February 25, 2007
So today is the first Sunday of Lent. There are a few signs we can point to that make it clear that we are in this new season: my vestments are now purple, the color of Lent. The fresh flowers are gone, replaced by bare branches. The crosses are covered, again in a shade of purple. If you look to our liturgy, you’ll notice that the music is in more minor tones, that we don’t sing or say alleluias during this season. There’s a more penitential flavor to the liturgy – we start with the confession, in what’s called the ‘penitential order.’ All of these changes are supposed to remind us that we are in a new season, and that this is the season that prepares us for Jesus’ death and resurrection. And as I mentioned at the Ash Wednesday service, these changes are also supposed to help us orient ourselves more towards God. Lent is a time when we are supposed to stock of ourselves, and of our spiritual lives, and to take whatever steps are necessary to help us focus more on God, and less on ourselves.
Something else that happens every Lent is that every first Sunday of this season we hear the story of Jesus’ foray into the wilderness. Mark, Matthew and Luke all tell this story, and though the details vary somewhat, all are clear about a few things: Jesus had to go there, into the wilderness. It happened immediately after his baptism. He was there for forty days. He was tempted while he was there. The tempter turns out to be Satan, as Mark tells us, or the devil, as Matthew and Luke do. Also known as the adversary.
Now this is a very familiar story, if you’ve been around church for a while. We hear it every year. Maybe because of this familiarity, it’s easy to stop hearing it. But then we hear it again, and something clicks, we gain some new insight into the same familiar story. That’s what’s so great about the Bible – we can hear the same stories again and again, and we can get something new in those familiar stories. This is what happened to me this week. I’ve never had any particular attachment to this story of Jesus being in the wilderness and being tempted, maybe because I’ve heard it a hundred times.. It never really spoke to me. But this week, at the noontime Ash Wednesday service at St. James, I found myself thinking about this story in a new way. I started thinking about Jesus being out there, by himself, in the wilderness, for a long time. And I thought about what that experience may have been like. Not just what the gospel tells us, but what Jesus may have felt, out there. I wonder if the experience pushed him to the edge, and I suspect that it very well might have. Why? Because that’s what the wilderness does to human beings, and Jesus was very much a human being. Being pushed to the edge is not necessarily a negative, either. Ultimately, it can bring positive changes.
Because here’s the thing about being in the wilderness: that much silence has the power to change you. While you’re out there somewhere, by yourself, with only God and the voices in your own head for company, it starts to peel away the layers. Those layers of self-protectiveness, for one. The layers of self-deception. Perhaps even the layers of any self-loathing that you may have lurking about inside you. You can start to see yourself more clearly, but not right away. It takes some doing to get to the clarity, and before you can get there, you have to go through a lot of other stuff. Like wondering who you really are. And what you’re really called to do or to be. If you can stick it out, the wilderness is a place that can grant true insight. But it’s a hard-won insight; it doesn’t come easily. You have to get through the layers, the self-doubt, the fear, until you’re more open with God than you thought you could ever manage to be.
On this theme, there’s a book I read last summer by Barbara Brown Taylor, a priest in the church. It’s called Leaving Church, and it’s her account of being the rector of her own church, and her journey of realization that in the end, she can serve God best not by being in the church, but by being in the world. It’s a wonderful, very moving book, and I recommend it to you. There’s a paragraph in the introduction that I find myself coming back to, and it fits readily into the wilderness journey we’re talking about, and the peeling away of self that helps us get to a different place. Here’s what she has to say: “Like every believer I know, my search for real life has led me through at least three distinct seasons of faith, not once or twice but over and over again. Jesus called them finding life, losing life, and finding life again, with the paradoxical promise that finders will be losers while those who lose their lives for his sake will wind up finding them again. In Greek the word is psyche, meaning not only ‘life’ but also the conscious self, the personality, the soul. You do not have to die in order to discover the truth of this teaching, in other words. You only need to lose track of who you are, or who you thought you were supposed to be, so that you end up lying flat on the dirt floor basement of your heart. Do this, Jesus says, and you will live.” I find myself re-reading those words, because of the deep truth I find in them. They might be the reason I heard this story of Jesus’ time in the wilderness differently, this particular Lent.
So here’s what I think: that Jesus, when he spoke those words about finding, and losing, and finding again, was talking not just about the path for his followers to travel, but also about his own experience. Not his actual death and resurrection, which come later, but of his experiences as described in the beginning of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. First, the finding: Jesus responds to John the Baptist’s message, and is moved to be baptized by John in the Jordan River. At that occasion of his baptism, Jesus receives a clear affirmation from God about the direction that his life will take, a life lived in intimate relationship with God. You are my Son, God tells him. You are my Beloved. You are my Chosen. Jesus experiences his baptism as his call, his commissioning, forming his identity as the chosen of God. He has found his life.
But then comes losing: Jesus, just after his baptism, heads out into the wilderness. And he doesn’t necessarily do this voluntarily. Luke and Matthew tell us that Jesus was led to the desert by the Holy Spirit; Mark tells us that the Spirit drove him out into the wilderness. And here’s what I think happened while Jesus was out there. I think Jesus had to face his doubts. And his questions. And his fears. I think Jesus may even have, as Barbara Brown Taylor says, lost track of who he was, or who he thought he was supposed to be. I think he may even have found himself lying flat on the dirt floor basement of his heart, as part of his time out there alone with God, and with the adversary, and with himself. I would bet that Jesus did, even if just for a brief time, lose himself. And I’m sure that when he left the wilderness, he had found himself again. He had found his life again. He had found his identity, and that is what allows him to resist the temptations the adversary puts in front of him. It’s what allows Jesus to return from the wilderness and begin his ministry, confident in who he was, and what his relationship with God was. And the rest, as we know, is history. Our history, as well as Jesus’.
So what does this story have to say to us, in our own lives, right now? The truth of the matter is, most of us probably aren’t going out into the wilderness for forty days, not the literal wilderness, anyway. But that metaphorical wilderness – what we experience in our own lives – now that’s a different story. Most of us, if not all of us, do experience this kind of wilderness, at least sometimes. Some of us may even seek this wilderness experience out, by doing things like going on retreat, or making a particular effort to set time aside to be with God, or create more real silence in our lives, silence which will eventually get us down to what matters, as Jesus found out there. And this is one of the things that Lent is, or is supposed to be. Lent is meant to be a temporary wilderness, and it’s meant to encourage us towards those encounters with God. Encounters which may mean us thinking about hard questions, like who we are, or who we want to be, or wondering if who we are supposed to be bears any resemblance to who we are right now. Lent even encourages those encounters where we end up ‘lying flat on the dirt floor basement of our hearts.’ It may not be a comfortable thing – indeed, mostly that tends to be uncomfortable – but it is, in the end, a good thing. If it gets us to a place where we are more our truest selves, and therefore more open to God, that is.
For me, I think I’m always going to hear this story of Jesus being in the wilderness differently than I used to. I hope you will hear it differently too. I hope that you will hear in it, as I do, some call to you, and to me, and to each of us. Not a call that we want, maybe, but perhaps a call we need. We are asked, on Ash Wednesday, to observe a holy Lent, by self-examination, repentance, prayer, fasting, and reading and meditating on God’s holy Word. Jesus did all of those things out in the wilderness. And we are asked to do them in our own wilderness of Lent. Easter is six weeks away. That’s our wilderness time. May each one of us take God up on the invitation to wilderness, to observe a holy Lent, to become closer to Jesus. Not just today, but over these next six weeks.
Amen.