21 Feb 2010
First Sunday in Lent
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O LORD, my strength and my Redeemer."
Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil.
Australians have a funny relationship with wilderness. We hold the outback, the bush, the forest, the red centre deeply in our hearts and imaginations almost as part of the national psyche, but the vast majority of us live in tidy suburban streets clinging to the fertile coastal fringes. For most of the European history of this country we have assiduously tried to change the wild places, to see it as a source of wealth, an economic resource to be utilised, a place to tame. We have become very adept, like the Israelites in the Deuteronomy reading, at possessing it and settling it. We rightly can rejoice at the fertile plains and fruits of the land we have been able to gain from it.
A bit more unsettling for me are the images of open cut mines, which are striking for their evidence of our capacity to remove entire mountains and strip whole valleys. A large proportion of our wealth and security has come from maximising the assets of our wilderness places. But as valuable as these resources are and as beautiful as we have come to realise our wilderness areas to be, few of us live there. Interesting places to visit but too uncomfortable, inconvenient or just too far away from the centre of the action for the bulk of us to want to or be able to make it our home.
In Advent we heard of John proclaiming a gospel of repentance in the wilderness and today it is Jesus' turn. Jesus seeks out the wilderness to prepare for his ministry. I wonder what visual image you have of that wilderness? Sand and howling winds? Craggy mountain tops and tumbled rocks? Heat, dust, desiccated plants, stunted trees, dry river beds? As a child in Tasmania, my view of wilderness was seemingly impenetrable forest, dark and damp. Whatever image we may have of it, the reality is that the wilderness is a recurring theme in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Time and again our scriptures tell us that the voice of God is to be heard in the wild places. The patriarchs and prophets encounter God in the rough, untamed places and generations of men and women have retired to wild places to hold themselves intentionally before God.
Why the wilderness? Why go to all that effort when surely God is just as capable of speaking to us in the crowded shopping centre car park or around the family dinner table? The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, in his book, Where God Happens: Discovering Christ in One Another and Other Lessons from the Desert Fathers 1, suggests that the key element of the wilderness is its silence.
Silence, he writes, "somehow reaches to the root of our human problem....Words help to strengthen the illusions with which we surround, protect, and comfort ourselves; without silence, we will not get any closer to knowing who we are before God."
The thing about wilderness is that it places us in a situation where all the normal props of life, the words that we use to distract ourselves, are stripped away. There is no television, radio, cd player, telephone, email or even postal service in most wilderness places. If we truly enter into a wilderness, we are entering a place where we are faced with our own thoughts... our own selves.... and perhaps... if we listen very closely, we might even hear the voice of God. I suspect this is the point of the wilderness in the tradition... perhaps in a more extreme way than the shopping centre or the dining room table, it hopefully allows those who enter into it, the space to stop talking about and at God... and allows them to listen to what God might have to say to us... not that the dining room table and the shopping centre carpark cannot be wilderness places, places of listening for God, in their own ways.
Today's Gospel invites us into something of the experience of Jesus as he prepares for what lays ahead and in that preparation we confront the reality of temptation. Whether we hold to a personification of evil called Satan or whether we are more comfortable with an understanding of the Devil as a metaphor for the brokenness of humanity and our capacity to consistently choose evil... the topic for a whole other sermon I suspect... the reality of what Jesus heard in His listening in the desert is that He was faced with the choice to respond to temptation... to respond to a voice that is not of God.
What I think is most interesting here is that Jesus is not faced with temptations that speak to weaknesses... its not the seven deadly sins that are presented here... no gluttony or lust or sloth or envy.... rather Jesus is faced with temptations that come out of His strengths... the voice in the wilderness calls to the power that lies within Jesus and it is this fundamental choice not to take the easy way out that sets the tone for all that Jesus does. He has the power to take land and have dominion over cities, He has the power to create food, wealth, resources to achieve whatever He wanted to achieve and He even has the power to cheat Death itself. But Jesus chooses not to. Jesus chooses the hard, gritty, all too human path of relationship, which is ultimately the path of radical self sacrifice.
These are choices that in some form or other we are also called to make... in our context... in our lives. Jesus' temptations are not our temptations...... but the dynamic is the same... the fundamental choice to listen to the stirrings of the Spirit of God in our lives and in our hearts. the path of relationship. To listen to that which is of God, rather than that which is not. I suspect that this is what Lent is really all about... a focussed time to do in some small way that which Jesus and Elijah and the mothers and fathers of the desert did... to pause from the rush and tumble of words that is the everyday for many of us and to listen to the voice of our heart... and hopefully, even in some small way to hear the voice of God there.
I have reflected many times on the seeming irrationality of the way God works. If there is a hard way to do something or a flawed human being to do it then that's the way God seems to go... and I suspect that is the point. Our God enters into wilderness... the irrational, the illogical, the imperfect and the wild and calls it into redemption, wholeness, completeness... God enters into the wild places of our lives... in our hearts... the sinfulness, the brokenness, the selfishness and imperfection and calls us into redemption, completeness, wholeness.
The thing about Lent is that we know how it ends. We know that the great feast of Easter is at the end of it all. We know that Jesus listens to the voice of God rather than the Devil and that Jesus defeats the worst that humanity can concoct... but we still need to do the work ourselves... we still need to enter into and to live the story. In many ways I love Lent and its journey to Easter. I love the drama of Ash Wednesday and the striking visual change as we bring out the purple. I love the spiralling in and out of the storytelling of Passion Sunday, the thanksgiving of Maundy Thursday, the emotional, poignant depths of Good Friday and the triumphant celebration of resurrection and new life on Easter Day. I love how each year we are invited into the journey anew... just as Jesus invites us anew to come follow... whenever we fail, whenever we give into temptation, whenever we listen to the voices that are not of God, when we busy ourselves and deafen ourselves so that we can't hear the still, small voice of God.
My prayer and invitation today is that you will come with us as we journey to Easter... in whatever way that allows us to listen... a Lenten discipline perhaps... nothing wrong with a few less glasses of red wine or pieces of chocolate... or maybe taking something on.. an act of service or a renewed focus for giving... maybe a study group or a prayer time... and maybe even some time to physically enter into the silence of the wilderness or create pockets of our own by choosing times with no television, radio, CD player, telephone or email...
Whatever we choose to do in the circumstances of our lives, may this Lent be a time of choosing again to listen for the voice of God... so that we may be as the psalmist sings, those ... "who live in the shelter of the Most High, who abide in the shadow of the Almighty, ..." ... those who can and will "say to the LORD, "My refuge and my fortress; my God, in whom I trust."
In the name of God, Creator, Redeemer and Giver of Life... Amen
Andrew Cooper, 21.2.2010
1 Where God Happens: Discovering Christ in One Another and Other Lessons from the Desert Fathers by Rowan Williams, Shambhala Publications, 2005
