Called into the Wilderness
A sermon for the first Sunday in Lent
March 6, 2022
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, just as Susie is doing now. 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 really 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 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 Satan. “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, hearing the Law of God anew before they cross into the Promised Land. They are in the desert, and have been there for 40 years. The journey from Egypt to the Promised Land 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 what they need to learn, 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. Jesus is quoting a verse there from Deuteronomy: “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.”
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 really 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 young children 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? 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.
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 (call them what you will)–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 have to. We don’t go through the desert 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. We must. But we can choose what happens to us when we get there. We can choose to trust in ourselves, or we can trust in God; we can lean on our own understanding, or we can learn the promises of God; we can depend on our own strength, or we can depend on the grace of God; we can believe in what we can do, or we can choose to believe in the goodness and love of God; we can hold on to ourselves in the desert, or we can hold on to the One who made the desert.
Jesus knows his way through the desert; he has been there before. And he is committed to taking us through it. More than that, he is committed to bringing a blessing out of it. It may hurt. There may be pain and suffering. It may seem to go on for too long. After all, the desert is a strange and wild place, with cold nights and scorching days, with wild animals and danger, with little food and water. But we don’t have to go through it alone, for Jesus is leading us–and transforming us.
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 bread alone. And you will be saved.
The Lifeline
A sermon for Ash Wednesday
March 2, 2022
Hello. My name is Mark. And I am a sinner. (It is at this point you all say, “hi, Mark.”)
You no doubt recognized that opening. Hello. My name is ___. And I am a ___. This phrase, first made popular by Alcoholics Anonymous, AA, has now spread to various other support groups using the same twelve steps. There are support groups for all kinds of folks, struggling, like all of us, with some sort of demon, a vice that has them in its hold. And the first thing those groups do is confess. I am a ____. Then they tell their story. The story that they all share. The story of how they started spinning out of control. We know about this format from our popular culture–TV, movies. Perhaps we also know from participating in one such group, working out those twelve steps ourselves.
Oftentimes, these stories, testimonies really, will end something like this: “I knew I was out of control, and I needed help. So I came here.” We all know the saying, the first step toward solving a problem is recognizing you have one. Joining a support group like AA is not a failure; the exact opposite actually. It is a victory. It is a shout of defiance against our spinning out of control. It’s grabbing a lifeline when we find ourselves in the depths.
That is, in a sense, what we’re doing here today. We are coming together to start a holy Lent with confession and penitence. Together we confess that we are sinners. That our sin spins out of control. That we can’t do it on our own. That we need help, a lifeline. And that’s not a failure–by no means. It is a victory. For it is a shout of defiance against our sin spinning out of control, if we take it seriously.
In our reading from Second Corinthians, St. Paul is entreating us to be reconciled to God. Reconciled: it means to be reconnected, to remove the barriers that divide. We are separated from God because of our sin. God never lets go of us, but we let go of God. We turn away from God and look to ourselves, to our own way, to our own desires and wills. And we begin to spin out of control. Our sin gets the best of us. We harm others. We harm ourselves. We lift ourselves up as gods and forget the One who made us. We become addicted to greed, to pride, to sloth, to lust, to envy, to gluttony, to wrath. We put up a front so no one sees what’s really under the surface, but we know the chaos within. And we spin, deeper and deeper, into the depths.
Through it all, God has not let go of us. We feel like we’ve gone so far, like who we are and what we’ve done cannot be reconciled to God. Like God has given up on us. Perhaps we have given up on ourselves. But if we look, there’s a lifeline. There is the very hand of God, in the middle of the depths of our despair, and that hand is reaching out for you, waiting for you to grasp it. A lifeline.
“Now is the acceptable time. Now is the day of salvation.” So says St. Paul. Your lifeline is right there. What are you waiting for?
That lifeline looks like Christ showing up in our world, to live among us, to die for us, and to rise again so that we might rise to newness of life in him. Christ shows up in the middle of our chaos of our sin, in the middle of our spinning out of control, and he says the our storm within, “Peace! Be still.”
What does grabbing that lifeline look like? It looks like confession. “Hello. My name is Mark. God knows that I am a sinner.” It looks like acknowledging we have fallen short. It looks like asking God for help. It looks like turning to God–that’s what “repentance” literally means, turning–to look at the loving gaze of Christ, full of love and mercy and grace and forgiveness. For you.
In a few moments we will put ashes on our foreheads. Ashes are the traditional sign of repentance and grief. They are a reminder that we are mortals and we will die: “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.” More than that, they are a reminder that though we are mortals, sinners; and though we are spinning out of control, we are holding on to the One who is immortal, who calms our storm and pulls us up, who loves us and forgives us, our Lifeline.
We learn what all of those folks in support groups know; we can’t do this on our own. We need Christ, who has given us himself for our sin, that we might become the righteousness of God, clothed in Christ’s own righteousness given for us. We need that Lifeline. We need him. And we need his Church, this Body of Christ. So we turn. We confess. We remember that we are mortals and we need God. We remember we cannot do this on our own.
And we remember that we don’t have to do this on our own. We don’t have to pretend we have it all together. We don’t have to pretend we’re perfect. We don’t have to pretend that we aren’t spinning out of control and that we are not beset by the weightiness of our sin. We don’t have to pretend. For Christ knows. And Christ has done all that needs to be done, for us. And he is reaching out to us today: sinners, whom he loves more than anything else.
Storied Grace 