Bible Text: Mark 1:9-15 | Preacher: Pastor Dorry Newcomer | Series: Mark | Did you have a happy Epiphany?  Epiphany is the day the church remembers the arrival of the Wise Men.  It was on Wednesday, but we celebrated it last week.  Bishop Johnson preached about the wise men following the star so they could worship Jesus.  She encouraged us to be “wise worshippers”, and she said that true worship always leads to a sense of call, to us receiving some marching orders of what God would have us do in response to having encountered God.  But what she didn’t have time to say last week becomes clear in our scripture today:  after the call comes the anti-call.

I have experienced this in my own life, but I never noticed the pattern until Bishop Johnson pointed it out several years ago.  It was the first time I met her, just a few months after she became a bishop and was appointed to our Eastern PA Conference.  She was the guest speaker at a gathering of clergy women, and she told us, there is the call, and then there is always the anti-call.  She gave the example of what had happened to her in recent months.  She had felt God calling her to submit her name for consideration for Bishop.  With time, that sense of call grew stronger and stronger.  That’s exciting, right?  But as soon as she submitted her name, she started hearing from friends and colleagues who couldn’t believe she thought she was called to Bishop.  They pointed out that she’d never even been a District Superintendent.  She pastored a deaf church.  She was not qualified, she didn’t have the right experience, she should reconsider—and these were the reactions from her friends!

That story left a big impression on me.  It is so exciting to feel a call from the Lord!  It is even more exciting when people say yes to that call!  But what happens next is usually a lot less fun.  When we say yes to God, something gets triggered in the universe.  There always seems to be an anti-call, a backlash, a struggle of sorts, after people say yes to God.

Just look at our scripture lesson for today.  Jesus asks John to baptize him, not because he has sinned, but as a way to show his solidarity with sinners.  To show his commitment to doing the work God has called him to do.  To transition from working as a carpenter to becoming our Savior.  John submerges Jesus into the river, and when he emerges, the sky split open, and God’s Spirit, looking like a dove, came down and landed on him, and a voice said, “You are my Son, the beloved, with you I am well pleased.”  In other words, Jesus had been called by God to save sinners, and he had answered that call, and this made God very happy!

But after the call comes the anti-call.  After Jesus’ baptism, the Spirit of the Lord immediately led Jesus away from his family and community of support to go off by himself.  Alone for forty days and forty nights.  I have a print at our house in the Poconos that says, “Happiness is a little peace and quiet.”  I like some solitude!  But there’s a big difference between a little peace and quiet—and solitary confinement.  There’s a big difference between solitude and isolation.  We have all learned a lot about that in the last ten months.

Of course, Jesus wasn’t completely alone.  He was led by the Spirit, and there’s nothing to suggest he wasn’t accompanied by the Spirit that whole time.  Jesus was not abandoned by God, dropped off like an unwanted puppy on the side of the highway.  He was led by God, he was accompanied by God.  Mark says angels waited on him.  But he was alone, as in, without the companionship of other people.  The only thing he had to keep him company were wild beasts–and his own thoughts.

I like how Mark phrases this, because I have to tell you, I’ve been noticing during this pandemic that sometimes my own thoughts are like wild beasts!  And sometimes, they are the devil.  Back on February 26, 2020, just two weeks or so before the pandemic starting impacting us, I preached on Matthew’s account of Jesus in the wilderness on Ash Wednesday.  I said in that sermon that I thought as Jesus dealt with the loneliness and isolation of that wilderness time, his own thoughts became the devil.  Now, it could be that an actual physical being in a red suit and carrying a pitchfork showed up in the wilderness with Jesus.  But whether a “devil” like that showed up or not, we have enough experience with our own attempts at solitude to know, the devil is inside our own heads!

The desert fathers, early Christian mystics, knew this better than anyone.  They devoted great stretches of their lives to living in silence and isolation, in order to get closer to God.  But what they discovered was, in addition to getting closer to God, silence and isolation can get us closer to the devil, the devil within.  The desert fathers were following God’s call their lives, to live differently.  But what they discovered is, after the call, there is always the anti-call.  Sometimes the anti-call comes, like it did for Bishop Johnson, in words from others.  But often it comes from the voices inside our own heads.

The desert fathers wrote of the eight logismoi, a Greek word that doesn’t have an easy English translation, but it describes the spiritual struggle with our own thoughts.  Jesus was “logos”, the Word made flesh.  If Jesus is the true word, logos, then logismoi are false words.  They are passions, temptations, false ideas we hear inside our heads that disrupt our peace.  They lure us away from our true selves and jerk us around with false teachings. Jesus is the true word; the logismoi are the devil.  The eight logismoi the desert fathers named are gluttony, lust, greed, anger, dejection, listlessness, vainglory, and pride.  I know I struggle with those!

This week I began reading a book by a modern author Jennie Allen, it’s called “Get Out of Your Head:  Stopping the Spiral of Toxic Thoughts”.  She boils things down to three basic “false words”:  the belief that we are helpless, worthless, or unlovable.  Now, I know this sounds pretty grim, and when things are going well, we might not ever have thoughts that approach that level of darkness.  But I bought this book at Target on Monday.  If it’s on the shelves at Target, you know it’s a very popular book right now.  This pandemic has us all in a wilderness.  The isolation, anxiety, and stress of it all has a led to a good many of us flirting with thoughts, struggling with wild beasts, we might never had had to tame before.

But the wild beasts in our heads is not a new phenomenon—some of us just never noticed it much before.  Several years ago I had a church member say to me, “The battle is in the mind, Pastor Dorry!”  I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, but now I think I know.  There is a force at work in the world that is anti-God.  That is anti-life.  That is anti-truth.  We might call that force evil.  We might say it’s the devil.  And among other places, it lives inside our own heads.

And so I have a question for you.  Don’t you think it’s ironic that, on February 26, 2020, I preached an Ash Wednesday sermon on dealing with the wilderness—and I had NO IDEA our wilderness time wasn’t just going to be for the 40 days of Lent, but we would be dealing with 40 WEEKS, even more than that, of wilderness!  I preached this sermon, on February 26, as if I had heard a calling from the Lord, to tell everyone about how I had come to know that the logismoi are real, and that we need to STAY CONNECTED to each other if we are to overcome in this battle in our minds.  And then, bam, two weeks later, we were thrown into a wilderness like never before, and all of a sudden, staying connected became almost impossible.  There is the call, and there is always the anti-call.

But there is also always the Good News, and that Good News is Jesus himself.  Jesus survived the wilderness time, and emerged from it with a refined energy for living out his call.  He started preaching and teaching and healing and serving, calling on people to believe in the good news.  Notice, he did not call them to heed good advice.  He did not call people to live by some good principles.  He did ask them to adopt good practices or consider some good strategies.  No, he asked them to believe in the good NEWS.  He asked them to believe in himself, in the revelation, in the HAPPENING of God.

We are going to be spending the next three months studying the book of Mark.  I can’t think of any better way to get connected to the HAPPENING of God, the good news, than to study this gospel.  The book of Mark is the oldest collection of Jesus stories we have.  It was written to give voice to Peter’s eye- witness accounts of his time with Jesus.  I hope as this worship service comes to a close, you feel a call from God, marching orders, to commit to reading the gospel of Mark the whole way through at least once in the next three months.

But be ready for the anti-call, and that anti-call is likely to come in the form of invasive, unhelpful, untrue thoughts.  This is a universal struggle when we decide to follow Christ and take steps to grow in our faith. The apostle Paul wrote, “We take captive every thought and make it obedient to Christ.”  That’s from 2 Corinthians 10:5.  Take every thought and make it obedient to Christ.  If you’re struggling with wild beasts these days, with the devil inside your own head, know that you are not alone.  You may feel bad for having these thoughts.  But maybe they are a sign that you are right where you are supposed to be.  You’re answering God’s call to stay faithful in the wilderness.  You’re answering God’s call to keep the faith during this difficult pandemic.  The thoughts that trouble you aren’t a sign that you are losing your faith.  They are a sign that your faith has brought you to a place where the tenderness of Christ can serve you like never before.

Now I know Jesus wasn’t always tender.  He got frustrated and angry and impatient just like the rest of us.  But look at how the Spirit of God came upon him.  Like a dove.  Like a gentle, common pigeon.  Can you think of any less impressive bird?  My husband and I are not avid bird watchers, but we like big birds.  We love seeing bald eagles at our house in the Poconos. Sometimes we see hawks flying over the field here at church.  And of course, we are big Temple Owls fans!  Wouldn’t it have been more remarkable if God’s Spirit had looked like an owl, or an eagle, or a hawk, and come upon Jesus with majesty and power and precision?  But the Spirit came like a dove.  With an innocent, quiet beauty, as a sign of peace.  We all know that was NOT by accident.

Maybe that is why the poet Emily Dickinson called Jesus the “Tender Pioneer”.  I used to feel so badly that Jesus was led into the wilderness and was subjected to stress for such an extended period of time.  But now I find it a great source of comfort, because during our own wilderness times, we know we are not alone.  And guess what?  There’s more good news!  Jesus’ wilderness experience shows us that a certain amount of spiritual discomfort is normal!  A certain amount of struggle is actually a good thing.  It can mean that you are answering God’s call in your life.

I hope you will hear a call today to read the gospel of Mark in the coming months.  And I hope you will also hear a call to picture Jesus as our tender pioneer.  Have compassion for yourself.  Allow Jesus’ love to help you refute the logismoi inside your head.  I was feeling nervous about preaching this sermon, because what if all of you are doing just fine, and I’m the only one struggling with hard thoughts?  There you go, exhibit A of how the battle is in our minds.  I know I am not the only one dealing with false thoughts. In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb and say, if you’re not struggling spiritually right now, you’re not paying attention!

So let’s call on this scripture passage to help us rebuke that voice that says, you wouldn’t be struggling if you were doing everything right.  Clearly Jesus did everything right.  But clearly he also struggled.  I thank him for being our Tender Pioneer, who out of great compassion, left heaven to come to earth, and who, out of great compassion, left his regular earthly life to begin his journey to the cross.  It is with tenderness that Jesus asks us to follow him.

We are living in a time when our biggest challenges have no known solutions. Our only choices are to abandon our faith—or to lean on and learn from God as we journey through the wilderness.  May you be blessed in a special way today by the Good News, the HAPPENINGS of God, Jesus, Emmanuel, God with us, our Tender Pioneer.  Amen.