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March 1:The First Sunday in Lent – St. John’s

Opening

It is good to be back here at St. John’s. It’s been a while. Why we’ve had Christmas and a New Year’s Eve. A new decade. And Ash Wednesday has now come and gone.

Lent has begun. It’s a time of the year that I dreaded when I was a parish priest . There were more activities, more things to keep track of, more pressure to grow, and more hope that our numbers would be better this year than they were the last year.

I must tell you that it’s been a delightful deliverance for me to be retired. It’s delightful to be here with you this morning.

The keeping of Lent has been a great blessing to me from the time I was a youth. It’s been a time when I could hear the call to be better than I was. And for most of my life it has been a time when the voices of distraction have been tamed. I have been more aware that most of my life and energy is spent on things that are ultimately not very important. Lent has been a time that flashes, “Major on the majors, not the minors.”

I actually believe that the voices of distraction, calling us away from what we really need to be doing, are pretty much common to everyone. That’s why Lent is a good thing for everyone, young and old, rich and poor, sick and healthy.

I think you didn’t have a scheduled Ash Wednesday service here at St. John’s. Some of you may have found your way to a service somewhere else. Others may have remembered that there was a time when you did have a scheduled service, and you lament that now you don’t.

I’m here today to do the basic thing that Ash Wednesday does. It calls us to the keeping of a holy Lent.

Lent is not really a time for observing ritual. The lessons on Ash Wednesday make that clear. And the account of Jesus temptation today, I believe, emphasizes it as well. Lent is a time for paying attention, for paying attention to what’s in our heart. It is a time for taking stock of what is important to us and what is not.

The Ash Wednesday service extends an invitation to everyone and in part it reads as follows:

I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy Word.

These are tools that the church has handed down for centuries and indeed millennia for looking into our heart and for discovering what are the actual priorities in our life. They are for pointing our lives in new directions to more clearly set our priorities in accordance with life-choices rather than death-choices – in the words of the Deuteronomist:

30:19-20 I call heaven and earth as my witnesses against you right now: I have set life and death, blessing and curse before you. Now choose life—so that you and your descendants will live— by loving the Lord your God, by obeying his voice, and by clinging to him.

The Temptation

How can we find a way to make Jesus’ Temptation relevant to us?

Right after Jesus baptism, and before he began any sort of ministry, he fasted. He went into the desert, the wilderness, to fast. And the Spirit led him. I picture a kindly older person, man or woman, taking his hand, reassuringly guiding and leading him, and relentlessly assuring him that it was going to be OK.

The prophet Isaiah puts fasting into the context of his day and age (Isaiah 58:3-10)

3 “Why do we fast and you don’t see;
why afflict ourselves and you don’t notice?”
Yet on your fast day you do whatever you want,
and oppress all your workers.
4 You quarrel and brawl, and then you fast;
you hit each other violently with your fists.
You shouldn’t fast as you are doing today
if you want to make your voice heard on high.
5 Is this the kind of fast I choose,
a day of self-affliction,
of bending one’s head like a reed
and of lying down in mourning clothing and ashes?
Is this what you call a fast,
a day acceptable to the Lord?

6 Isn’t this the fast I choose:
releasing wicked restraints, untying the ropes of a yoke,
setting free the mistreated,
and breaking every yoke?

7 Isn’t it sharing your bread with the hungry
and bringing the homeless poor into your house,
covering the naked when you see them,
and not hiding from your own family?

8 Then your light will break out like the dawn,
and you will be healed quickly.
Your own righteousness will walk before you,
and the Lord’s glory will be your rear guard.
9 Then you will call, and the Lord will answer;
you will cry for help, and God will say, “I’m here.”
If you remove the yoke from among you,
the finger-pointing, the wicked speech;
10 if you open your heart to the hungry,
and provide abundantly for those who are afflicted,
your light will shine in the darkness,
and your gloom will be like the noon.

As I prepare these words, inviting you to the keeping of a holy Lent, I join a long line of followers of Christ who have encountered the Temptation of Jesus in an effort to make it their own. They have sought to understand this scene of Jesus heading off into the wilderness in order to make it real in their own lives. The New Testament itself used the Temptation of Jesus to understand who Jesus was and what he was up to, namely the redemption of sin while experiencing the reality and power of sin.

  • Heb. 4:15
  • 2 CO 5:21
  • Matt 16:21-23

In the Temptation of Jesus the writers of the New Testament, in different ways, saw Jesus confronting sin and Temptation and emerging victorious. Again and again from generation to generation and century to century Christians have looked to this scene – to Jesus victory here – as a window on Jesus’ final victory over sin and temptation.

  • the Book of Kells focused on it in its magnificent illustrations
  • John Milton used the Temptation as one of the main themes of his poem Paradise Lost
  • the Brothers Karamazov, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Jesus Christ Superstar, – each has found the Temptation to be a central motif for the epic stories they told.1
    This is an important text for us to reckon with in our journey as Christians. But it is not easy to find our place within it. It is tempting for us to dismiss it as a fanciful story that happened long ago and has little to do with us today.

Our resistance to fasting

As the Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness what was it that Jesus did? He fasted. He fasted, as the text says, 40 days and 40 nights – a proverbial length of time.

In our culture and society of abundance where so many of us have luxuries that centuries ago were unheard of, people who fast are often seen as aberrations or distortions.

My mother used to fast. Often.

But she didn’t do it for religious purposes. She fasted from food, she fasted from buying things that would make her life easier – not because she was trying to follow Jesus into the wilderness but because she didn’t have the money.

Many in our culture of abundance fast in order to lose weight. It might be a healthy desire to reduce the obesity that plagues our society. Weight loss might also be a sign of disease, or an eating disease. In either case it’s not a spiritual activity.

Jesus specifically headed into the wilderness, being led by the Spirit, because it was there that something important was going to take place. He did it as an act of faith and trust in the God who sent him and who walked with him in the Spirit.

He showed us the way to fast as a part of our Lenten call to a holy life.

Fasting

What is the point of fasting? How should we make sense of it? One writer asked it this way:

Minding Our Manners

“That doesn’t make sense,” she said. It wasn’t junior high snark but simply an observation during a Lenten lesson. “So if I go hungry, how does that help other hungry people? That doesn’t make sense.” She was right, of course. Fasting without prayer and almsgiving is not the manner of fasting God wishes. If our fasting doesn’t make us hunger and thirst for righteousness, if it doesn’t move us to works of mercy, it is not the manner of fasting God wishes. We have God’s word on it. – [Mary Stommes for 2/28]

I invite you to the keeping of a Holy Lent.

Embrace fasting

The way for us to embrace fasting as a foundational piece of our journey of faith, is to use our imagination to enter the scene.

If I try to place myself in this scene of Temptation from the beginning of Jesus life, I am startled that I don’t find what I was expecting. I expect there to be tension and fear. There ought to be anxiety.

I expect to feel anxiety like what I feel when I am experiencing temptation, when I do what I shouldn’t do or don’t do what I should, as Paul the apostle put it.

In the words of Julian of Norwich, what I see is the assurance that "All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well."

What I feel is the calm of the spirit holding my hand and the promise that God is in charge, not me.

Closing

When I imagine myself walking beside Jesus in the wilderness, each of us fasting, I am also keenly aware that I do not walk alone. Though our wilderness may feel lonely, the Spirit is there.

Perhaps the fasting the Spirit leads me to is more like what Isaiah described. Perhaps it is the fasting from bickering and back-biting. Perhaps it is fasting from broadcasting my own self-righteousness. Perhaps it is to build up those from whom I feel alienated. It is clearly as important to feed the hungry as it is to fast from eating when I am satisfied. Fasting is to provide homes for the homeless, a rest for the weary, and the presence of calm in a time of unrest.

6 “Isn’t this the fast I choose:
releasing wicked restraints, untying the ropes of a yoke,
setting free the mistreated,
and breaking every yoke?”

Lent invites us to a time of fasting, not a gentle, mild, surface kind of fasting. But one with prayer that asks what is it you’re doing with me, Lord. Fasting with giving away our wealth to those who have less, who have needs we can not imagine. Fasting that leads us to long for justice and to act with mercy to all around us.

In our fast, by God’s presence, we shall know, again with Julian of Norwich, “God loved us before he made us; and his love has never diminished and never shall.”

Notes

lectionary

  1. These might well be unfamiliar examples to many? ↩︎

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