At yesterday’s service for Canon Dalton Downs, the Rev. Allison St. Louis spoke of how he would always ask her, “How is your soul?” It is such a simple question, so very clear and so very deep – never-ending depth. It is a most important question. It brings to mind Psalm 43:5:

“Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you disquieted within me”

Truly, if our souls are disquieted, everything else about our being is affected.

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The years after World War I, or The Great War as they called it, was a very unstable and vulnerable time in Germany. Their economy was a disaster under the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War One, and Germany resented it. Nefarious political forces – Soviet Communists and Nazis – were preying on their economic troubles, the fear and the resentment hoping to gain control. Once Adolph Hitler was elected Chancellor, the Nazis began to systematically turn every institution toward the singular focus of strengthening Germany to dominate the world.

Where was the Church? The Nazis pressured and eventually took over leadership of the German Church to make it turn away from this whole notion of a suffering savior in favor of Hitler’s Aryan ideal. They literally turned the German Church into a neo-pagan shrine to the state. Many pastors and other church leaders signed on to The Barmen Declaration, which reaffirmed Christian belief. The Nazis used every means they could to silence opposition. Those who signed onto it were pressured. Many left, some were arrested.

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While Mathew and Luke give us a much fuller account of Jesus’ temptation, with the details of three temptations Satan made, the way Mark briefly covers it places it in context with Jesus’ baptism and his ministry in a way that enables us to step back and connect it to our own struggles, to the realities of life we encounter. Mark quickly frames it between his baptism and ministry.

Note how Peter ties the story of Noah to baptism. The flood covered the earth as God’s means of washing away sin, starting over with the righteous Noah and his family. Those waters bring us back to the waters of chaos at creation, so the idea would be that what we really need when everything has gone wrong is to wipe away the errors of the past and start over. That will fix it, right?

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