Sermon – First Sunday in Lent

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Welcome to the desert. We get the sense from the gospel text this morning that, just as Jesus spent forty grueling days in the desert, on this first Sunday of Lent, we are also entering our own wasteland…our own 40 day journey through a spiritual desert, called Lent.

Now I know a little something about living in a desert. I lived for four long years in the West Texas town of Abilene. This is a place where tumbleweeds literally tumbled down the dirt alleyway behind our rickety little apartment. Where a few times a year the sky would grow dark and a thick layer of red dust would quickly descend and cover the town. These dust storms were like sandpaper to the face. Throughout the long summer you could count on the sun beating down with blazing temperatures near the century mark. It didn’t help that our little Honda’s air conditioner broke during the middle of one of those hot West Texas summers. One year it had been so hot and dry that a plague of millions of big black beetles squeezed their way from the dry cracks in the dirt and invaded our town. I remember the beetles crunching underfoot on the library steps and how we plugged up the cracks under our doors with old T-shirts to keep the beetles from creeping in. Now there are beautiful things about a desert, like the big blue sky with nothing to block your view but, overall, let me assure you, living in a desert is a harsh and empty existence.

This wasn’t the only desert I found myself in during my four years in Abilene. I also found myself in what you might call a spiritual desert. There were times during my four years in Abilene that I found myself not even moving my mouth during the singing of a hymn at church. I had long periods without prayer. There were times that I questioned my faith deeply. What was ironic, though, was that I was supposed to be on a religious mountaintop, not in a spiritual wilderness. I was in seminary after all. But while my mind worked overtime, my soul was dry and empty. I was in a spiritual desert….

Now, in our gospel text this morning, we heard about Jesus living for 40 days in a desert. Jesus was “famished” the text says—hungry, thirsty, hot. You can imagine that living in a desert for 40 days might make you a little thirsty and hungry, not to mention dusty, sweaty, sunburnt.

And here the devil—the very personification of evil—tempts Jesus with turning stones to bread. To make a little snack for his empty stomach, a tall glass of lemonade for a parched throat. This is something Jesus will do for his followers (remember water to wine and the multiplication of loaves and fishes)—but something he won’t do, here in the desert, for himself. Something greater was at stake in this story. Jesus wasn’t about to sell his own integrity to the devil for a bite to eat.

We can easily see that Jesus’ experience in the wilderness wasn’t just physical, but also spiritual. Jesus came face to face with his deepest temptations. These weren’t just temptations with food and drink, but about the core of his identity. The devil—that gnawing inner voice of selfishness—tempted Jesus on a deeply spiritual level. Here Jesus was being tempted with the offer of complete power and authority on earth…if only he would sell his soul. And since we know Jesus was tempted in every way like us, we know that these temptations were indeed real for Jesus. True doubt must have entered his mind. Doubt about who he was and what he really believed in and stood for. This is the kind of doubt that comes to you in a spiritual desert.

We might have a tendency to read stories of Jesus’ temptation retrospectively with our rose-colored Easter glasses on. As if Jesus never had doubt and never had fears and was never tempted by anything.

But this morning, we are challenged to read this text realistically through our dark Lenten glasses. Where temptations, where loneliness, and where the feelings of guilt, are all real, persistent, and pervasive. Even for Jesus.

There is another biblical story, this one in the Old Testament, about another desert experience, alluded to in this morning’s text from Deuteronomy. After God delivered the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, they went wandering in a Middle Eastern desert for not forty days, but forty years. This was also a time of temptation and doubt for the Israelites. Even though their God had brought them out of extreme suffering, we read stories about their losing faith in God. They would have rather gone back to Egypt. There they had enough good food and clear cold water. There was no worrying where their next meal will come from. Out of fear, they built for themselves a golden calf idol, hoping that perhaps this god would make things better. The Israelites were desperate to leave the desert.

Though similar, these two desert experiences—Jesus’ and the Israelites’—are different in one respect. The Israelites were constantly seeking to evade their desert experience. God provided manna, but they wanted gourmet food and drink, their milk and honey...now. Enough of this manna! They were ready for the Promised Land. In contrast, Jesus embraced his desert experience. In fact, he walks into the desert of his own accord.

These two ways of living in the desert hold a lesson for us as we enter Lent. This is not a festive time. Lent is our spiritual desert. We symbolize this by replacing the flowers with dried, crooked twigs of wood. The colors are purple for penance. We recite The Great Litany as confession for our sin. There are no “Alleluias.” Easter is not yet here. We cannot hurry Easter up, make the time pass more quickly, or arbitrarily decide to celebrate it before its arrival. Rather, we walk into the desert, and orient ourselves here in the desert. We do not enjoy our time, but we must embrace it. This will be a hard time. This is a time when we come face to face with our temptations. We come face to face with our doubts. We come face to face with our losses. It is a time to be endured.

We must enter the desert deliberately. I personally first came to realize this spiritual dimension to the desert during Lent 2004, when I found myself on a spiritual retreat at the Holy Cross Monastery, an Episcopal Monastery on the West bank of the Hudson River in New York State. Now here was another kind of desert. During early spring the trees were still bare of leaves, no sign of life. The cold Hudson River flowed past the windows of the monastery, leaving a chill just glancing at it. A monastery by nature is a Spartan atmosphere, a desert no matter the season. It is simple and empty. The chapel with its cold stone tiles and white washed walls. There was no religious decoration.

For Lent, the one cross at the east end of the church was covered with canvas: God’s face was hidden, or so it felt. These monks took daily vows of silence, which we were invited to partake in, from nine in the evening until after breakfast the next morning, every day. We got up in the middle of the night to say prayers, as we yawned and rubbed the sleep out of our eyes. This was a kind of self-imposed spiritual desert, at a lonely monastery during Lent 2004.

But what I learned about Lent at the Holy Cross Monastery was that a spiritual desert is not spiritually empty: it is full of doubt, fear, anxiety, and uncertainty; here our spiritual lives become open before us against the backdrop of severity. We learn our weaknesses, we number our fears, we count our losses, name our temptations. In the blazing harsh light of the desert, these hidden things become very clear.

Perhaps we, like the Israelites, prefer to avoid the kind of clarity the desert provides. We would rather be comfortable, stay secure, in an easy land nowhere near the desert. But the way out of the desert is the way through it; to deny the reality of the desert is simply to fruitlessly wander it, as indeed the Israelites did, for forty long years. It is Jesus who shows us that desert doubts and temptations must be accepted if they are to be conquered. Like Jesus, we must walk into our own deserts knowing that there our deepest fears and strongest doubts will confront us. For if we do, the desert will teach us that it is the fear of doubt that paralyzes our spiritual life, not doubt itself. Doubt is the flip side of the coin of faith. Doubt is not the opposite of faith, but an integral part of faith itself.

The surprise of the desert, the place we feel very alone—alone with our fears and doubts and struggles, the place where we feel that God is very far away—the surprise, is that God is not far away at all. Rather, God is in the desert. We read in Matthew and Mark that at the end of his temptation, Jesus is tended by angels from God. We read of God’s faithful nurture of the nation of Israel throughout the forty years in the desert. This is a little counter-intuitive, because when we are in our spiritual deserts, or in the midst of doubt, or loss, we may feel so far away from God. But in our vulnerability, our emotional and spiritual nakedness, God draws near, just within arms’ reach.

So what might we do to embrace our own Lenten desert? Many of us have traditional Lenten disciplines. The Israelites wanted their gourmet dinners, but Jesus fasted; some of us might choose to fast, to give up chocolate, ice cream, meat. Jesus responded to the devil with deeply ingested biblical wisdom; some of us might choose to attend one of the special Lenten studies offered here at St. Barnabas. Jesus entered the desert without any possessions; some of us might choose to clean out our closets, downsize our accumulated possessions. I encourage you to engage in whatever practice is beneficial to you; whatever practice enables you to strip away the pretense of security which we all cling to in our daily lives, and enter the uncertainty of the desert. These traditional disciplines are not an end in and of themselves, but they are pointing to deeper spiritual realities. They are tools to unearth our temptations and weaknesses in the deepest most hidden parts of our souls, so that we can lay them bare for God on the floor of this desert. They allow us to bring our brokenness and sinfulness, our fears, doubts, and our losses…. And in our honesty, in our transparency, in this void, we will find that God is indeed in the desert. Amen.

Brent Bates,
Parish Intern

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

Monmouth Junction, NJ