First Sunday in Lent

Scripture: Luke 4:1-13 and Deuteronomy 26:1-11

I was just finishing my work out at the gym early Thursday morning when
I ran into a colleague from another congregation who paused in the
middle of his sweating and panting to greet me. When I asked how his
week was going he said, okay. Ash Wednesday service last night. I
nodded. Us, too. How was it? He grimaced. Poorly attended as usual. You
know how it is. Nobody wants to do Lent.

Then yesterday, a friend of mine who is a priest burst out: I hate
Lent. Lent is ridiculous. Lent is not what we are about, we are about
Easter. Lent is nothing more than the forty day bus ride that carries
us to Easter. Nobody wants to do Lent. Some years I think that’s what we
ought to recite, when we ritually inscribe ashes on the foreheads of
the faithful few, instead of the more traditional you are dust, and to
dust you shall return. Nobody wants to do Lent but Lent is doing you.

The truth is, Lent is doing usand our choices are not so much about
skipping the bus ride and living a life of endless Easter, as they are
about whether we are going to use our spiritual energy to enter the
desert time, the Lenten times, willingly and with our eyes and hearts
open, or rather to exhaust our spiritual strength in avoidance and
denial. Lent is doing us — in the turmoil in Haiti, and our confusion
about how to help; on the steps of city hall in of San Francisco and
New Paltz and Ft. Lauderdale and in the courthouses behind them; in the
memory of a grief not yet healed, felt as a pang when you least
expected it; in the weary anger and numbing exhaustion and sheer
depletion that comes sometimes just as the cost of getting through
another hectic, ordinary day. Lent is doing us: the desert is not an
optional tour, but an essential part of a soul-full life.

Scripture reminds us that the human story really begins in the
desert. You are dust, and unto dust you shall return. These are not
only the opening words of Lent, but also the words that mark the
beginning of the rest of Adam and Eve’s life, when they were done with
Eden and ready to enter the world. The ancestors who crafted and told
this story put these words into the mouth of God, reminding us that it
is a very part of our humanity, our god-given nature, to be shaped not
just by Eden, by the garden of delights, our joys and pleasuresbut
also, by dust: by the hard facts of lives that are shaped by work and
toil, by the earthy ”stuff” of relationships forged not in the
mindless bliss of romantic love, but in the real-time love-work of
conflict and compromise; by souls whose beauty is etched in the joy of
wisdom learned through pain and pondering.

We were not meant for Eden; rather, we began in the desert to know
what it was, what it is to be truly human. We are dust and deity. And
we continue in the desert, in the wilderness, as well. After Eden, it
is the story of the Exodus and the wilderness wanderings that has most
profoundly shaped the Jewish and Christian understanding of what it
means to be a child of God, a member of the tribe of those who choose
and are chosen for a life in God. The Exodus was only the bus stop, the
place we began the journey. Israel learned what it meant to be God’s
people in the wilderness. There, they received the torah, the
commandments. There, they learned how to trust, even in seasons of
deprivation, anxiety, and aimlessness. There, their slave-spirits were
tested and refined and prodded and poked into the beautiful,
independent, ornery fullness of free people. There, they learned that
the key to knowing how to choose among difficult options and the trick
to keeping the family together in hard times was to know how to tell a
good story. Read the story. They learned it they hard way and then they
taught us, that to be a people of God is mostly about practice, and
repetition, and knowing how to mark your life from beginning to end,
and to believe that that life has meaning because you, and God, are
together in the midst of it.

Listen to this morning’s reading from Deuteronomy, a story and a
commandment tied to the very moment when the people realized they had
left the wilderness and come into a place of sufficiency and grace.
Listen to what they were taught to remember, and to say, and to do:
When the priest takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before
the altar of the Lord your God, you shall make this response before the
Lord your God: “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into
Egypt and lived there as a stranger, few in number, and there became a
great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us
harshly and afflicted us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our
ancestors, and the Lord heard our voice.

This may seem dusty and distant: but it is our story, and truly, the
stuff that frames and makes sense of our everyday lives. Let me give
you an example in an editorial by Diego Ribadeneira of the Boston
Globe, concerning why some ministers and religious activists support
civil marriage rights for gays and lesbians. The article began:

For centuries, from the early Middle Ages until the start of the
last century, many European countries had laws that put a cap on the
number of marriage licenses given annually to Jewish couples. It was a
way, says Rabbi Howard Berman, of trying to control the Jewish
population in overcrowded European ghettos. Berman, rabbi emeritus of
Chicago’s Sinai Temple, told this little-known historical account to
bolster his position on the controversial issue of whether gays and
lesbians should be allowed to marry. “We were strangers in the land of
Egypt,” says Berman, “We know what it is like to be told by external
authorities that we may not marry.”

What a challenge for most of us, who rarely think to read our faith
story, let alone to allow it to shape the way we are in the world, and
the choices we make here. Why do you support gay marriages, Rabbi? A
wandering Aramean was my ancestor, and he was oppressed in Egypt.

We began in the desert to know what it meant to be human; and we
learn in the desert to claim and to tell our human story. Do we even
know our own history well enough to claim it? Do we take it seriously,
whether it be our faith history, or our own?

Finally, the scriptures suggest that the desert is the place where
we learn to listen to hard questionsand listening, come to know who we
want to be. This may be the most crucial desert lesson of all for us,
who avoid at all costs quiet, empty spaces and empty desert time. We
fill our lives with advice and action, with noise and distraction and
busy-ness, and in filling our lives to such a brim, and keeping them
that way, we have emptied the well from which our souls must drink, in
order to be well and strong to give back to the world in thanksgiving
to God for what we have been given. We don’t have enough emptiness in
our living to nourish the fullness of a healthy spiritual life.

I think that Jesus of Nazareth knew this about emptiness and
fullness, and that wisdom is what sent him out into the wilderness. Now
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. We don’t know how it really happened. We just know that a
man struggled with questions in his soul, resisted temptation, and
fulfilled his calling. Jesus thought enough of his life to attend to
the details, to take time to listen to hard questions, and to tell his
own, and his people’s story as a way of anchoring himself to his faith
and his history. Jesus believed enough in the meaning and
purposefulness of history to tell his people’s story– to quote
scripture– while he was making these important, private choices in his
life. Jesus was “full of the Holy Spirit,” and just maybe, a great part
of what that means is that Jesus knew, and behaved as if, he was in the
Flow of the purpose of God as it was being played out in human history,
every single minute of every day. Perhaps the greater part by far of
Jesus’ being the Christ was not that he had access to God and God’s
purposes in a way that we do not, but that Jesus’ own awareness of the
presence of the Holy Spirit in his life was so acute that he was
literally incapable of devaluing the events and the living of his days
in the ways that we do so casually, every day of our lives. Living as
the Christ of God was as much about the discipline of understanding
life to be meaning-full and attending to it as it was about anything
else. And that is something we can do; indeed, must do, if we would
live as “Christian.”

There is no way around it: Lent is a desert season, harsh and
barren, when our serious obligations, our anxious struggling, our
awareness of the fragility of our lives and the lives of those we love
are permitted, even coaxed, out of the places where our deep sadness
and our anxiety lies hidden in shadow to rise to the surface and be
examined in the clear light of day.

Facing what we are, and what we have failed to be or become, we know
ourselves fragile, earthy, fallible, and we admit, even if just for a
moment, that we are not all we are cracked up to be, nor even quite
what we have pretended. But this is not a necessary evil, a bus-ride
toward Easter, but a life-tour that has meaning in and for itself. This
work of dust and ashes, hard though it be, must also be seen as
God-work. It is God-work that frees us from the burden of illusion,
pretense, and self-delusion. God-work that Lent is a time for letting
go, for telling our story and listening to the God-stories we have been
given with renewed passion and interest, for believing that the dry
work of the desert can bring us, by hidden paths, back once again to
the places, where God is still awaiting us. It is a necessary work for
us, and a good one. The poet T. S. Eliot describes it, this sort of
needful paradoxical transformation, in one of his Choruses from The
Rock:

The world turns and the world changes,

But one thing does not change.

In all of my years, one thing does not change.

However you disguise it, this thing does not change:

The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.

Forgetful, you neglect your shrines and churches;

The men you are in these times deride

What has been done of good, you find explanations

To satisfy the rational and enlightened mind.

Second, you neglect and belittle the desert.

The desert is not remote in southern tropics,

The desert is not only around the corner,

The desert is squeezed in the tube-train next to you,

The desert is in the heart of your brother.

The good man is the builder, if he build what is good.

I will show you the things that are now being done,

And some of the things that were long ago done,

That you may take heart. Make perfect your will.

Let me show you the work of the humble. Listen.[1]

[1] Eliot, T. S., ”Choruses from The Rock,” I, 1934, in Collected Poems 1909-1962, NY: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc. 1970.