First Sunday of Lent, February 21, 2021 – Genesis 9:8-15; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:12-15

I don’t know how many of you can see the empty chair up here on the altar. That’s because last night we had a special guest here as the main celebrant for Mass. His name is Timothy Cardinal Dolan. He came here to celebrate 5 o’clock Mass, partly just to visit our parish and offer some comfort to our people in the midst of this pandemic, and to share with us the joy of knowing that this is the Year of St. Joseph. And, in the back of his mind, is a plan to try to visit every church named after St. Joseph in his entire diocese during this year. We were talking about things like the indulgences that the Holy Father has granted for certain acts of piety and charity done under the name of St. Joseph this year; he said he intends to add to it, if possible, a plenary indulgence for making a visit to any church named after St. Joseph. Which means that, if that should come to be, then ours would be a shrine church for the rest of the year, in which peoples from all over the area can come to make a short visit and pray for the intentions of the Holy Father.

So he sends his greetings to all of you. It was a big surprise for the people at the 5 o’clock Mass, who didn’t know anything about it, and walked in, and all of a sudden there was the Cardinal in their midst. It was a lot of fun. Actually a lot of fun for the Cardinal as well. We gave him a little tour of this building, and told him how certain things came to be. He had noticed the stained glass window of St. Joseph up there because the evening sun, after the snow shower, was shining through it. So I told him how we got that window, how we got the doors; I took him on a tour of our renewed basement. And he was really kind of impressed with the spirit of our congregation, with their joy, with their participation, and he was impressed as well with our physical facility. When I told him this was the second largest - this hall when all the chairs are here - is the second largest worship facility in all of Sullivan County, he was bowled over. He had no idea that we hold that many people. 

About 20 years ago, maybe a little bit more than that, Ted Turner bought a television station and he began produce original content for it. And one of the things he decided to do was to do a series of dramas about the lives of famous Native Americans. After about four of them he gave up, because it just wasn't drawing the sponsorship dollars that he had hoped. But one of his best efforts was the story of the great Lakota Chief, Crazy Horse. It begins with the most amazing story. A little boy, about 12 years old, is sent by his father, off into the wilderness, carrying nothing but a knife on his belt - no food, no clothing, nothing - to spend a week  in the wilderness fending for himself, feeding himself, defending himself from any dangerous animals that should come his way, and praying for a vision from God. And every Sioux boy had to go through this process. But it's something that almost all primitive societies did, in one way or another. They found a very similar process among the Aborigines in Australia. The Spartans in Greece did it. The Romans did it. The Celts, both in Scotland and in Ireland, did it. The number of days or weeks spent alone, and the precise nature of the tasks required, changes from culture to culture, but a couple of things stand out.

It is going away from the society, so that you can come back to serve the society, that's the essential ingredient. The second essential ingredient is to find one's own inner self. To find one’s own inner self.  The third ingredient was to come to some sort of terms with the mystical elements of the world. Whether you called it the Great Spirit or something else, there was some defining presence in the world that was above the world, or beyond the world, with which you had to come to terms; make some sort of peace.

I'm not saying that the story we heard in the Gospel this morning is a vision quest like the Lakota vision quest, but it's something very much like it. I'm sure that when Mark wrote this Gospel, he had in mind this kind of behavior that was, pretty much, standard in the society in which he lived. And so Jesus, the young man, having just been baptized and told that he is a beloved son - notice what St. Mark says - he says, “the Spirit drove Jesus out into the desert,” not, “ Jesus walked out into the desert.” But, the very one who had told him he was a beloved son, now sent him out to learn what being a beloved son really means.

And so, you notice that Mark does not have temptations in his story. When it says, “to be tempted by the devil,” that's not really good translation, because, for us, temptation means being lured into sin. It’s more like he was being tested, being tested by the devil. Up until almost New Testament times, Satan was not a bad guy. He was God’s minister of justice. Another angel was God’s minister of mercy. But Satan’s job was to hold people’s feet to the fire, on behalf of God. And so, Jesus is sent out to be challenged by Satan in all the things that he thinks He believes and holds dear. That’s the first part of it.
The second part is that St. Mark says, “He was with the wild beasts.” That doesn’t mean he was surrounded by animals that he was terrified of. It means the Jesus, for those forty days, was living in harmony with God’s creation - all the natural world that, most of the time we are afraid of, and try to avoid - He’s living in harmony with it. And, finally, He was ministered to by angels. In some way, God’s presence was with him during this time of trial.

During this Lent, we are going to go on a series of journeys. A journey inward to ourselves. A journey outward toward our community. A journey upward toward God. You know, this past Ash Wednesday, I chose to use, as the prayer for the imposition of ashes, “Repent, and believe in the Good News.” But everybody knows the other one better, because it’s been a part of our society for so long, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

There was a song in the early 1970s, by a one-hit-wonder group called Kansas. And this is part of the lyrics: “I close my eyes, only for a moment and the moment’s gone. All my dreams pass before my eyes of curiosity. Dust in the wind. All they are is dust in the wind. Just a drop of water in an endless sea. All we do crumbles to the ground though we refuse to see. Nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky. It slips away, and all your money won’t another minute buy. Dust in the wind. All we are is dust in the wind.” That’s a very depressing kind of idea, but it’s rooted in both the Old Testament and in Jesus’ teaching. Jesus talked about the fact that money can’t buy happiness.

No. So what do we make of that? Well, our religion talks about the seven deadly sins, and they’re not sins, they’re attitudes that lead us to individual acts sinfulness of some sort. But those seven can be reduced to one. And this is how I'd like to phrase it, “All of us are capable of doing great things but, in our minds, when we do them, it's because we're great, not because the things were great. We have this unbreakable self that is egotistical, and almost everything we do wrong, in our own lives and in the life of society, comes because we are so egotistical. Even the best of us, at the best of times, are more interested in ourselves than anything else. And going out into the desert journey, forces us to confront that part of ourselves.”

So I found another song from the 1970s, by a group called America. “On the first part of the journey, I was looking at all the life. There were plants, and birds, and rocks, and things; there was sand, and hills, and rings. The first thing I met was a fly with a buzz; the sky with no clouds. The heat was hot, the ground was dry, but the air was full of sound. I've been through the desert on a horse with no name. It felt good to be out of the rain. In the desert, you can remember your name, ‘cause there ain't no one gonna give you no pain. And after nine days, I let the horse run free.” Some people say that the “horse with no name” was heroin, because that was the street name for heroin back in the 1970s. But I’d rather think that this is talking about the vision quest that everyone has to go through; to go out into the desert to be at one with the world around us, and to remember our name.

In today's first reading, God puts a rainbow in the sky. We have to be careful about how we understand the story in the book of Genesis, because the rainbow became a thing for children with My Little Pony, and then it became the symbol of the liberation movement for people who are gay. And those are both good symbols as themselves, but the symbol that it was meant to be, in that story, is a symbol of war.

All the ancients believed that the gods made war on the earth very capriciously; sometimes they were nice to people, sometimes they weren’t. And Israel's God had to be different. So, after the flood, God hangs up the bow that he used to kill people with. And God's arrows were lightening. So the storm brings God's vengeance. God hangs up his bow on a hook in the sky and says, “I’m never going to use that again. And this day I make a covenant with all the earth - not just the Jewish people, but all the earth - all the living things, the plants, the trees, the animals. I will never again behave that way.”

Now, we don't really believe that God tried to destroy the earth with a flood, but we do understand what the writer is trying to tell us, that we journey, whether it's forty days or forty hours, we journey out into ourselves to find out what's going on in there, and to try to remove what is egotistical. We do that in order to go on the second and third part of the journey, which will come later in Lent. The journey outward, towards our community. The journey upward, toward God. But your task for this first week of Lent, is to spend some time journeying into yourself, so you can remember your name.