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This weekend we embark once again
on the Lenten journey. Actually the train left the station this past week, on Ash
Wednesday. But today is a chance for those who were not able to receive the
imposition of ashes on Wednesday to catch up, so that we can travel together on
this pilgrim way of Lent.
The dominant metaphor for
this season comes from today’s gospel reading: Jesus heads into the wilderness
for forty days and forty nights as Moses and Elijah did before him and as
the Israelites spent forty years in the Sinai Desert journeying from slavery
toward freedom. The wilderness is not a punishment. It may be scary but it also
creates space for insight. Some of you may know Wendell Berry’s poem, the peace
of wild things. It goes like this:
When despair for the world grows in my
and I wake in the night at the
least sound
in fear of what my life and my
children’s lives may be.
I go and lie down where the wood
drake
rests in his beauty on the
water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild
things
who do not tax their lives with
forethought
of grief. I come into the
presence of still water.
And I feel above me the
day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a
time
I rest in the grace of the
world, and I am free.
Many years ago now I read a
book by Belden Lane called The Solace of Fierce Landscapes. It
transformed the way that I thought about Lent. Peter and I have broken bread
together at daybreak in that same Judean wilderness where Jesus was tested and
it’s holy ground to be sure. The peace of wild things. The solace of fierce
landscapes. That is what this pilgrim way is about.
Jesus is led into the desert by the Spirit to be tested; that is what
the word temptation means. But it was for Jesus (and I pray will be for us as
well) a time of grace as well. In the forty years the Israelites spent in the
wilderness of the Sinai Desert they were given gifts for the journey: the gift
of Torah, the gifts of manna and water, the gift of traveling companions. So,
too, Jesus is led into the wilderness not as a punishment but as place where he
gains clarity and insight and wisdom about his vocation as messiah. The
wilderness can be a place to discover God and a place where we are ministered
to by the angels. It can be like a vision quest. If you haven’t thought of Lent
this way before I invite you to let this Lent 2023 be something like that for
you.
Lent is a time to look into
the mirror and face up to our own shortcomings. Some people give something up,
others add something. But mostly I think it is about doing a spiritual
inventory and every Lent will be different because we are in a different space.
How do we re-orient ourselves, get back on track again, find our way forward,
get unstuck? I think this is what Lent is for as we get ready to embrace the
paschal mystery again in April.
In my personal experience and
as a pastor, I have come to believe that most of us don’t sin for the joy of
it. Remember that story that Jesus told about the two brothers, one supposedly
very responsible and one supposedly “prodigal?” I’m always struck by the envy
the older feels for the younger about that dissolute living – money spent on
booze and women. That’s projection, but I bet if you talked with that younger
brother he felt what the old man knew instinctively: he was lost. He was trying
to find his way back home.
Our sins are almost always
rooted in our pain, in trauma, in places where we have been broken and are in
need of healing. So I invite you to think of Lent as an invitation to healing
those broken places in our own lives, in this community, in the body politic and
in our world. I invite you to pray for those who are struggling with illness or
addiction or feelings of shame or inadequacy. We pray for health: in body,
mind, and spirit.
When the cabin pressure on an
airplane drops, we are reminded to put on our own oxygen masks first. I think
that metaphor works for Lent and for repentance and for forgiveness as well: we
confess our own sins; not the sins of our neighbors or our parents or
our spouses. They may all may be part of our story and even of some unresolved
pain; I get that. But the only person we can really change is ourselves. Lent
can be a time to confront our own pain and weakness and insecurities; not with
a sense of fear or shame, but confident of God’s steadfast mercy and loving-kindness.
Lent is about entering more
deeply into the truth made known at Holy Baptism; we are God’s own beloved.
Each of us has been claimed and sealed and marked as Christ’s own forever.
Being marked with ashes is in that same place where we were sealed and marked
and claimed with oil as Christ’s own. Forever.
If you were in church on
Wednesday you heard that invitation to a holy Lent, and how in the early Church
this was the time to prepare catechumens for holy baptism. When I was a rector
I ran a little water fountain at the font throughout these forty days. While I
did notice more people had to get up and use the bathroom during my sermon,
that gurgling water spoke to the deeper invitation of Lent than any sermon I
ever preached. Remember your Baptism!
Today’s reading from the
second chapter of Genesis, and St. Paul’s theological reflection in Romans,
invite us to reflect on the human condition. We are all caught up in sin. But
what does that mean? I worry about the language of sin: on the one hand are
those who are tempted to see human beings and the world as morally depraved, as
having no good whatsoever within us. In reaction to those who are fixated on
sin and the wrath of God, however, are those who think it is all a matter of
will: a kind of boot-straps theology where we just need to say “no” to
temptation and “no” to sin.
But as I said, my experience
tells me that most of our sinning is rooted at a very deep level in our wounds,
our brokenness, or dis-ease, our fears, our insecurities. The language of
addiction is enormously helpful here because I think that most of the time when
we “miss the mark” it’s not because we are bad, but because we are hurt. And when we feel most afraid, most anxious,
most vulnerable—very often that is when we can become paranoid—literally we are
“out of our minds.” Lent is about metanoia – changed minds. Repentance. Seeing
things from a new angle.
Too many of us feel that we
are not good enough or loveable enough, and sometimes it is out of that
insecurity that we tear others down. We are called away from paranoia and into
metanoia as we begin again.
So I invite you as Lent
begins to take a good hard look in the mirror—an honest look, a real look at
where you are in your journey with Christ. Not to do that in a shame-filled way
or in a despairing way but in a way that allows you to take stock of where you
are and what you desire from this one wild and precious life that God has given
you. Asking that question will help you to figure out what might make this
season holy for you, this “tithe” of a year to try out some new things.
Too much of what passes for
Lenten discipline is really unhelpful spiritually. I don’t think we glorify God
by beating ourselves up. We need to linger at that mirror long enough to sing
with the psalmist who wrote the thirty-second psalm:
Happy are they whose transgressions are forgiven and whose sin is put away!
We need to pray that psalm until
we believe it. Maybe it will be enough to pray those words every day for the
rest of Lent. Our sins are already forgiven: that is the work that Christ has
done. What we are invited to do in Lent is wake up to that reality.
So we don’t need more shame this
Lent. What we need to do is repent and in the Bible repentance is very
concrete: it means to turn around. It means to change our minds. Metanoia not
paranoia. It means that we need to get busy living, as forgiven and beloved
people. The end of that psalm counsels God’s forgiven people to “be glad and
rejoice in the Lord and to shout for joy.”
How does Jesus resist temptation
in the wilderness? And maybe more importantly, how do we resist the temptations
we face? It seems to me that Jesus knew who he was as God’s beloved Son and
what the devil is really trying to do is to make him forget that. Keep in mind
that the wilderness experience in the gospels comes right after Jesus’ Baptism at
the Jordan River, which is where the voice from heaven says literally that: you
are my beloved.
But the devil tries to make
Jesus feel insecure in his true vocation and to settle for being simply
relevant, or spectacular, or powerful. Each of the three temptations Jesus
faced were not in and of themselves bad things. It’s not a bad thing to feed
the hungry or to trust the angels or to use one’s authority to bring about
justice. But the devil is crafty, and each of these temptations come to Jesus
as ways that diminish his true and deepest calling.
I suspect that many of the
temptations we face work the same way, and in our own times of trial we are
being invited to discover (and rediscover) who we are and where God is calling
us to be in ministry. We aren’t Jesus, so our temptations will not be the same.
None of us are called to be the messiah – that job is taken. So for us it won’t
be about leaping off of tall buildings.
But we do get tested and how
we respond to that testing leaves a mark for good or for ill.
We will make it through Lent to
Easter morning by taking care of ourselves and our neighbor, and by tending to
our souls, and by putting on our oxygen masks, and inviting God to be with us,
one day at time, throughout these forty days. That may be long enough to
develop some new habits that we can carry with us into the fifty days of
Easter, but all of that in due time.
