February 21, 2010

Clay Nelson

Lent 1     Luke 4:1-13

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Some Sundays are more fun to preach on than others. The first Sunday in Lent isn’t on my list. Part of the problem is that it focuses on the same story every year, which while told from different perspectives, still has Jesus being driven by the Spirit into the wilderness for 40 days after his baptism. Which of course is why the church made Lent 40 days long. Luke and Matthew expand the episode by describing Satan’s temptations of Jesus that foreshadow his last temptation, not going to Jerusalem. The church uses the temptations to justify asking us to give up something “meaningful,” you know, like lollies or ice cream for the duration, as if by doing so we will be plunged into the wilderness.

It isn’t that the wilderness and temptation aren’t rich themes to explore but in their frequent reoccurrence within a given year and annually, saying something that hasn’t been said countless times before is nearly impossible. The temptation is to just get the sermon done. Say the predictable things the church has always said about how being miserable, sinful beings we need to be purified. We do it by paying the price for our fallen state with fasting and confession. The implied message being: Easter won’t be any fun unless we suffer first. Sure the congregation will tune out as soon as they realize they have heard this sermon before, but I will have done my priestly duty and extolled the importance of Lent to being good Christians.

I’m sorry I just can’t do it any more. Lent has lost its luster. I only need to point to an interview of Vice President Biden on Ash Wednesday this week. The interviewer, who later confessed to being Catholic, asked if the black smudge on his forehead was a bruise. 

Considering such evidence, perhaps it is time for a renewal of Lent.

It is only fitting. Lent began as a grassroots renewal movement. In spite of its use of the number 40 which reminds us not only of Jesus’ time in the wilderness, but Israel’s 40 years in the wilderness, and the 40 days Moses spent on Sinai receiving the Law and the 40 days Elijah spent on the same mountain before hearing the “still small voice of God,” Lent is not biblical.

Sometime early on in the life of the church, probably after it became clear that the world was not going to end in their life time, as Jesus foretold, the early adrenalin rush of being part of the young movement began to subside. Christians stopped expecting so much from God or themselves. It was easier to nail a cross to the wall and remember the good old days of being radical advocates for a topsy-turvy world where love was more important than power and the meek would inherit the earth. Risking your life to worship in a subversive community lost some of its allure. Better to blend in than draw attention to yourself by getting arrested for standing up for the poor. Eventually it became OK to be comfortable and Christian. 

It was in this context that the earliest forms of Lent began to emerge. It may of come about out of a frustration that being a Christian had become “safe” and “respectable." The earliest practice was to pray and fast for 40 hours from Good Friday to Easter. I suspect it began as the individual spiritual discipline of a few and then caught on. It was extended to 40 days perhaps out of pious over-exuberance or because of a misplaced comma in a translation of Eusebius’s History of the Church that unintentionally changed the length of fasting from 40 hours to 40 days. But for whatever reason, it was an established part of the church’s life by the Council of Nicea in 325. It was no longer an individual response for radical renewal but an institutional requirement for conformity. While intentions might’ve been good, making it an externally imposed requirement led us to a lusterless Lent.

As soon as it became a quasi-legal requirement imposed on the faithful by religious authority it became something to be resisted through negotiation. “Bishop, define fasting please?” Is it everyday, or do we get Sundays off? Do we fast all day or can we have a ham sandwich after 3:00pm? If not ham, how about fish and chips? Well, if after 3:00 is OK, it would be a lot more convenient to end the fast at noon in time for lunch. And so it went until the only required fast days were Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. From one point of view our rebellious desire for comfort became more important than our faith. From another point of view living faithfully isn’t the same as following rules. 

The focus on loopholes in Lenten fasting became a distraction from what the season might have been, an opportunity for transformation. Since just going through the motions of Lent won’t transform any of us, perhaps it is time for us to give up for Lent what Lent has become.

Instead of giving up one of our vices or dessert we should get real about seeking transformation. One interpretation of Luke’s story of the temptations of Jesus in the wilderness may point the way.

The wilderness Jesus was driven into by the Spirit is the bleakest place I’ve ever seen. There certainly isn’t one like it in New Zealand. It is a barren land gouged with canyons between steep cliffs pockmarked with caves. It makes Death Valley look like an oasis. If you have seen it the impression you are left with is that nothing grows there but rocks.

The story says Jesus fasted there, a spiritual practice of many religious traditions. After several days of water only, the body chemistry changes, often resulting in altered states of consciousness, including visions. To do this in solitude puts this practice in a category called by anthropologists and historians of religion a “vision quest.”

Vision quests are often rites of passage, similar to initiations. In some traditions it is a preparatory rite for a young shaman, or healer.

While in this state Jesus is reported to have had three visions where he and the Devil are the two main characters. The Devil in his vision is the personification of those cacophonous inner voices that seek to rationalize avoiding the harder path. Choose comfort over self-denial they seductively suggest. Choose power over love. Choose safety over risk and blaming over personal accountability and everything will be OK. Through these visions Jesus becomes clear about his relationship with God and what his mission is and is not. While clearly this was a demanding and difficult experience, the wilderness became a welcoming place for Jesus. Numerous times he is reported returning to the solitude of the wilderness during his ministry, perhaps to reclaim the direction the visions gave him in the face of uncertainties, doubts and temptations that beset him day to day.

While a similar quest is at the very least physically beyond most of us, the goal of such a quest is what I would encourage us to seek in Lent. However, for the more hearty of us there are organizations that for a price will help you experience your own vision quest. 

But really it would be silly to pay for a wilderness experience. Live long enough and they come freely and unexpectedly into our lives. They come in many shapes and sizes. It can look like a doctor’s waiting room; the cubicle of a dead-end job; the sheets on the bed of a cheap boarding house after experiencing foreclosure; the long bus ride home after being told your job has been shipped overseas; the wedding ring tossed into the harbour after your spouse walks out; the visit in the middle of the night from the police to report your child was in an accident. Sometimes it is a kind of desert in the middle of your own chest, in the dark of night, where you beg for a word from God and hear nothing but the wheezing of your own breath.

We would not wish such moments on anyone, let alone ourselves, but they do provide an opportunity for transformation. How we engage them will make a difference not only to us but those around us. But will it be for good or ill? Will we come out of it lost or with a greater sense of who we are? Whose voice will we listen to: our inner demons or the still small voice of the divine within?

I know it sounds a little crazy, but a Lent that could make a difference would be to willingly revisit the wilderness, if you are not already there: Not to suffer, not to be punished for past misdeeds, not for penance, not out of some perverse sense of unworthiness, but as a vision quest.

How you might ask? Simply take some time each day to look around for what we normally count on to save our life or give it meaning. Then imagine it gone. I know it is not the same as it really being gone, but perhaps revisiting the feelings we had in the past when they were will give them substance. Staying with those feelings we will enter Jesus’ reality of having no food, no earthly power, no special protection – alone except for a Bible-thumping devil spouting scripture in his ear and, of course, a whole bunch of rocks.

If by Easter we have come out of that place with a sense of wonder that being hungry didn’t kill us, then we are in a new place. If by Easter we understand that the only power and control worth having and using is the divine love instilled in us and that that is OK with us, then we are reclaiming who we are. If by Easter, we understand that testing God by asking for divine protection is a distraction that keeps us from hearing the still small voice of God – the one calling us to live out the divine ministry for which we were born – then Lent will have regained its luster.

Lent is the Spirit’s gift to each of us, not the institutional church. Welcome it as a means to expect great things again of God and ourselves. Make use of it to believe again that all things are possible no matter how grim the wilderness.