A sermon for the First Sunday in Lent
March 9, 2025, at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Hot Springs, AR
Readings: Deuteronomy 26:1-11; Romans 10:8b-13; Luke 4:1-13
Why would you want to go into the wilderness, into the desert? Before I went to seminary, I was the children and youth minister at St. Thomas’ in Springdale. Part of my job was to teach Sunday school. Whenever I taught a Bible story that took place in the desert, like our gospel today, I would get a sandbox, about 2 foot by 4 foot. The curriculum we used would give me a sort of script. It would sound something like this: “The desert is a big place, and we have a small piece of it here today. The desert is a strange and wild place. At night it gets very cold. During the day it gets very hot. There are wild animals, and not very much food or water. The desert is not a place you want to go to alone.”
I always used that introduction for today’s gospel, when the Spirit leads Jesus into the wilderness after his baptism. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all tell us this. Jesus is baptized, and immediately God sends him out to the wilderness, the desert, to pray, and to be tempted by the Evil One. “The desert is a strange and wild place. The desert is not a place you want to go to alone.” But that’s exactly where we find Jesus today, fasting for 40 days and 40 nights.
We also find the Hebrew people there in our reading from Deuteronomy. They are in the desert, and have been there for 40 years. The journey from Egypt to the Promised Land, from bondage to liberation, should not have taken that long–a few months maybe. But it does. They have some things to learn. So they end up wandering, going in circles, for 40 long years. The desert, for them, has not been too kind. God has taken care of them, even keeping their clothing and shoes from wearing out. But they have struggled. They have fought God along the way, refusing to learn how to depend on God for what they need instead of themselves.
Jesus’s own journey into the desert is a reflection of the Hebrew people’s journey there. They are there for 40 years, trying to learn how to depend on God. Jesus is there, fasting for 40 days and 40 nights, depending on God for what he needs. “One does not live by bread alone,” Jesus tells the Evil One today. That’s the lesson the Hebrews had such a hard time learning.
Here at the start of Lent, our 40 day spiritual pilgrimage in the desert, we are being called to learn the same lesson: We cannot live by bread alone, by the work of our hands alone, by what we can provide for ourselves–our security, our stability, our effort. No, if we want to live–truly live–we must learn to live by the words that come from the mouth of the LORD. We must learn to live according to God’s will, to trust in God’s promises, to believe in God, and not in ourselves. So St. Paul says today, “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.
As we head off into this spiritual desert, I will tell us what I told all those kids: “The desert is a strange and wild place. At night it gets very cold. During the day it gets very hot. There are wild animals, and not very much food or water. The desert is not a place you want to go to alone.”
Here’s the second part of that sermon, the part I didn’t tell the youngsters all those years ago: We cannot choose not to go into the desert–that is inevitable. It will happen. Just as the Hebrew people could not choose to skip the desert, just as Jesus could not ignore the leading of the Spirit into the desert, so we cannot choose to skip our spiritual deserts. But we can choose what happens when we get there. The question becomes, now that we’re in the desert, how will we choose to respond? Will it become a place of illumination, or of damnation? You see, God can use our times in the desert to bring us to the place we need to be. God used the wilderness to bring the Hebrew people from bondage into freedom. God used the wilderness to strengthen Jesus, the Son, for his public ministry. God can use our wildernesses, our deserts, to transform us, too, if we’re open to it.
One Christian writer, Marlena Graves, said it this way: “God uses the desert of the soul–our suffering and difficulties, our pain, our dark nights–to form us, to make us beautiful souls. He redeems what we might deem our living hells, if we allow him. The hard truth, then, is this: everyone who follows Jesus is eventually called into the desert.”
“The desert is a strange and wild place. The desert is not a place you want to go to alone.” The good news is we don’t go through it alone. Christ is with us. We are led through by that cloud by day and pillar of fire by night, under the shadow of the Almighty. We are given water from the rock and manna from heaven. We are led through a parched and desolate landscape, and we learn to trust God and God’s grace for all that we need. We do not live by bread alone, but by the word, the promises, the grace, the love of God.
We cannot choose whether we go through the desert, but we can choose what happens to us when we get there. We can choose to trust in ourselves (the path that leads to damnation), or we can trust in God (the path that leads to illumination); we can lean on our own understanding (damnation), or we can learn the promises of God (illumination); we can depend on our own strength alone (damnation), or we can depend on the grace of God (illumination); we can believe in what we can do for ourselves, or we can choose to believe in the goodness and love of God, holding on to the One who made the desert.
Marlena Graves would go on to write, “the desert is a blessing disguised as a curse.” Sometimes–maybe all the time–we cannot see the blessing in the middle of the desert. But hold on. Persevere. Don’t give up on Jesus. Trust in him and believe in him. Live by God’s word, God’s promises, God’s grace, God’s love, and not by the bread you can make alone. And you will be saved. We will all be saved.
Storied Grace 