The Separation of Church and Field
July 10, 2008
We hear a lot of about the separation of Church and State. In the Biblical age of Israelite monarchy, there was no such distinction, and yet there’s a constant tension between church and field - between the Temple and the Wilderness. Naturally, the histories in the Hebrew Scripture were written from the Temple-State point-of-view, and yet the prophets and the Gospels offer another side of the story.
The first thing we see in the original Gospel, according to Mark…
John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance…And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to [be] baptized by him in the river Jordan…Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. (Mark 1:4-6)
I recently heard a very good sermon about how CLEAN John always looks in artwork. And yet here we’ve got him, wearing the hair of the smelliest animal that lives, eating bugs, and his beard and hair and smeared with honey. It’s really something of a miracle in the story – people are going out to SEE this guy! And to hear him shout insults at them. Townspeople, and from the big city-dwellers, are coming out to the wilderness - YES, we’ll repent, just PLEASE get your filthy self into that water!
And then Jesus shows up…
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. (Mark 1:11-12)
So now JESUS runs off into the wilderness. For forty days, he gets baked by the sun, hassled by the Satan – who knows? Maybe he found John’s stash of bugs and honey. We might read this now and think, ‘Oh, I guess that’s when Jesus sat back and watched Lawrence of Arabia…the extended version…’ but to first century Judean audiences, people brought up on the tales and traditions of the Hebrew Scriptures, hearing the word ‘Wilderness’ was like doing a Google-search for…I don’t know, ‘car,’ or ‘house’ – this was an iconic word that brought up ALL KINDS of cultural memories. To give a sense of it, the word ‘Wilderness’ appears 27 times in Exodus, 48 times in the book of Numbers – these were a people whose cultural identity was forged in the wilderness. Even the word Hebrew, coming from ‘Habiru,’ meaning ‘outsider,’ suggests a people from the fringes on society.
Beginning with Abraham in the book of Genesis, “Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” (Genesis 12:1) The first thing the Lord says to Abraham? Hey, let’s go take a walk through the wilderness! And then of course, the most famous example is the Exodus. The Israelites have been slaves for generations, and one day Moses gets so fed up with the abuses heaped on his people, he kills a man for beating a slave. Where does he go? Running off into the wilderness. He meets a nice African girl, gets married, they have some kids, and then one day he’s tending some sheep and sees a burning bush…in the wilderness (Exodus 3) So he goes back to Egypt.
Moses…went to Pharaoh and said, “Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, ‘Let my people go, so that they may celebrate a festival to me in the wilderness.’” (Exodus 5:1)
And of course, many of us are familiar with the story of how the Israelites with the Lord’s help manage to get out of Egypt. But once they’ve left, as we read in Exodus 13:
They said to Moses, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? …Is this not the very thing we told you in Egypt, ‘Let us alone [to] serve the Egyptians’? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.” (Exodus 13:11-12)
I think God just LIKES the wilderness. It reminds me of vacations with my Dad, camping out or whatever, and his four kids saying “Da-ad…can’t we stay in a hotel? Air conditioning? Cable TV? Free danish in the morning?” And of course, he’d say “No, we’re on this three-day canoe trip – it can’t rain forever!” Or…I don’t know if anybody remembers Calvin and Hobbes…the comic-strip I mean, by Bill Watterson, how Calvin’s Dad would take them on vacations and it would rain all week. Then, as they packed up the car to go home, the sun would come out.
Anyway, I can’t help seeing YHWH as one of those Dads, trying to build character for the kids by…well, literally dragging them through the wilderness. And the more they complain, the more determined he becomes. We need to remember here that we’re dealing with God, who decides where all the lakes and resorts and swimming-pools are going to be. Those little cocktail umbrellas? Who do you think came up with that, in the first place? These Israelites were walking in the desert…with the inventor of the Pina Colada! No wonder they complained! Then in the book of Numbers, Chapter 14:
And the LORD spoke to Moses…: How long shall this wicked congregation complain against me?…“As I live” says the LORD “I will do to you the very things I heard you say: your dead bodies shall fall in this very wilderness…not one of you shall come into the land in which I swore to settle you… (Numbers 14:26-30)
And so for forty years the wandered, even Moses never got to the Promised Land, only their children…as adults…ever got there. So they settle in and eventually establish a kingdom under David. Now we see an interesting scene in the second book of Samuel, chapter 7:
Now when [king David] was settled in his house, [he] said to the prophet Nathan, “See now, I am living in a house of cedar, but the ark of God stays in a tent.” …That same night the word of the Lord came to Nathan: Go and [ask] my servant David: …Are YOU the one to build ME a house to live in? I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle. Wherever I have moved about among all the people of Israel, did I ever speak a word with any of the tribal leaders…saying, “Why have you not built me a house of cedar?” (2 Samuel 7:1-7)
When faced with the prospect of a nice, settled, respectable life, the Lord suddenly becomes indignant and sarcastic. “Are YOU going to build ME a house?” Here again, the great scout-master in the sky is turning down the grand hotel (the presidential suite, no less) in favor of his old tent in the wilderness. Of course then David’s son Solomon drafts all the Israelites into slavery to build the big Temple anyway. …And yet, as we read in 1 Kings 8:4, even when moving into the newly built, palatial Temple, the Lord has the beloved old tent installed inside. And the Lord never really lets this wilderness thing go.
Through the prophet Jeremiah:
Thus says the LORD: I remember the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride, how you followed me in the wilderness, in a land not sown. (Jeremiah 2:2)
Through the prophet Hosea:
I will punish [my ex-wife Israel] for the festival days…when she offered incense to [idols] and decked herself with her ring and jewelry, and went after her lovers, and forgot me, says the LORD. [Then I will] bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her… There she shall respond as in the days of her youth, as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt. (Hosea 2:13-15)
Through the prophet Ezekiel:
I will bring you into the wilderness of the peoples, and there I will enter into judgment with you face to face. As I entered into judgment with your ancestors in the wilderness of the land of Egypt, so I will enter into judgment with you, says the Lord God. (Ezekiel 20:35-36)
Time and again, the Lord says to the people Israel ‘Don’t make me take you out back behind the barn.’ Time and again they disobey, and are dragged across the wilderness to be enslaved by the invading armies of Assyria, Babylon and Rome. And then, in the Gospel of Mark, a figure emerges from the wilderness, shouting at the people who gather to hear him – We’ve got to change our ways! You people from the city and the towns have forgotten your wilderness roots. Jesus appears, gets blessed, and charges out into the wilderness…to have his visions, face his demons, and REMEMBER WHERE HIS PEOPLE CAME FROM. In forty days, he symbolically re-enacts the forty years of wandering, and when he returns…he’s ready to enter the synagogues and Temple, and show people a new direction.