Lent 1 Year C

Last week was a crazy week. It required many late nights and long days. During all of this I was looking at the lectionary texts, found here. It was a long week to get through. So I think I felt a little like I was in the wilderness. I preached a sermon on Sunday morning that I felt had a lot of good ideas in it, but not really enough conclusion to it. Some Sundays are like that. It felt like a sermon that needed a few more days to really come together.

With out further chatter, here is the sermon.

In our gospel passage today Jesus has come from his baptism at the Jordan river and into “the wilderness.” That phrase always struck me as intriguing, almost ominous.  So for today’s sermon I started to think, well, what exactly is “the wilderness?”  It’s wild, overgrown - and it has the connotation of being a place untouched by humanity. It’s a place where there is no clear way through. It's a place where when you are in it you don't know where you are going. A place where nothing else is.

As I began to contemplate the idea of a place where nothing else is, I thought it might be a good thing to explore as we enter into the season of Lent.  Jesus’ willing entry into the wilderness following his baptism and preceding his ministry meant that this wilderness was in between more definite things. It's a liminal space.

In the Bible wilderness functions as a place where nothing else is, and a place in between. Certainly as we hear that word, and the forty days we think of the forty years of wandering the ancient Israelites did. They were between Egypt and the promised land. But another Biblical connotation of the wilderness is of a place where prophets sometimes went to be purified. So not only then is wilderness a place of exile, but it is also one of refuge and it might even be a holy place. 

So then if for the purposes of a sermon, or a spiritual exploration, I invite you to reimagine Lent as a temporal wilderness. It will be for us this morning and this season a liminal space, a space of both exile and refuge. I know, Forty days is a long time, longer than a month, but it does have a definite end. As we move into and mark the days in the temporal wilderness, we do so in the knowledge that the limits are established, the wilderness time does not last for all eternity.  And this too, is true of all wildernesses: it was a long journey in the wilderness for the Israelites, but it did come to an end.

But as we enter into this, I thought we might need a guide. After all the ancient Israelites had Moses, and Jesus has the Holy Spirit. For our guide, I have selected Delores Williams, a black womanist theologian. I chose her because she writes about this in her book "Sisters in the Wilderness." In it she explores the white cultural impulse to civilize the wilderness (and it’s people, like native Americans and African slaves). Williams compares this to the experience of slaves. For them it was a place where there was some freedom. It was a place they could travel through to get to the north. But more than that, Williams says it was a place where many slaves had encounters with Jesus. As an example Williams suggests considering the spiritual “Come Out the Wilderness” which comes form that tradition. The song, in case you're not familiar with it begins by asking what are you going to do when you come out the wilderness? and in some versions also asks: did you see Jesus when you come out the wilderness? Wilderness, for Williams, offers us a transformative religious experience. The liminal space allows us to enter as one thing, and come out transformed.

Now that’s pretty cool. Transformation. I am not sure I can guarantee us all transformative religious experiences even if we imagine Lent as a temporal wilderness. But perhaps this is an opportunity to think about where wilderness is in our lives. Williams wrote about attending a black women’s clergy conference, and one of the sessions was about wilderness experiences, but it was neither about an outdoor adventure, nor the opportunity to see Jesus, rather the clergy people were using this term as short hand for a period of struggle. Something had changed from the creative freedom that let their ancestors encounter Jesus- and Williams argues that something had been lost. This is to say, wilderness in our lives is more than struggle. So let’s hold on to our ideas of wilderness as an in between state because it may help us to see it in our lives.

Now, I don’t know about you, but as a New Yorker, I don’t encounter a lot of traditional, physical wilderness in my day-to-day life.  There isn’t much overgrowth and underbrush cropping up along the Promenade this time of year.  But despite the tamed and civilized urban landscape, I suspect we all have plenty of wilderness experiences in our lives.  The feeling we’ve somehow slid off the map, and that our journey no longer has any particular destination.  Things like depression, divorce, accumulating anxiety, the stress of long-term unemployment, recovering from an injury, mourning the loss of someone in our lives, even feeling distant from one’s self – these are all moments of having stumbled into wilderness. 

            There is something that is quite scary about this sliding off the map, and something rather intimidating about being in the wilderness. But there's something we might notice in out there. It's something the ancient Israelites noticed too. Even though there is a wildness to it, there isn't much danger. And God sustains God’s people in the wilderness

In the book of Deuteronomy God reminds the Israelites by saying: “Surely the Lord your God has blessed you in all your undertakings; he knows your going through this great wilderness. These forty years the Lord your God has been with you; you have lacked nothing.’ (Deuteronomy 2.7). We are reminded that God provides for us.

So then wilderness is a place both where God sustains us, a place where God might transform us, but still remains this in betweeness. I think that is one thing that Lent offers us. It is a season that affirms and even lifts up that in between place. Lent is not like advent, advent is all about preparing for what is next, Lent is more about dwelling in the wilderness. Lent holds up those moments of stress and anxiety, of not knowing what we should be doing and says there is something holy in that. Wilderness doesn’t tell us we have to move on, but it does end as all of them do. Lent is a counter-cultural time, a time that resists knowing what comes next and dwells in the undiscovered.  

As we turn back to todays Gospel, I am interested in the way the freedom of the wilderness allowed Jesus to have space to come to terms with what being the Son of God might mean. His experience there though sounds rather unpleasant. It begins with the physical realm, he is tempted to eat some bread, but Jesus doesn’t want nourishment, or power in the usual ways. Jesus shows the ways in which he is a counter-cultural leader. He uses his time in between to discover that. At each of the tests, it could have gone the other way. The wilderness for Jesus is a time of transformation—it is the place where he decides that being what his relationship to God will mean. It will not mean power and dominion, instead it will mean being with the poor, the oppressed, the sick, the lonely, the cast out, the exile.

As we enter into our Lenten season of temporal wilderness, we resist the temptation to get to the next thing but dwell in freedom. And as we join in the Eucharist, we are sustained by God. And we become for the world and for ourselves the Body of Christ we remember that we are a counter-cultural people, we are okay in the liminal, off the map places in our lives. We are sustained by God’s love, and by our relation to one another through Jesus. And we are called to be with those who Jesus was with, refusing unnecessary comfort and power, and resisting the temptation to leave the wilderness before we are done with our transformation.