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Finding Wilderness                        Mark 1: 9-15                   March 1, 2009

I love the Daily Show. I rarely get to watch it, though. I'm an early riser and so by 10:00 I confess I'm usually ready to pack it in for the night; and I never can seem to remember when the show is re-broadcast in the daytime.

This past Tuesday evening, though, we had a Delaware Valley Moravian Council meeting in Egg Harbor and by the time I got back to Riverside it was close to 11:00. So to unwind, I switched on Comedy Central and watched.

After Jon Stewart finished his monologue, he introduced Jason Jones, one of the regulars on the show, to do an interview segment. As those of you who are Daily Show fans know, these interviews are always satirical and are often laugh-out-loud funny.

This one, however, despite being both of those things, was also troubling. Jones interviewed two clergymen. One, Reverend Daniel W. Blair, a Baptist minister, thinks Barack Obama is the Antichrist. The other, Pastor James David Manning, thinks the President is Hitler. He also claims that President Obama is bisexual - or a bicycle. It was hard to tell from his ranting just what he meant.

At first I thought these interviews were just another tongue-in-cheek skit staged and performed by actors. No real clergymen, I reckoned, could possibly believe such drivel.

But my first thought was incorrect. James Manning and Daniel Blair are real ministers with real followings. Worse, they claim to be Christians. They represent what might properly be called the lunatic fringe of Christianity, but the simple fact that hundreds of people - thousands, perhaps - buy into their messages of hate and deceit sends chills up my spine.

Little wonder that many people either think religion is either a joke or, at the very least, irrelevant. Little wonder that for so many people, the church is simply not important. These men are poster children for the religion bashers of the world.

Anyway, after spending a couple of days trying to sort out why this short segment on the Daily Show was eating at me, I thought, "why not double down," so I rented and watched Religulous, Bill Maher's sometimes funny, and pointedly critical documentary about religion.

Maher, a standup comedian and host of the HBO program Real Time, makes no claim to be objective in his film. He believes that all religion is nonsense and sets out to find examples to prove his point.

The sad truth is that he has no trouble accomplishing his goal. He finds a mushy-headed actor who plays Jesus in a theme park, a director of a museum where dinosaurs and humans coexist, a televangelist who claims, with a straight face, to be the Second Coming of Christ and a Jew who sells silly gadgets to help people circumvent Sabbath restrictions.

Many Christians reacted to Religulous with anger, when it was first released, accusing Maher of blasphemy. I found myself a little embarrassed - and more sad than angry. Embarrassed because it takes so little effort to find so many buffoons claiming to be God's messengers - a sufficient number to fill a two-hour movie - and sad because I'm afraid that people use movies like this - and episodes of the Daily Show like the one I saw this week - to justify their drifting further and further away from the church.

My fear, by the way, seems to be well founded. A Gallup Poll recently found that two-thirds of Americans think that religion is losing its influence on U.S. life.

If the Gallup Poll is right - and I suspect it is - the fringe elements of religion are partly to blame. But only partly. The reason religion is losing its influence is not just because of the cooks and extremists that show up in the public eye naming the name of Jesus.

It is also because many of us who are in the Christian mainstream sometimes lose sight of the message of Jesus, and the positive influence it can have on our lives.

And unfortunately, when we don't get Christianity right those who distort Jesus' message fill the void and dominate the perception the world has of all of us.

This morning, we in the Christian Church find ourselves at the beginning of Lent, the holiest season of the year. It is the perfect time of the year for us to get it right. The perfect time for us, as the people of God here in this small corner of the world, to set a positive example of what it means to be people of faith.

The Gospel text we read a few minutes ago is always the text for the first Sunday in Lent. It reminds us that after his baptism and before he began his public ministry, Jesus followed the leading of the Spirit and entered the wilderness.

All of the Gospel writers recount this time in Jesus' life. All of them mention the forty days.

Mark's account, though, is different from the others. All he tells us is that Jesus was tempted, was with the wild beasts and that the angels waited on him.

The understated way that Mark tells the story stands in stark contrast to the more detailed stories in the other Gospels.

"The Spirit drove him into the wilderness," Mark writes. Nothing more. No detail on what happened while he was there.

What we do know is that when Jesus emerged from the wilderness, he found his voice."The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near," he said to his disciples, "repent, and believe in the good news."

During that forty days in the wilderness, Jesus of Nazareth had become the Christ.

And the Christ that Jesus became when he emerged from the wilderness preached a gospel that bears no resemblance to the message that is so easily lampooned by the likes of Bill Maher and so easily dismissed, in our popular culture, as just so much foolishness.

The gospel that Jesus preached was a message of justice and peace; a message of good news for the poor, a message that challenged the powerful and stood up for the powerless. So much so that it eventually led to the cross.

The message of Jesus is good news. News that we Christians can be proud to proclaim. News that we can embrace without reservation.

The season of Lent is an invitation to us to follow Jesus into the wilderness. An invitation to spend forty days with the good news front and center in our lives.

The meal we share together this morning is a fitting starting point on that journey. Join me, now, as we gather around the Table of the Lord.

                                                                             AMEN

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