Luke 4:1-13 

A new season in our life together is upon us, the 40 days of Lent. The church modeled this time of preparation for Easter on the experience of Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness. So it is that on this first Sunday of the season, you might say that we have the landscape of Lent before us: a wilderness into which we are invited to journey, to fast and pray, even as Jesus once did.

But what does that landscape look like? On a snowy winter Sunday, it might be hard to imagine a dry and desolate desert And our visual image may be influenced, if not distorted, by our own personal experience. I still remember sitting in a Bible study class as we studied this passage with a group from a church I once served. I was giving a description of that wilderness landscape to the group – the desert terrain where Jesus prayed — when Martha expressed great surprise. “Really?” she said. “All these years, whenever I heard the word ‘wilderness’ in the Bible, what I pictured was the deepest and darkest unexplored woods.” I smiled to myself. Imagine Jesus camping out beneath the pines, keeping a campfire going to prevent the bears or wolves from drawing too close.

But maybe Martha was on to something. She knew nothing of dry deserts and barren places. But she did know the anxiety provoked by the thought of being lost in the woods, without any sense of one’s bearings or of having enough food or water to survive. She had a vivid sense of the kind of place that would unsettle her – a place where she could not rely on all of the normal comforts of life or the things which made her feel secure.

I know that I can have a fairly romantic picture of Jesus fasting for forty days in the wilderness. And there is a part of me that can fantasize about having that kind of time to be alone with God and away from all the preoccupations of my life.  40 days in the Palestinian desert? Sure I can contemplate doing that. But 40 days of confronting my own anxieties, or shaking myself loose from some of the things that most comfort me and make my life familiar and predictable? That is another story. Martha was on to something. For the church, in observing this season, invites us to step beyond the comfortable and the known, even if it is just in small ways.

We can trade stories or chuckle at our attempts to give something up for Lent. But this classic discipline is not an exercise of willpower, a contest to see whether we can make it to the finish line of Easter morning without having had a nightly drink or having eaten too many sweets. No, to give something up is to create an experience, to create a moment, a place and space where suddenly the landscape of our life looks a little different – a bit of an intentional wilderness if you will.

I was up very early this morning to finish this sermon and turned on the coffee maker earlier than normal, only to discover that it had not been set up the night before. A minor inconvenience. And so I went to make a fresh pot, only to discover that we are out of coffee. A not so minor inconvenience. I have not chosen to give up coffee for Lent. I will not give up coffee for Lent. But what do I do with the annoyance, the immediate feeling of deprivation that wells up in me, and then the embarrassment I feel about having such strong feelings about such a minor matter? Perhaps I intentionally look at myself and listen to myself.

For when things look different, when they sound different and when they feel different, that is to say, when the normal routine is changed and when the landscape suddenly appears different, it is often in those moments and places when we begin to see with new eyes, hear with new ears, and possibly even act with new hearts. When we cannot rely on what we think is true or necessary, we may just discover what is true and what is necessary.

Martin Smith, in his classic Lenten devotional A Season of the Spirit, quotes a character in a Dorothy Sayers novel recalling “the extempore prayer of a well meaning but incoherent curate, heard once and never forgotten, ‘Lord, teach us to take our heats and look them in the face, however difficult it may be.’”*

To take our hearts and look them in the face – Smith calls this the essence of the wilderness experience. To see our lives as they are; to see what we take for granted, what and whom we depend on, and what moves us at the core of our lives. It is there that we discover the truth. The truth about ourselves, and the truth about God.

Jesus went into the wilderness for forty days, having been baptized and anointed by the Holy Spirit. And Luke tells us, that filled with that Spirit, he was led into the wilderness, and there he was tempted and tested. He prayed for forty days. And in that sense we can say that he was with God. But in the temptations he encountered, we might also say that he was continually facing, and ultimately rejecting, any conception of God that was less than the full truth. Jesus recognized in these temptations that the God who had anointed him at his baptism and who had filled him with the Spirit was not a God who would satisfy only material needs. He recognized that the Spirit that had filled him and led him to this place was not a Spirit that would grasp at power in order to achieve the divine purpose. This was not a God who would keep him from all harm, even though Satan could quote Scripture suggesting so.

He came out of that desert knowing himself, and his vocation, and knowing God. The God who had led a wandering Aramean down into Egypt. The God who had freed a people and led them for forty years through the desert. The God who had proclaimed at his baptism “You are my beloved Son, with you I am well pleased.” The God whose Spirit so filled him that in him we have come to see the truth that is God. And with that knowledge Jesus could face every aspect of the landscape ahead of him: its beauty, and its power, and its danger. As can we.

A journey across the Lenten landscape may seem foreign and unfamiliar. But it can also bring us home: to a clearer understanding of ourselves, and of the One who created us. I remember a seminary professor telling the story of visiting some churches on the Maldives Islands, in the Indian Ocean. Recognizing his own discomfort at being so far from any mainland, he asked one of his hosts, “So what is it like living so far away like this?” With a puzzled look, his host replied, “So far away from what?”

Let’s be willing to venture into the wilderness this Lent. Let’s be willing to be dislocated, maybe even a little bit lost. For in so doing, we might just find that the landscape is not so foreign and not so unsettling. We might just find that rather than being in the most far away of places, we are at center of where we should be, with God.

Amen.

 A Sermon for St. John’s Episcopal Church

Charlestown, Massachusetts

Preached on The First Sunday in Lent

By the Rev. Thomas N. Mousin

February 17, 2013

*Martin Smith, A Season for the Spirit, (Seabury Books: New York, 2004) 13.