"Good News in Bad Times"  San Williams, UPC

Mark 1:9-15

January 16 of this year Airbus flight 1549 took off from LaGuardia airport quickly colliding with a flock of Canadian Geese.  Captain Chesley Sullenberger calmly took control of the plane and  guided the impaired aircraft to an emergency landing in the icy Hudson River. Miraculously, all one-hundred-and-fifty passengers and five crew members were successfully rescued without a single fatality.  As news of this incident spread, a collective cheer went up throughout the nation.  Pictures of the plane floating in the river with the passengers standing on the wings were seen everywhere.  Captain Sullenberger became an instant hero.  Interviews with the pilot, crew and passengers were all over the media.  I even noticed that Captain Sullenberger was in attendance at the President’s address to the joint houses of Congress last Tuesday evening.  This story struck Americans like a burst of sunshine piercing the gloom of an overcast sky.  We seized the opportunity to bask in the light of a good-news story, because so much of the news of late has been…can I say it church?…scary as hell. For this reason, of all the words that come out of Jesus’ mouth on this first Sunday in Lent, “good news” may be the words we that we are most eager to hear.   

Obviously, we are eager for good news, because there has been so much bad news of late.  Anxiety abounds, and the reasons are well known.  At his inaugural, President Obama delivered an address almost as wintry as D.C.’s sub-freezing temperature that day.  The President acknowledged that he is taking the oath of office “amidst gathering clouds and a raging storm.” 

“We are in the midst of a crisis,” he said, “Our nation is at war against a far reaching network of violence and hatred.  Our economy is badly weakened…Homes have ben lost; jobs shed; business shuttered. Our health care is too costly, our schools fail too many and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.”   The President is right.  We are in the midst of a crisis.  Everybody feels the chill.  A headline in the news this week announced that glaciers in the Arctic are melting even faster than anyone predicted, giving us still another worry to add to our lengthy bad-news check list.  No wonder then that when we read that Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the good news of God, our ears perk up.  We’re definitely ready for good news. 

But God’s good news may be hard for people because our ears, our eyes and our brains are stuffed with data, text messages, twenty-four hour news broadcasts, e-mails and twitters.  Dalton Conley has written a new book that he describes as compact guidebook to our nervous new world.  His book is titled Elsewhere U.S.A. and aims at helping us manage “the myriad data streams, impulses, desires and even consciousnesses that we experience in our heads as we navigate multiple worlds.”  Conley argues that in our elsewhere society we are only convinced we’re in the right place, doing the right thing, at the right time, when we’re on our way to the next destination. Constant motion,” Conley asserts, “ is a balm to a culture in which the very notion of authenticity…has been shattered into a thousand e-mails.”  Or, we might add, trivialized by waves of meaningless twitter.  How does an anxious, on-the-go, information-saturated people tune in to God’s good news? 

Now, the wilderness may sound like a strange environment for hearing good news, but that’s where we’re instructed to go on this first Sunday in Lent.  We read in Mark that after Jesus’ baptism, the Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness.  You may have been struck with the brevity of Mark’s wilderness account when compared to the same story in Luke and Matthew.  They describe more fully Jesus time in the wilderness, his conversations with Satan and the specific temptations that assaulted him. But Mark isn’t interested in such details. He says, simply of Jesus, “He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beast, and the angels waited on him.”   As you know, the wilderness evokes Israel’s forty years of trials and testing before entering the Promised Land.  So in the Bible, wilderness can be a geographical place, but even more it represents a time of testing, uncertainty, challenge and  crisis.   Mark simply notes that Jesus had to content with hostile powers by the mention of Satan and wild beasts.  The wild beasts represent danger, threat.  Yet Mark also tells us that the wilderness, while dangerous, is not void of God’s presence.  “The angels waited on him,” is the phrase Mark uses to express divine providence at work in times of testing.  So with only a few words, Mark conveys his faith that no time is so dark, no crisis so grave, no danger so scary that God’s sustaining, hope-giving presence will not be with us.   Perhaps that’s why people in search of good news are sent, first of all, into the wilderness.

There’s a heart-rending story in this week’s Presbyterian Outlook called “Forty Years on the Run:  A celebration of Marriage.”  It’s written by Linda Reinhardt, Mission Presbytery’s Director of the Jeremiah Project, a nationwide ministry serving those suffering chronic illness and disability due to environmental toxins.  In this article, Linda recounts the courtship and forty year marriage with her husband Bob.  It’s a love story that turned into a wilderness nightmare.  Seven years ago, she contracted a devastating and debilitating auto-immune disease forcing her to live in isolation from the world,  including her beloved husband, who she can only see and talk to from a distance.  No touch, no face-to-face.  Can you imagine?  Yet in spite of the isolation and hardship, she writes, “At the end of the day, no matter how bad the day has been, we can honestly say we wouldn’t trade where we’ve been, the life we’ve shared, and the forty years of loving each other, for anyone’s else’s life.  And, that,” she concludes, “can only be by Divine Providence.”   Yes, the wilderness is real, but so are the angels that wait on us.

And there’s yet another small item in our reading today that may also help us hear the good news of God that Jesus announces.  Mark tells us that Jesus began proclaiming good news of God, after John was arrested.  Of course, Mark’s speaking of the arrest of John the Baptist, but why does he mention it?  John, you recall, was widely regarded as a prophet.  According to Mark he had attracted the attention of the whole Judean countryside.  Not just a few, but all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him.”  So the importance of John was huge.  He had rekindled the people’s expectation for the Messiah. But whatever dreams John had awakened in the people must have evaporated with John’s arrest.  Yet it was at this moment of disappointment, this crisis in the life of the nation that Jesus came to Galilee announcing the good news of God.  Apparently, God’s good news is typically heard—not apart from—but emerging out of disappoint, set-backs, testing.  After John’s arrest, Jesus came proclaiming  good news...after the flood, came the rainbow sign...after the death of King Uzziah, came Isaiah’s vision and call..after Paul threatened violence against the Christians, came his conversion on the Damascus road…after the crucifixion came the resurrection.  

And certainly many people today could continue this biblical litany with experiences of their own such as:  After I was laid off my job,  I learned to trust in God…after I lost my husband, I discovered inner resources I didn’t know I had…after the cancer diagnosis I became more compassionate human being.  The times that we are most vulnerable are often the times we are most open to God, to guidance, to good news.

 Friends, on this first Sunday in lent, can we hear the good news?  “The kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”  God’s goodness, we are assured, will outlast Satan’s evil.  But to what shall we liken the good news of God’s kingdom?   God’s kingdom is like an endangered airliner making a safe landing in perilous waters.  It looks like bright pink red bud blossoms springing froth from a barren branch. It sounds like a melodic hum in a noise-saturated world.  It is very near…and that’s good news.