Dear friends,
As we journey through the season of Lent together, I pray you will know the presence of God beside you in powerful ways.
Here is this week’s worship service in its entirety. We are grateful for A Sanctified Art (https://sanctifiedart.org/) and the resources they’ve provided for this worship series entitled Again and Again.
If you’re prefer to listen to only the gospel reading and sermon, you may do so here:
https://soundcloud.com/stacey-nalean-carlson/a-real-savior-a-sermon-for-the-1st-sunday-in-lent
Today’s sermon is based on Mark 1: 9-15.
9In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. 10And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. 11And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
12And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. 13He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.
14Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, 15and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”
Beloved of God, grace and peace to you in the name of Jesus. Amen.
Have you ever had a song from your childhood spontaneously rise to the surface of your mind? Out of the blue?
That’s what happened to me the other night as our family was eating supper together. I have no idea what prompted it, but suddenly I was singing a song from my Sunday School days that I didn’t even know I remembered.
1, 2, 3 The devil’s after me.
4, 5, 6 He’s always throwing sticks.
7, 8, 9 He misses every time.
Alleluia! Alleluia! Amen.
9, 8, 7 I’m on my way to heaven
6, 5, 4 to live forevermore
3, 2, 1 with God’s own holy Son.
Alleluia! Alleluia! Amen.
The boys just looked at me like I had finally lost it.
And I, too, was a little bit disturbed. Frankly. Because for as much as I am indebted to my Sunday School teachers through the years—and I do indeed give thanks to God for them—there’s something about this particular song (a song I thought I had long ago forgotten)—that doesn’t sit quite right with me anymore.
For my boys, it was the first line that shocked them. The devil’s after me? That’s terrifying, one of them said. That’s a song for children?
But for me, as an adult, I think the most problematic line—at least in the first half of the song—is he misses every time.
Listen to what Debie Thomas has written about her own childhood Sunday School experience with our gospel reading for this day:
I was a little girl in Sunday School when I first learned the story of Jesus’s temptation in the wilderness. My teacher, a grandmotherly woman in a hairnet and beige panty hose, had the Judean wilderness stretched across a flannelgraph board in front of my first-grade class. At the far left of the fuzzy felt landscape, an innocuous-looking devil — scrawny, red-suited, and fork-tailed — stooped in the sand, reaching for a loaf-shaped stone. To his right, a supremely undisturbed Jesus towered over the landscape in a pristine white robe, his finger pointed devastatingly at his tempter.
To be fair, my teacher was doing the best she could to ease us very young kids into a story that might have frightened us. I give her credit for that. But here’s the problem: what I absorbed from her on that Sunday morning was a superhero version of Jesus that left no room for his humanity. At no point in my childhood or young adulthood did it occur to me that Jesus actually struggled in the wilderness. That he hurt. That he hungered. That he wept, thirsted, wrestled, and suffered. Instead, I assumed that his triumph over evil was a foregone conclusion — a “trial” that cost him nothing.
It’s comforting, maybe, to believe in a superhero version of Jesus. It’s comforting, maybe, to sing about how the devil misses every time when throwing sticks at God’s beloved. But sometimes those sticks land. Sometimes those sticks puncture our trust, wound our hope, send us reeling. Sometimes encounters with the devil—with evil, with sin, with the powers of this world that rebel against God—are not so easily sung away. We are not so easily undisturbed. Jesus is not as easily undisturbed as the flannelgraph would suggest. The devil is not so scrawny and off his mark. Life is full of trials—time in the wilderness—where the sticks hit their target and leave a mark.
Just this week, there have been striking images emerging from Texas. Among all the human tragedy, the magnitude of which is hard to even begin to comprehend…there were those thousands of sea turtles—stunned by the record cold temperatures—brought to a convention center in an attempt to rescue them. And somehow, for me, that image captures it all. How stunned we can become in an instant. How easily our lives can change. How vulnerable we all are, even those of us with strong, outer shells.
So, do we need a superhero Jesus? Or do we need a Jesus who suffers with us? Who is himself vulnerable? Who experiences the sting of those sticks landing? Those nails piercing?
Debie Thomas writes, we need the Jesus of the desert. We need to know that he wrestled with real demons and real dangers during those forty days of temptation. As alluring as it might be to cling to a divine superhero, we need the Jesus who endured a terrain where the Holy Spirit, Satan, the wild beasts, and the angels resided together. Alone, we’ll never survive such a dangerous place. With a companion who knows the way, though, we will.
The Jesus we need is the Jesus we get. He is our companion who not only knows the way, but is the way. When we’re driven into the wilderness by pain or loss, stunned and disoriented, there is one who journeys beside us. The sting of the sticks is real, but so is your Savior.
Friday morning, I walked to Dunning Springs, aware of so much grief in our community, in our nation, in the whole world these days. And I found myself praying, God, we do not know the way through the wilderness of grief—the vast emptiness; the relentless annoyance; the dreams frozen in mid-air, falling to the stony ground, shattering into a million pieces—each one ready to pierce us if we dare take even one barefoot step.
God, we do not know how to navigate the separation from what we hoped would be, the distance from those who do not know, the cruel gap between before and after.
We do not know, dear God, but you know us.
Have mercy.
The waters flow even now; here is your cascading grace, soothing, smoothing, leading, calling, making a way home.
The water flowed over Jesus just before he was driven into the wilderness. God’s cascading grace claimed him and named him Beloved.
Did that water keep flowing even in the wilderness? Did that grace-filled name continue to claim Jesus, even when the devil was after him, even when the temptation, the suffering, the exhaustion, the disorientation, the need was so real and so profound?
Of course. Yes! We know it to be true, because we’ve seen what Jesus did on the other side of that wilderness time. He aligned himself with those who were suffering, those who were exhausted, isolated, sick, possessed. He brought hope and healing, good news by simply drawing near. He received God’s word for him—and whatever gifts the angels provided as they waited on him—and that experience formed him and shaped him for a life of wholehearted love.
I so appreciate these questions Debie Thomas asks: What do your angels look like? Do you recognize them when they show up? When they minister to you, hold you, brace you, do you hear a new version of God’s voice, calling you “beloved?” If yes, then what would it be like to enter into someone else’s barren desert right now, and become an angel for their journey?
I love those questions. And here are some more that I’m asking: What would it look like to feel God’s grace cascading over you, to receive God’s presence beside you, and to willingly come alongside another whose wilderness is overwhelming right now? What gifts might you have to offer? What hope might you bring by simply being there and whispering, beloved? Singing, beloved? Praying, beloved?
Returning once more to Debie Thomas, Lent isn’t a season for unshakeable superheroes. It’s a season for vulnerable creatures whose wilderness journeys are never easy or straightforward. It’s a season that leads to the cross. It’s a season where the devil’s sticks do not miss. And, it’s a season where we know ourselves to be loved beyond measure, never alone, never forsaken, always Beloved, on our way to life—abundant life—here and now and forevermore. Amen.
Read Debie Thomas’ entire commentary here.
And, if you missed Ash Wednesday worship, here it is:
We’ll continue worshiping on Wednesdays (services are available after 9am each week), using Julie Aageson’s book, Finding Home, as our inspiration. You can learn more about Julie’s book here.
God’s peace be with you!