February 18 Worship

Music.

In those days, Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.

And just as he was coming out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and

the Spirit descending like a dove on him.

And a voice came from heaven, You are my Son, the Beloved. With you I am well pleased.

And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.

He was in the wilderness for 40 days, tempted by Satan, and he was with the

wild beasts, and the angels waited on him.

Now, after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news

of God and saying, the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near.

Repent and believe in the good news.

This is the gospel of the Lord.

Music.

Praise to you, O Christ.

Because it is my first Sunday with you all as senior pastor,

because it's the first Sunday of our Lenten journey, because we find Jesus at

the beginning of his ministry in the gospel of Mark in the wilderness.

Wilderness, no matter which way you slice it, we find ourselves at the beginning of a journey.

And so, friends, let us ask ourselves then what is needed to faithfully move

through this wilderness together.

I'm not going to do this in every sermon. Some of you know this about me,

but I was a classics major in college, but I'm not going to bring up Latin and

Greek in every sermons, so just consider this first one a little treat,

all right? Or not, or the opposite.

But the word wilderness in its original Greek of our Gospels can sometimes be

written by two words, the Greek words eromos and topos, or as we find it in

the Gospel of Mark, just one word, just eromos.

But either way, what this literally translates to is empty place,

eromos, empty, antitopos place.

The connotation here is that it is.

Empty of life. It's empty of water. It's empty of food.

It's empty of people. In many senses, this is like a vacuum.

The stuff, the things, the particularities have all been sucked out.

And this, I think, should give us pause. Because if this is where we begin our

journey in the the eromos topos, the empty place,

it would then seem to suggest that we are all alone.

We literally get the English word from eromos. We get the word hermit from that, all alone.

And yet, a long time ago, a very smart man said a very smart thing that couldn't

be proven by other other smart people for thousands of years.

And the smart man's name was Aristotle.

Yes, that Aristotle. And in one of his philosophical musings,

it was Aristotle who said, nature despises a vacuum.

In other words, if there is an empty space anywhere on this earth,

something will come along to fill it.

Water, earth, air, plants, animals, even humans, Every place on earth,

and it turns out in the cosmos, has...

Even after the advent of modern science, Aristotle's ancient bold claim still holds true.

And I know this because of where I last served as senior pastor at St.

Timothy Lutheran Church in Naperville, Illinois.

Have any of you ever heard of the Fermilab?

The Fermilab is located in Naperville, just a few miles away from the church.

And the Fermilab, if you're unfamiliar, familiar, is the best attempt at creating

an absolute perfect vacuum that humans have tried, the perfect empty space.

And what they have there in order to accomplish this and what they aim to do

with it is they have an enormous particle accelerator buried underground.

And from what I know about these machines, which is very little,

what they do is they send elemental particles around a four-mile track underground,

and they move at incredible speeds in order to study them.

But in order to do this, to send these particles, they can't hit anything along

the way, so they need to remove everything from this four-mile loop.

They need to get rid of even the air, all of the oxygen, the nitrogen,

the hydrogen, and they even need to get even smaller with that,

and they have to remove the electrons, the protons, the neutrons,

any other trons hanging hanging out.

And to do this, to achieve this absolute vacuum, they use these high-powered

fans that run for weeks and weeks and weeks at a time before an experiment to try to clear it out.

And despite all of their best efforts and the top minds in our country and around

the world, they don't do a very good job because there are still 100,000 parts

per cubic centimeter centimeter all around that four-mile track.

In other words, humans cannot create a perfect Eremos topos, a perfect empty.

There's no such thing, it turns out, in all of nature as a truly empty place,

because something always, always, always comes along to fill it.

This is true for hydrogen colliders, and this is true for you and for me.

The question is, and the question we need to ask ourselves today,

day is when we find ourselves journeying through our own empty land,

lent or otherwise, self-imposed, led by the Spirit like Jesus was,

or led by something else entirely, the question is, what is going to fill it?

For 40 days and 40 nights, Jesus tries to fill the empty place of of the wilderness

with things that are good. He tries prayer.

He tries fasting. But as we hear, not in today's abbreviated account in Mark,

but in the much larger, longer versions we're accustomed to reading in Matthew

and Luke on other first Sundays in Lent, at the end of his time,

famished from not eating, worn out from being alone, who shows up?

That's right, the devil, Satan shows up and Satan has a proposition to make.

The great accuser offers to Jesus to fill the emptiness.

Something has to fill the void is essentially what the devil says when he says,

that void in the pit of your stomach, let's fill it with food.

Tell those rocks to become bread.

Are you bored out here in the desert? Let's fill it with a cheap thrill.

Let's climb to the the top of the Temple Mount and throw yourself off. Let angels catch you.

Do you want to fill the emptiness of this ministry, Jesus? Make it truly important.

Well, then let me give you the kingdoms of this world.

It turns out that you don't have to be a particle physicist or an ancient philosopher

to know the powers of this earth that seek to fill our emptiness.

Our life is full of empty-place moments, wilderness moments.

Every day, in fact, we must ask ourselves how we will fill our days,

our weeks, our months, our lengths, our times in ministry, our life.

And the truth is all too obvious.

If we don't choose what fills them.

Something else will. And so I ask you all today, as we begin our journey through

Lent, what is going to fill the emptiness, the eromos topos,

the wilderness in our lives through which we journey?

There's an old legend about the blues singer, songwriter, and musician Robert Johnson.

Does that name ring familiar to all of you, Robert Johnson?

Well, Robert Johnson Johnson was born in Mississippi in 1911,

and the story goes that he wanted to be a blues singer more than anything else in life.

So at a young age, he hung out with other musicians in the Mississippi Delta.

There's just one problem. He wasn't any good.

Far from good. Most people who knew him at the time said he was utterly talentless,

not a musical bone in his body.

Well, the story goes, there was a moment when Robert disappeared.

He just wasn't around anymore. And then one day he showed up.

And all of a sudden, he returned and he wasn't just good.

He was better than good. He was the best.

Robert Johnson didn't live for very long after that. But with the music he went

on to write and perform, he has gone down as possibly, if not the best blues

musician, at least one of the most influential in history. country.

And as you can imagine, people began to wonder how Robert Johnson got so good.

Do you know this legend? Some of you are shaking your heads.

Well, legend says that one night, he went out into the country, the wilderness.

And there he found a place where two roads met, and there he waited.

And the hours of the night passed, and they passed until about midnight, night,

suddenly a mysterious figure appeared and promised Robert Johnson that he would

give him unparalleled ability and talent in exchange for his soul.

Wilderness, the devil, temptation? Sounds familiar. Turns out the story's not true.

It was invented by a record producer in order to promote this backcountry blues

player who appeared out of nowhere from relative obscurity.

But the message is all the same.

People believed this story for decades, some even going down to Mississippi

to find the place at the crossroads because it captures some kernel of existential truth.

We humans are afraid that we are alone to figure this whole thing out.

And in that feeling of emptiness, we cling to false promises that say they will fill up the emptiness.

So friends, listen closely. In a world where we we are told to believe in the

power of personal aptitude and self-sufficiency.

It's hard to omit our need for help.

And when we do, when we realize that put in the same position as Jesus in the

desert, we probably wouldn't stand a chance against the allures of what he was

offered—satisfaction,

power, self-importance—it can be easy to be afraid of the journey that lies before us.

The great task at hand. That's fear.

And this is where the devil wins on this Lenten journey and our journey through life.

But this isn't the fear over our garden variety temptations,

right? This is not the bite of chocolate you said you were going to give up for Lent.

It's not the prayer practice you said you were going to take on that has fallen by the wayside.

That's not where the the devil makes inroads.

It's the fear that convinces us that we're alone. It's the fear that convinces

us to fill that sense of emptiness with satisfaction and power and self-importance.

But friends, here's the good news, and it's quite simple.

We are not alone.

We're not alone because we sit in this room with so many brothers and sisters

in Christ, and Jesus promised long ago that where two or three are gathered, he would be there.

So look around. We got two and then two more and three more and a whole room of people.

Just imagine St. John's, what we can do.

Friends, we're not alone because Jesus says every time you break bread at that

altar, Jesus says, I will be.

We're not alone because Jesus says that we find him in the face of all those

people we meet as we minister to them.

Friends, we're not alone because there's no such thing as an empty place in the entire universe.

There's no such thing as a truly empty place if we recognize with every fiber

of our being that even in the aramos topos of Lent, of our wilderness lives,

of our feeling of emptiness, if we realize that Jesus is already there,

already there, walking with us in all of the empty places of our lives,

a promise made in our baptisms, that nothing in all of creation can truly be

empty when it is full of the love and the grace and the forgiveness and the

worthiness and the peace and the power and the victory of God.

Choosing to boldly live into that truth, that's the answer to the question at

the beginning of the sermon.

That's what we need to faithfully journey through this wilderness world,

this journey through Lent, this journey we are on now together, St. John's.

To that I say, thanks be to God. Amen.