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February 2l, l999
"Our Journey Begins - Lent
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Richard Lisher, a professor of preaching at Duke
Divinity School, relates that his father met his mother
about 50 years ago with one of the great pick-up lines of
that era. Having seen his future wife at a young
people’s Sunday night church gathering, he
approached her afterward and inquired with the savoir
faire of a Lutheran Cary Grant : "Say, do you go to the
movies during Lent?"
Lisher’s father was grateful that even back then
the Church’s reach at Lent did not prevent an
independent-minded young woman responding: "I think I can
manage a movie even during Lent."
The story points to a time when the Church and the
season of Lent, whose beginning we observe today, set
certain conditions on its members’ daily existence.
Back then Christians could be expected during Lent to
regard it as an especially holy season for extra prayer,
extra self-discipline and extra churchgoing. You were
expected to give up movies, or desserts, or skip a meal
and fast, because these little disciplines helped you
remember, if not always very successfully, Jesus’
sacrificial life and death. Back then Lent was the
season when Christians shaped up. Doesn’t this all
sounds quaint to us!
We cannot return to a culture and time which are no
longer ours, but we still need Lent. We need to seek to
let the sacrifice of Christ shape our daily living. We
need the sense of Lenten holiness. We need the tension of
the incongruity between the Church calendar with
its’ Lent and the secular calendar with its’
sense that life just goes on as usual.
******
It is usual to enter Lent with a reading from one of
the Gospels, about the temptation of Christ. We do so
from Matthew today:
MAUREEN YUEN , who served as lector, read
Matthew 4:1-11
*****
In the film, THE TRUMAN STORY, Christoff, the director
of the TV program which has programmed young Truman since
his birth into the number one global TV character is
asked by an interviewer how he could get away with using
Truman in a real life series running 25 years without
Truman suspecting anything? Christoff replied: "We accept
the world with which we’re presented."
We need Lent for it adds some dimensions and shadows
to the world with which we’re presented. Two great
themes of Lent are obedience and the wilderness, and
these images are not normally pressed upon us by our
normal world. Our normal world assures us that obedience
is old fashioned and in opposition to our
self-fulfilment. Our normal world says we have done away
with the wilderness; we have slapped asphalt over the
wildness.
At first hearing about Jesus’ temptation, they
seem on a level far removed from my ordinary temptation.
Twice the devil says to Jesus: IF YOU ARE THE SON OF MAN.
These are temptations of a supernatural kind: Who among
us has known the kind of hunger of Jesus after 40 days of
fasting, and thus who knows the intensity of the
temptation to receive all material things for our
survival. If one has suffered, then the devil’s
temptation to spare Jesus from suffering, could resonate
with us, but most of the time most of us coast along with
good health. And who among us expects to be offered
dominion over all things.
Are our temptations not of a more ordinary variety:
the temptation to cheat on our duties, our relationships
and loves. And yet the struggle for power is fully human
and does not await protagonists on the level of Satan and
the Christ to inform us of its power. And all
temptation, if succumbed to, ends up being cheating on
God. And basically that was what Satan was tempting
Jesus to do: to cheat on God.
When he was tempted, Jesus’ exclusive defense was
reliance upon the Word of God and obedience to God. Our
Lenten journey with Jesus reopens the way of obedience
to us. As Jesus was obedient to God, we too can through
renewed obedience become engaged in a lively dependency
upon God.
We need Lent because we need to learn to be more
obedient to God. Yes, obedience is a word out of favor
with modern sentiment. And the seeming opposite of
obedience, rebellion, is needed and can be creative.
Some disobedience is necessary for growth. Children must
separate from total obedience to their parents to become
their own persons. But modern attitudes have become
disconnected with reality. Not any individual and
certainly no community can long survive on the romantic
myth of independence, rebellion and rejection.
Jesus is a helpful antidote to the poison of
separatism and rebellion. He established his completeness
as a person not by rejecting his Father in Heaven but in
obeying him. Jesus said I must live from the Word of
God; I will not tempt my God; I will worship only God and
serve him. Lent raises the sticky question which our own
upbringing would have us even deny as existing: whom do
we obey?
And the wilderness? Jesus temptation takes place in
the wilderness which is meant to be cast as a second
Eden, except a fallen Eden in which real evil rages and
tempts humanity to fall again. The literal geographic
setting for Jesus’ temptation was the inhospitable,
barren hills of Judah east of Jerusalem. They crawled
with lions and hyenas and scorpions in Jesus’ time.
That wilderness was no romantic aslyum but a place of
ultimate spiritual struggle.
Modern people believed they have forever banished that
wilderness; we confuse wildness with wilderness. True, we
are on our way to asphalting over much of the wild areas
of the earth. My first parish 37 years ago was in a still
pristine valley then beyond the range of Los Angeles
sprawl. It was a kind of Edenic place with few roads,
thousands of acres of citrus and avocados, few people,
clear skies. In sum, a perfect advertisement of the kind
which l00 years ago began to attract the immigrant hordes
to Southern California.
It’s all gone now: super highways and asphalt
have done in that lovely Santa Susana Valley of my first
ministry. Our asphalt job deceives us, however, with the
miscalculation that by asphalting over paradise and the
wildness we have eliminated the Wilderness from our
experience.
The Wilderness is still with us. The power of Evil
still crawls, usually subtly and aided and abetted by all
the forms of modern rationalism and self-excuse, though
now and then evil breaks forth to show its claws and
teeth. And we are not far removed from danger.
We need Lent because we need Christ more with us. We
need to feel the tension between God’s way and our
own. We need to become Lenten pilgrims so as to be
strengthened as ordinary warriors against the dark powers
and principalities. To assume the ashes of repentance
and the purple cloth of penitence are to begin to arm
ourselves with the strength of Christ to resist the
blandishments presented to us. We need Lent in order to
remember the person who began the resistance to evil and
empowers us to resist temptation.
Our Gospel readings, and the other scriptures of these
six Sundays of Lent, help us remember Jesus through a
series of dialogues: one with the devil as Maureen read
today, another with a perplexed seeker named Nicodemus;
a talk between Jesus and a blind man seeking the true
identity of Christ; and a woman longing for meaning and
fulfilment. The Sundays just before Easter, there shall
be a couple of conversations about life and death which
take place in Jewish cemeteries.
The church’s Lenten journey does not follow our
more familiar secular journeys: from a lower paying job
to a higher paying one; from misery to happiness; from
insecurity to self-confidence. The journey of Lent is in
tension with these worldly goals and that is why it is
necessary. We need Lent.
Lent informs us with the threatening news that we are
not out of the wilderness. We are not nearly as safe as
we think we are. The beasts are barely at bay as our
casual and total reliance, even at this late date in our
history, upon horrendous military weaponry to solve
problems like Kosovo and the Serbs, Iraq and other Arabs,
the Kurds and their neighbors show.
It is quaint, this idea that followers of God, should
want to reject some small enjoyments and indulgences and
pleasures, and that in the great scheme of the struggle
between evil and God, it would make any difference. But
the symbolism of Lent is potent if we are endorsing the
way Jjesus took: He chose to say no to evil and the ways
of the world which evil encourages. Jesus renounced the
way presented and pushed upon him by the world and chose
total obedience to God. Among other benefits, he thereby
made possible our renouncement of evil at our baptism in
Christ.
Lent comes each year to help us to get a bit more back
on an authentic spiritual path. It is not easy because
Lent appropriately carries a cost to any true pilgrim.
Flannery O’Connor has a story about a little girl
who loves to visit the convent and the sisters there. But
every time the senior nun gives her a goodbye hug, the
crucifix on the Sister’s belt gets mashed into the
child’s face. The mother nun’s gesture of love
always leaves a mark.
I hope this Lent will leave a mark upon you; welcome
the mark of your sacrifice as evidence you are besting
temptation and renewing your obedience to God.
The Lenten journey we begin is one we can not and
should not go alone; we need others to journey with us.
We need to be the Church together this Lent. Lent is the
way of the people of God and it is a journey whose every
step is held up with God’s grace. And it is a
journey whose end we see glorious in the One who has
already completed the course for us.
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