Old South Sermons:

Empty

by the Rev. Dr. Nancy S. Taylor, Senior Minister

Based on Mark 1:9-15 (Jesus in the Wilderness)

The First Sunday in Lent, March 1, 2009

Listen to this sermon

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Warren Buffet, considered by many to be the greatest investor of all time, just had his worst year ever.

Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor, ethicist and author, lost his entire savings with Bernie Madoff and his charity lost over $15 million.

Every week in February, more than 600,000 people filed new claims for unemployment benefits.

The number of Americans on food stamps has reached an all time high.

Animal rescue facilities are flooded by abandoned dogs and cats. Huge numbers of animals are being euthanized and shelters and rescue facilities are going out of business.

Over 100,000 US-based not-for-profits are expected to close their doors this year and next.

The fortunes of the American economy have reached an alarming state and the pace of the decline has been precipitous. It is not just the American economy at stake. It is the synchronized nature of the current global downturn that is so extraordinary. Some say the entire Western banking system is at stake.

If you are like me, this is the news that dominates your lives. Week in and week out, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, this is the news that floods cable and network channels, that screams its truth across the pages of newspapers and blares at us from our radios, our computers and other devices.

After a week of being drenched in such news you could be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that humans believe they are in charge on this planet … that DC and Wall Street, Hong Kong and Tokyo are the only kingdoms that matter.

But you have turned off those sources of news and come here today, on this first Sunday of Lent to hear tell of different news.

There is no camera trained on this story. No glittering, up-market, high-tech studio … no beautiful newscaster covering the story you have come here to hear.

Out of camera shot, beyond the hearing of microphones, news is being made: there is Godly activity in the desert where Jesus is wresting with the devil, with the world.

And here’s the news from the desert: Jesus wins. That’s the news. He enters the desert empty. He is empty handed. He has no food. No book to keep him company … no companions. He is empty. The desert is empty.

In Paul’s words: “We brought nothing into the world, so that we can take nothing out of it.” (1 Timothy 6:7)

Jesus enters the desert like that: empty handed … even if there had been news cameras present,

they would have been disappointed …because he emerged from the desert empty and empty handed: just as poor and a great deal hungrier than when he entered. He emerged empty, but laden with good news, bursting with news to proclaim: the news that God is in charge.

Wednesday, Ash Wednesday, all across the world – in China and Africa, in Italy and America –

Christians enacted this emptiness. We entered churches and came away as marked men and women. “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.” (Genesis 3:19) Our foreheads were marked with ashes, we were marked men and marked women … marked by our emptiness … by our mortality. We wore our emptiness. We proclaimed it.

We dared do this because it is from this Lenten desert that the news was leaked that our emptiness is met and matched by God’s fullness.

The news from the desert – from the wilderness – is that Wall Street is, in the end, a charade, barely a blip. It is nothing against the expanse of God’s eternity,

It is from this place – in God’s house – that we look out upon the news of the moral wreckage of our financial systems, the news of the collapse of institutions we had thought of as sturdy, secure, and stable … They were here just yesterday, strutting and striding. Today, in the blink of an eye, they are rubble. But God’s truth endures for ever and ever.

We have come to this place to tune into to our source of news, of gospel … to hear the reports that those who are poor in things are rich in spirit. The lost are found. The dead are alive again!

We have come to this place, this holy house, to proclaim what we claim in the Lord’s Prayer that the “kingdom and power and glory,” belong to God … not to Pharaoh, not to Herod, not to the United States of America, not to Rome, not to the great financiers of the world, not to the rulers of this present age, not to the power of fear, not to the power of hatred or hunger

The kingdom and the power and the glory – the fullness – these belong to Jesus who said, when the storm raged around them: “Fear not.”

It was Jesus’ very emptiness that shook an empire and has shaped and challenged the world across two millennia.

He came with nothing: no weapons, neither for conquest, nor for self-defense. No wealth. No power. Not even a place to lay his head. Empty. Yet for 2000 years he has filled our human hearts. He has satisfied our deepest longings. He has taken away the sting of death.He has crammed earth with heaven.

The news from the world is bad. Predictably so. But it is just a passing report.

On this first Sunday in Lent, we subject ourselves to the emptiness, to enter the desert …that we might there meet the fullness of God.

We have buried our alleluias.

We have invited you to join us in the Lenten discipline of Gospel reading … so that this gospel, this good news enters our bodies and finds a home within us.

We have hung in the Gordon Chapel an exhibit of paintings by peasants, from Nicaragua … peasants who lived through a time of terrible social and political upheaval … who, themselves, were empty by any of the measures of the world … but who were filled with God.

Behind that exhibit of paintings – behind them, upholding them, explaining them – there is a story, a true story …[1] the story of a Nicaraguan priest, who was a good and gentle man. He was surprised to find himself in jail as political prisoner. Surprised and afraid. The men who had rounded them up in the dark of night, who had broken into their homes, roused them from their beds, and marched them to jail … stood outside with heavy weapons and big boots.

The Catholic priest was not, in fact, a political revolutionary. He had never handled a gun. He preached non-violence. He did own to preaching a revolutionary gospel, however … a gospel of justice and of mercy ... a gospel that challenged the Somoza dictatorship.

The days in jail passed slowly and painfully. The men behind bars were ravenously hungry. But that was nothing compared to their ache for their families. They had reason to believe their wives, too, had been rounded up and jailed. They were terrified by the prospect of their children on the streets, parentless, fending for themselves.

When Holy Week arrived these peasants from Nicaragua – they and their jailed priest – they decided to celebrate communion. They had no cup and no wine … not even water. They had no plate and no bread.

So they practiced a Communion of Empty Hands. The priest told his fellow prisoners: “We have no bread, nor wine … but we will act as though we had.” He held out his empty hands to the first person on his right, and placed his own hands over the other man’s open hands, and the same with the others. “Take, eat, this is my body which is given for you; do this in remembrance of me. Take, drink, this is the blood of Christ poured out for us.”

In a holy silence, in that unholy place, they fed on Christ in their hearts by faith with thanksgiving Practicing a defiant, relentless hope they, who were empty, became full again.

Remembering that jail filled with Nicaraguan peasants and their empty hands …

Remembering the hungry of Kenya and Sudan and their empty bellies …

Remembering the elders among us who are terrified by empty retirement accounts …

Remembering the families of soldiers who are away from home, some of whom will never return,

remembering the emptiness of those homes and hearts …

Remembering our own emptiness, our bare mortality let us gather to share communion … a communion of empty hands … a communion without  bread or cup … a communion of relentless hope by which we proclaim that the world’s bad news is met and matched by God’s good news.

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Mark 1: 9-15 In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. 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. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.

Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

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[1] The story is found in a book by Thomas Pettepiece, Visions of a world hungry : study, prayer & action, in which he quotes from the Preliminary Reports, Section 1, Chapter 3, Fifth Assembly of the World Council of Churches, Nairobi, Kenya, 1975 in which former political prisoners from Latin America gave testimonies about their experiences.

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