Recovering the Wildness of Scripture

When I imagine this morning for Jesus, I think there must have been so much churning him. The Bible is such a juicy, earthy text, but I fear we have tamed it. What happens if we put our bodies into these waters?

Read Mark 1:1-12.

When I was a child, my dad would watch the weather forecast in the winter. When a good cold stretch was coming, he would take the hose out to our little backyard in southwest Detroit and he would cover the ground with water. He would go back out a few hours later and do it again. And then again. After a few days, my sister and I had our very own ice rink! For weeks, we would skate around the apple tree and picnic table.

My kids, who are now 11 and 8, know that apple tree. They’ve climbed it dozens of times. And they’ve eaten at that same, old picnic table. But they will never know what it feels like to skate around that yard. The days don’t stay cold long enough. The temperatures dip low and then suddenly there is a warm day. Just in the brief time between my childhood and theirs, you can see so many ways the climate has shifted. 

Climate change is all around us. We feel it in little ways like how we harvest the cherries in our yard a little earlier each year. And in the big ways, as so many beloveds are still without electricity, water, schooling, or homes in the wake of two raging hurricanes tearing from the shores through the mountains.

The rains fall harder. The snow comes less. Aqueducts are drying up. Fires spread rapidly. The air grows toxic. The songbirds are growing quiet. Mountain tops are being harvested. Topsoil is drifting away. Plastic fills the oceans. 

It’s too much. So many of us have already tasted climate catastrophe, and if we haven’t, we will soon. This loss lives in our bodies. There is reason to weep. And a collective need to hold it.

Witness the story shifting

It is in these moments of ache and grief and anxiety and dread and perhaps something a little too close to despair, that I open the Gospel these pages in Mark and see the story shift before my eyes.

I have to admit that I never found the story of Jesus’ baptism all that interesting. I understood it as crucial to the arc of the Gospel, but I think it a little dull and altogether weird. But suddenly in the context of an ongoing climate crisis, the geography and ecosystem of that time and place seem to rise off the page.

In this reading from Mark, Jesus is baptized into the Jordan. It is a transformational moment for him that shifts the course of his life. 

When I imagine this morning for Jesus, I think there must have been so much churning him. He has been witnessing since the day he was born the power of empire, the military might of Herod, and the economic injustice all around him. 

Vocation and spirit are rumbling in his belly. He’s listening. He has been moving more and more to the margins listening to his cousin John’s vision. 

Sand between his toes

As I read through the text, suddenly life begins to jump off the page—honey bees and grasshoppers, camels and wild birds, and the sound of the water touching the shore.  

John has found his way into community by being in relationship with the wilderness. He is living off the land … filling his belly with locusts and honey. 

And it is here in this place that Jesus takes off his shoes and puts his feet on the ground. He walks into the waters. Sand between his toes. He gets in the water. Fish swim around him and the wild birds fly overhead. Spirit is flowing … in this wild place. 

And then in the brief verse at the end Jesus decides to go even deeper into the wilderness to live among the wild animals as he lets all that is churning move into the next moments of his life. 

The Bible is such a juicy, earthy text, but I fear we have tamed it. How could we look at these readings to recover the wildness that has been stripped from the pages?

Jesus is constantly in relationship to the watershed to which he belongs. The stories take place in rivers and seas and up in the mountains. In fact, I sometimes wonder if we know the names of Jesus’s landscape better than we know our own. The stories are full of fish and bread and wheat and grapes and donkeys and palms and seeds. These are not metaphors, they are the living, breathing reality of the disciples’ lives.

Re-wilding our theologies

If Jesus lived in your place and in this moment, what water would Jesus be baptized into? What wild bird would descend? How do we let the power of our places enter our sanctuaries more fully? How do we re-wild our theologies? How do we get baptized into our watersheds? How do we re-know ourselves as creatures on this sweet earth? 

And how does bringing creation back into focus in our readings of the sacred text change the ways we are in relationship to our own watersheds in this very particular moment?

Jimmy Boggs who was a labor organizer in Detroit said that “Revolutions are made out of love for people and for place.” If we love our neighbors and fall head over heels for the oak trees and the wild raspberries then we will build a revolution. What happens if we put our bodies into these waters? I believe that is what happened when Jesus walked into those waters that day. He was falling in love with the people and the place…and a revolution began.

So, dear friends, let us feel this invitation—to move to the margins, to take off our shoes and feel the ground, to fill our bodies with good earth, and to step into these troubling waters. May we fall deeply in love with this wild world of which we are a part. And may that put us on the risky and beautiful road of discipleship. 

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