Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 9, 2003

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Today is the first Sunday in Lent. I suspect that we all know that there is a season in the church year called Lent, but I wonder how many of us know what Lent really is. Most of us grew up with the idea that Lent was a time when we were supposed to give up something we liked. If you’re like me you never actually did that, but that was my childhood understanding of Lent. It was a time before Easter when some people, especially Catholic people, identified something they liked, like chocolate, and stayed away from it. I was never quite sure why. I guess I thought giving up something you liked was supposed somehow to be good for your soul, although I never understood how that was supposed to work either.

Well, actually, Lent isn’t actually about giving up anything, although you might decide as part of your more profound Lenten discipline to do that if you think it would be helpful. Lent is a time of preparation, specifically preparation for the greatest celebration of the Christian year, of the Christian faith, Easter. Traditionally, it has been a time of introspection, of discernment, and thus necessarily of repentance. That’s where the giving up part comes in, actually, although it is based on a misunderstanding of what repentance actually means. Be that as it may, Lent is primarily a time of preparation. And the Gospel stories of Jesus in the wilderness have become traditional Lenten texts.

Now, maybe for you like for me, the connection between those wilderness texts and Lent hasn’t been obvious. Let me share with you something that I think I have discovered about them explains why and how they work in our Lenten context. I’m going to be going through the Gospel reading pretty closely here, so you might want to open your pew Bibles again and follow along.

In our passage this morning, there is essentially a three part movement. You can see those three movements in the section headings the editors of the NRSV translation have inserted into Mark’s text: The Baptism of Jesus, the Temptation of Jesus, and the Beginning of the Galilean Ministry. Those headings give us a good model of what Lent is all about. Let me explain.

In the first movement, Jesus takes his first steps into a life of ministry. He comes from his home in Nazareth to the Jordan River, where John the Baptist is preaching an apocalyptic message of repentance and baptism for the forgiveness of sin in preparation for the coming Day of the Lord. Jesus joins this very anti-establishment movement by being baptized by John. This part of the story can be a metaphor, I think, for our own beginnings in the life of faith. We may not expect the immanent coming of the end of the world, but most of us at least have been baptized and have taken at least some tentative steps into a life of faith. You may recall that we read this baptism text in January on the day we reaffirmed our baptismal vows. Since I talked about its meaning in more detail then, I won’t spend more time on this part of the story now.

Then, in its second movement, which has several parts, the story gets more interesting, for our purposes today at least. This is the part that makes the story appropriate for Lent. As soon as Jesus was baptized and blessed by a sign from heaven, we are told, “the Spirit immediately drove him into the wilderness.” Now, most of us probably weren’t immediately driven into the wilderness after our baptisms. If you were, please let me know. I’d like to hear about it. Still, this part of the story has a lot to tell us. What is the Spirit driving Jesus into the wilderness about, after all? We can see it as being about, I think, God (here “the Spirit”) telling him, and us, that the life of faith requires times of reflection, of introspection, of discernment, if we are to know what we are called to do and if we are to have the courage to do it. Mark (and Matthew and Luke after him, with elaborate additions not found in Mark) call it a time of temptation. Like Jesus, we are all tempted to live less than fully faithful lives. We need wilderness times, times when we can go inside ourselves and deal with that temptation through reflection and prayer, if we are not going to be controlled by that temptation. Lent is, or can and (if I may for once use a word we are usually better off avoiding) should be, such a time for us.

The story says Jesus was in the wilderness for forty days. That time specification tells us something too. At least on occasion we need protracted times in the wilderness of prayer and reflection. Forty is a number often used in the Bible symbolically to mean “a long time.” In this sense, Lent is forty days long. It’s actually forty-six days long (hence the title of this sermon), but that amounts to the same thing in a Biblical sense of time. The kind of introspection and discernment that the life of faith requires isn’t just a matter of an hour (or maybe a little bit more) on Sunday morning. It is something that takes time and for which we need to set aside time. Lent is a time when we can do that.

The story then says that Jesus was “tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts.” What is that part of the story telling us about those wilderness times that the life of faith requires? It’s telling us, I think, that these times aren’t easy. They aren’t always fun. Las Vegas may be in a desert wilderness, but we’re not talking about a vacation in Las Vegas here. This is serious business. This is hard work. It can even be dangerous work. Satan may win, and we may give in to the world’s oh so enticing temptations. Our own fears, prejudices, and hatreds, that is, our own wild beasts, may overpower us. But this story tells us that this is work that we must do if we are truly to live the life of faith. Lent is a time set aside for doing it.

Now so far I’ve painted a pretty bleak picture of this wilderness time of prayer and contemplation to which God calls us and to which Lent is dedicated. But the picture our Gospel story paints this morning actually isn’t bleak at all. That’s because of the next element in this second movement of the story. Jesus was tempted by Satan and was with the wild beasts. Yet Mark tells us that in all those difficulties “the angels waited on him.” God calls us into the wilderness. God does not stop Satan from tempting us or the wild beasts from threatening us. But God does not leave us alone in our wilderness. Indeed, if I have learned anything of real value in my fifty-six years of life it is that God never leaves us alone, no matter how alone we may feel. And the Gospel tells us here that God ministers to us even in our difficult but necessary wilderness experiences. God supports us and protects us, comforts and encourages us, as we with wrestle with Satan and the wild beasts. We can enter into the wilderness precisely because we know that we do not go alone.

Then we come to the third movement of the piece, the beginning of the Galilean ministry. You see, the life of faith does not end in the wilderness. Not all Christians have always understood that fact. Beginning in about the fourth century, around the time Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire-we need to talk about that some day. It was a mixed blessing at best-there was a movement of desert hermit monks. they produced a great body of writing that contains many wonderful spiritual insights. They are worth reading. But the problem I’ve always had with this group usually called "The Desert Fathers" (although there were some mothers among them as well) is that they stayed in the desert. They went to the desert to wrestle with their demons, and their writings get very vivid on that point. But having wrestled with the demons most of them never returned to the world, to their home towns, to proclaim the Gospel and serve the people. Jesus too went to the desert to wrestle with his demons, but he didn’t stay there. Mark tells us that after his forty days in the wilderness he returned to Galilee (whence he had come-note now this section begins with Jesus coming from Galilee and ends with him returning to Galilee, a literary device that tells us we are on the right track when we read these three pieces as a whole). He returned to Galilee proclaiming the good news. Just what that good news consists of is the subject of the rest of Mark’s Gospel. The important point for us here is that after his wilderness experience, Jesus went home. He returned to the world. He went back to proclaim the Gospel and serve the people. God calls us to do the same. Our wilderness experience, our Lent experience, is complete only if it equips us for mission back in the world.

And so I invite you all to observe a holy Lent this year. I’m not saying literally go out into the wilderness until Easter, although doing that some time might well be a worthwhile experience. Rather, I invite you intentionally to set aside time regularly during the next six weeks for prayer, contemplation, reflection, and discernment. I intend to do that myself. If any of you would like to do it with me, or if you want some guidance on how to do it, please let me know. One hint: This exercise is a lot more about silence than it is about talking. However you do it, I pray that you will all find a way to make this Lent a holy time in your lives, a time of prayer and reflection, of renewal and hope. And if you want to give up chocolate, I suppose that’s all right too.