I.

The anthropologist, Victor Turner, talks about rites of passage he has observed in traditional or "primitive" cultures. He has developed a theory that significant transitions in life involve the passage through what he calls a "liminal" experience. The word liminal comes from the Latin term for a threshold of a doorway. But Turner expands it. A liminal experience is one of radical disorientation and confusion, it is a time of crisis and insecurity. And his point is that such experiences often characterize the times of serious transition in our lives. In other words, as we move from one stage of life to another, there is often an in-between stage in which the old life is broken down and the new life has not yet emerged. This is called the liminal stage.

This pattern is embedded deep in our consciousness. For instance, adolescence is a liminal stage. During adolescence we are neither child nor adult. Our child-nature is dissolving and fading away, and this brings a certain amount of grief. And our adult-nature has not yet appeared. So it is no secret that adolescence is a very difficult and trying time of insecurity, fear, experimentation, desire, and hope. Most of us would not go back to being adolescents for anything.

An even more radical version of this pattern is the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly. This transition is not neat and continuous. Biologists say that the caterpillar’s whole being is broken down into a dissociated mush, and then the butterfly is built out of these components. The mush stage is the liminal, transition stage, a time of fundamental crisis in which one state of being has been demolished, and the new has not yet been constructed.

In Christianity, the initiation ritual of Baptism originally functioned in these terms. A person went down into the water, which represented chaos and death, and emerged a new person. Baptism was a liminal experience, and still is to a degree in those traditions that baptize adults by immersion. We have lost some of this imagery over the centuries, but if you listen to the prayers we say at Baptism you can tell that this is the kind of transition the Sacrament is supposed to represent.

My point is that human transformation almost necessarily involves some entry into a liminal, disoriented, crisis stage. In traditional cultures, this transition is institutionalized in terms of particular rituals. In these rituals, of which Baptism is a fairly tame example, the candidates are brought through a period of crisis and dislocation, only to emerge on the other side as new people with new roles to play in society.

This structure is so inherent to our nature that Jesus himself feels the need to endure a similar liminal experience. And he does this by going out into the wilderness to confront the power of the Evil One.

II.

The wilderness has always been a place of paradox in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Israelites wandered in the Sinai desert for forty years between their birth as a nation at the Red Sea, and their entry into the Promised Land. And they would always look back at this wilderness experience with mixed feelings. On the one hand, it was a hard time of learning when they were forged and hammered by God into a coherent nation. And on the other, it was also the time when they were closest to and most intimate with God. Most of the Jewish Torah is about those years in the wilderness, and Jews read and reread these stories regularly.

When Jesus went into the wilderness he was following in this same pattern. The wilderness is the place of liminality and transformation; it is the crucible in which we are tested and refined; it is the place where we are most likely to find God and ourselves.

In the third century, as the Roman persecutions were gradually waning, some Christians felt a need to recapture the sense of crisis and liminality that the persecutions provided. They wanted to recapture this sense of living on the edge, we might say. So they fled comfort and respectability and went out into the desert to live incredibly simple, austere, and prayerful lives. They saw themselves as following Jesus’ example. The wilderness is where you find yourself tested, and so find yourself.

In a secularized form we continue to see this acted out in our own time in terms of athletic or other mostly physical attempts to push the envelope of our endurance. We climb mountains, run triathalons, race cars, take a balloon around the world, or do any number of other things in an at least subconscious attempt, I believe, to have a liminal experience that will transform us and somehow move us to a higher stage of existence.

The Church has understood and appreciated this need by institutionalizing a liminal and crisis element to our life. And one of the manifestations of this is the season of Lent. Originally, Lent was a period of training candidates for Baptism. Converts were baptized at the Paschal Vigil, which was celebrated the night before Easter, and they were required to have forty or so days of intense indoctrination beforehand.

In other words, they had to go through a liminal, "wilderness" experience of testing, refining, crisis, and transformation. Eventually the whole Church decided to identify with the converts and share their discipline and preparation. So that even though you were only baptized once, you could still reaffirm your Baptism by sharing annually in the disciplines of Lent.

They understood that our need for transformation is constant and that by immersing themselves in the deprivation and discomforts of Lent every year, they could emerge at Easter more and more sanctified. The idea was to deliberately apply a controlled amount of stress to themselves, to identify and root out the impurities and bad habits that had accrued over the previous year.

III.

Now, for those of us who feel that the stresses in our life are quite sufficient as they are, thank you very much, this approach does not sound all that attractive. I mean don’t we have enough to worry about without having to add fasting, prayer, and study on top of it? We have enough stress in our lives, do we not? With our mortgages, our insurance, car, and credit card payments, our office politics, the health of our portfolios, our child care issues, our kids’ education, our church and community meetings, our professional responsibilities, our aging parents, our job insecurities, our physical fitness and health, our marriages, and so forth... don’t we have enough pressure and stress in our lives as it is? (It is interesting that Lent happens to fall at the same time as we are all doing our taxes.)

Yes. Certainly. We do have enough stress. But the kind of stress that Turner means when he talks about liminality, and the kind of stress we see in the biblical stories of the Israelites and Jesus in the wilderness, and the kind of stress that Lent is meant to induce is not necessarily the kind of stress we endure. Our stress is more like that of a juggler who has to continue performing even though someone keeps throwing more balls for him to keep in the air. Rather, the real and creative stress of liminality is what comes from just letting all the balls drop to the ground and facing things without the very activity, stressful as it was, that gave your life meaning. As stress-filled as our lives are, imagine the increased stress if we simply stopped what we are doing.

The whole point to initiation and transition rituals is that they take a situation of inherent stress, such as adolescence, and reframe it according to a particular story and a coherent, intelligible pattern. And the pattern is basically that of the caterpillar-to-butterfly movement I described earlier. The pattern, as Jesus says, is that you have to lose your life in order to save it. The pattern is that you have to die with him in order to live with him. The pattern is that you get back only what you give up. The pattern is that you have to be reduced to nothing in order to amount to anything.

Some stress is just plain meaningless distraction. Maybe that’s what Satan was tempting Jesus with in this story. Mark doesn’t tell us any details like Matthew and Luke. It just says he was tempted by Satan.

Maybe one of the temptations submitted by Satan was that Jesus should be busy, have lots of commitments, and accomplish great things.

Maybe one of the temptations was, "Why are you wasting all this time in the desert? Can’t you be more productive than this?"

Maybe one of the temptations was, "What do you possibly gain by punishing yourself like this? Don’t you think God wants you to be happy?"

Maybe one of the temptations was, "Don’t you have enough stress in your life? What are you coming out here for? What you really need is a vacation!"

IV.

But Mark doesn’t say any of this, so it is just conjecture. Neither does Mark say explicitly how Jesus did. Did he succumb to the temptations? Did he resist Satan effectively? We can only assume that he did resist, as Matthew and Luke indicate, because otherwise there would be no gospel. But also, Jesus emerges from his wilderness, liminal, crisis experience, ready to begin his ministry. And the first thing he says is, "The time has arrived; the kingdom of God is upon you. Repent, and believe the gospel."

He comes from Galilee an anonymous person, a member of one of the crowds coming to John for baptism. He emerges from the desert with a fully-formed personality, announcing with bold confidence the arrival of God’s Kingdom.

In between is this mysterious time of testing and confrontation with evil. In between is this time in the wilderness with Satan, the Adversary, the Evil One.

Lent is supposed to be a similar time for us. It is not a time of stress for its own sake. Rather, in Lent we allow the Spirit to draw us into the metaphorical wilderness, or crucible, or oven, or chrysalis. We allow the Spirit to draw us into a zone of stress and crisis which is controlled and has a very specific purpose of transforming us and bringing us in tune with Jesus’ death, and so also in tune with his resurrection life.

One of Stephen Covey’s "seven habits of highly effective people" is "begin with the end in mind." Lent is a crisis time in which we also have to begin with the end in mind. In the wilderness we become something. We are not just deconstructed and left in pieces on the floor. Rather, as we will read at Easter, bone is connected to bone again and we are reborn as new people.

The end of Lent, and the end of the ministry Jesus begins in this passage, is the Resurrection. As we begin this season of introspection, we need to ask ourselves what we need to do to get to a place where we can be resurrected. That’s going to mean at the very least cleaning out a lot of clutter. It’s going to mean unloading a lot of baggage. And it’s going to mean facing a lot of distracting temptations along the way.

The good news is that "the time has arrived; the kingdom of God is upon you." We will emerge as new and transformed people, one way or the other. Christ’s victory assures us of that. Now is the time to anticipate participation in that victory, by participating in the struggle.

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