Genesis 9:8-17
Psalm 25:3-9
1 Peter 3:18-22
MARK 1:9-13
Sermon
-- First Sunday of Lent
March
5, 2006
In the name of the Father and of the Son and
of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
There is a wonderful hymn in the 1982 Hymnal that we often sing. It is “Praise to the Lord, the
Almighty.” In the third verse there are
these reassuring words: “ponder anew
what the Almighty can do, who with his love doth befriend thee.”
“Ponder anew what the Almighty can do, who
with his love doth befriend thee.” “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
wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.”
(Mark 1:10-11 NRSV)
Please note, Jesus did not decide to go on
post-baptism retreat. Neither did Jesus
just go from his baptism into Galilee and begin to proclaim that “the Kingdom
of God has drawn near.” The Spirit
drove him into the wilderness. The
language is strong, forceful, and almost violent. Jesus did not have a choice.
God drove him from his baptism into the wilderness to be tempted and
tested. Just think “what the Almighty
can do, who with his love doth befriend thee.”
We do not generally consider being driven into a wilderness for forty
days to be tested and tempted an act of caring and friendship.
So why would God the Holy Spirit want to drive
Jesus, to whom he has just announced “You are my Son, the Beloved” into the
wilderness to be tempted, or as one translation has it, “tested,” for forty
days? This was not a time of relaxation
and rest before beginning the really hard work of ministry. It was a time of struggle and questioning
and testing like Jesus would not see again until his last night in the
garden. I am not capable of speaking
for God, but I do have some ideas that might possibly help us think about Lent
and its place in our lives this year.
I can only speculate about some of the
questions and problems that must have been going through Jesus’ mind as he was
driven into the wilderness. “Was that
really God speaking to me? What did the
Spirit mean by, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased’? Am I God’s son? What does this mean for my life?
If I tell others, what will they think?
How will they react? What am I
to do? What will happen to me? Do I trust this voice?” In other words, the very nature of his
person and ministry must have been raised in Jesus’ mind. The temptation stories in Matthew and Luke
tend to indicate this. Jesus struggles
with Satan over who he is and what obedience and faithfulness mean. It is a cosmic struggle of God with
evil. This is a test and a victory that
must happen before Jesus’ ministry can begin.
It is a defining moment. Jesus
must truly know God and himself; he must truly be centered and grounded in God
his Father and understand his ministry, he must have already struggled with and
defeated Satan before he begins. This
time is critical. It is God’s gift.
I grew up in a less than pro-Catholic context
that viewed Lent as a time when Catholics did silly and essentially meaningless
things during this period, like giving “something” up. The view was that good Christians should be
repenting all of the time and not just doing things during this period. Lent was viewed as either wrong or
useless. Lent was fervently ignored.
Then there were the Catholics. They gave something up, as they chose,
during Lent.
Both of these are caricatures. But I have been in conversations about Lent
with individuals from both positions that did not go much beyond these. When we do not go beyond them, we miss the
opportunity for a great gift.
Jesus was tested by Satan and won. This is good news. But, here we are gathered together on this first Sunday of
Lent. What does this story have to do
with us? We are not Jesus. We are tested and tempted, and we often do
not win. The good news is that God in
Jesus has already won the battle for us, but I also think that Jesus’ time in
the wilderness can help us think about Lent, and what we do with it that will
help us go beyond either of these positions.
The position that Christians should be leading
a repentant and disciplined life at all times is true, and all Christian
traditions that I know of have always said this. It is also true that if there is a period when we are called to
especially focus, we are more apt to do so than if we are told in a general
that we should always do it.
So, what should we do in Lent? Henri Nouwen, that great Roman Catholic
priest, pastoral counselor and spiritual writer said, “What counts is being
attentive at all times to the voice of God’s love inviting us to obey, that is,
to listen with an attentive heart.”
If adopting a specific discipline such as
giving something up during Lent helps us to focus, helps us to be attentive to
God’s love and to ourselves, then we should do it. We should examine ourselves and our lives to find something that
will focus our attention in the direction that God is calling us to focus and
adopt it. Self denial in many different
ways has been a long-standing and useful part of the Christians’ life. Such a discipline is not an end in itself
though. Doing it does not earn us any
points. It is a reminder. It is a means to another end. It is a means to making us pay attention to
God and ourselves.
Some of the questions that I raise above in
reflecting on Jesus’ time in the wilderness are even more valid for us.
In many ways most of us are brought up not to
know who we are. We often have very
little sense of what our real gifts are.
We are given a direction to go in life, and we often tend to follow this
blindly. This is a good period to begin
to look at who we really are. When God
created you and me, whom did God create?
God created something precious.
Do we know it? Do we allow
ourselves to be truly that precious creation of God?
Denial (not self denial) is also an issue on
which we might want to focus during Lent.
As The Reverend Catherine Brunson spoke to us so powerfully about her
journey a few weeks ago, I was reminded about the issue of denial in all of our
lives. It is not only the alcoholics or
drug addicts who are in denial about their problems and what is going on in and
driving their lives. Denial is a
problem for all of us. How well do we know
ourselves? Do we know what is really
controlling us? In the book the Men’s
Spiritual Group is reading, Cynthia Bourgeault raises this issue from another
perspective. “The real mark of personal
authenticity is not how intensely we can express our feelings but how honestly
we can look at where they’re coming from and spot the elements of clinging,
manipulating, and personal agendas that make up so much of what we experience
as our emotional life today. (The Wisdom Way of Knowing pp.
32-33) And of course Cathy raised some
other steps from the 12 steps that we might consider this Lent: confession, making amends and turning our
lives over to God.
Lent can be a time for considering new
directions. Is God calling us to a new
place in our lives? Do we need to let
something go so that we may pick up something new? Jesus said that he came that we might have life and have it more
abundantly. He also called us to give
all and follow him. How is he calling
us through these words at this time?
What does he want for us and for us to give?
What are the things that we value and respect?
Who are the people that we admire and
think should be emulated? Who do we
think the good and the strong are? Who
do we want to be like? Who have we
modeled our lives after? All of these
are good questions to ask ourselves during Lent.
Over the past few years I have become
interested in the Shakers. Recently I
got around to reading a book that I had picked up some years ago when Elizabeth
and I were visiting what had been the Shaker Community at Canterbury, N.H. It was the memoir, written twenty-five years
after the experience, of a nineteen-year-old woman who served as a guide there
when some of the last Shakers of that community were still alive. The book tells of that experience and what
she learned from them. In her book, I
came across a paragraph that made me stop and think a long time. I want to share it with you.
Writers
would have it that heroes and good characters are less interesting than
villains and pests because virtue is boring.
I’ll agree that that’s often true in stories, or if you’re Dickens, and
it may be this chapter is doomed to fall short of rousing your passionate
interest. But in real life, I have to
say, I have found authentic goodness magnificent, muscular, tonic, as rare and
grand as Yosemite’s El Capitan, a mountain whose magnitude stuns you further
when you realize that it is a monolith, one whole, seamless rock. I find absolutely nothing boring about true
goodness. If you doubt that, consider
the life of Christ, or Saint Francis, or Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or someone you may
know. Lillian, and later Bertha, made
goodness vastly more interesting to me than the alternative, and that was a
lesson worth learning, especially at nineteen.
Whatever else I wanted from life, I wanted to be like them. (June Sprig, Simple Gifts p. 91)
Who are the people who make goodness
“magnificent, muscular, tonic” for you?
In what ways do you exhibit those qualities in your life? True humility acknowledges not only our
faults but also our goodness. Lent is a
good time to look at all of our life.
I could go on and on. You have the idea and probably have better
suggestions than I do. You certainly
have better suggestions for yourself.
Please note though, Lent is not a journey we
make by ourselves whether it be the Lent of these forty days or of anytime in
our lives. Just as Mark notes that the
angels ministered to Jesus all during those forty days in the wilderness, God
does not leave us alone in our time of testing and growing now or at anytime.
Whatever discipline we take on, whatever journey
we begin, may Lent be for all of us a blossoming of God’s good news in our
lives.
One of the earliest Christian writers sums up
the call and purpose of Lent better than anyone of which I know. Let me close with these words from Ephesians
and may they be the finish and completion of your Lent.
With this in
mind, then, I kneel in prayer to the Father, from whom every family in heaven
and on earth takes its name, that out of the treasures of his glory he may
grant you inward strength and power through his Spirit, that through faith
Christ may dwell in your hearts in love.
With deep roots and firm foundations may you, in company with all God’s
people, be strong to grasp what is the breadth and length and height and depth
of Christ’s love, and to know it, though it is beyond knowledge. So may you be filled with the very fullness
of God.
Now to him who
is able through the power which is at work among us to do immeasurably more
than all we can ask or conceive, to him be glory in the church and in Christ
Jesus from generation to generation for evermore! Amen. (Ephesians 3:14-21
REB)
The Rev.
William O. Breedlove, II, TSSF
St. Barnabas Episcopal Church
Monmouth Junction, NJ