jesus Who in the end finds enough water in the desert to give us all to drink. “Living water,” He calls it.

Bob Simon, the CBS reporter tells the story of being held hostage near the Iraq border.  As he was being remembered last week an old interview was being shown on television (Sixty Minutes February 15, 2015) again about how he found something inside himself he never knew he had and that the beating he took would not kill him. He somehow knew he would survive.  It is of course not an experience anyone would wish on another, but like Jesus Simon’s desert experience led to a source, a wellspring.

Sometimes being depleted does not mean we will lose hope more and more and we will lose the connection with God more and more but that we will find God again, like that beautiful oasis in the middle of the Oman desert. Sometimes drying up and drying out is a way of draining all the excess and finding our real selves and a new mission. Not too long ago the drought in Texas drained a lake and exposed historical riches no one knew were there.  This may happen to us.  The spiritual drought in our lives may be inevitable sometimes, it is not necessary the end of our world.  I have been there many times myself over the years, but I am still talking to you here today about God. Sometimes feeling drained and depleted is a way of us reacting to the challenges and stresses of our life and our sense of failure.  Sometimes things flood in, sometimes things dry up.  Sometimes the Spirit may call us into the desert and the dry places also.  May we find meaning in the deserts of our lives.  May we find the pool of water that emerges in the drought that sustains us for the tasks ahead, the way they did for Jesus in the desert. May we walk with the depleted Jesus during Lent and find water along with Him. May God guide us.