Lent 1, Year C

February 21, 2010

Grace Episcopal Church

I sometimes wonder what visitors or newcomers think when they come to our services on a day like today. I mean, there was the Great Litany which I love. But its language is archaic and the chant itself sounds more like something out of the Middle Ages than the twenty-first century. Then there are the lessons we heard today, which themselves come from a far distant past and don’t seem to speak to us. As I read the gospel for today, images from Hollywood movies came to mind—especially “Devil’s Advocate, that Al Pacino movie in which he plays a devil figure and takes Keanu Reeves to the top of his tower and tempts him with wealth and power. How do these stories, how does our liturgy connect with the lives we lead here in the twenty-first century?

It takes a curious sort of person who would look forward to the self-examination and self-discipline that the season of Lent encourages. Most of us want our religious lives to focus on celebration and joy, not the repentance, the gloom and doom, of Lent.

In fact, that is only part of what Lent is about, and perhaps not the most important part. The “Invitation to a Holy Lent” that is read during Ash Wednesday services, refers not only to repentance and confession of sin, but also to the fact that Lent began as a period of preparation before baptism. So it was a time of instruction in the Christian faith. But whether or not we celebrate baptisms on Easter, Lent should serve as a season in which we deepen our understanding of our faith.

But that’s a hard thing, because the small corner of our lives which is dedicated to our relationship with God has to compete with everything else that demands our attention—our families, work or school, our leisure time. We may find it difficult even to get to church many Sundays—the roads might be bad, it might be too cold, or we might not be able to find a parking space when the square is blocked off for something like Winter Festival. For many of us, perhaps for most of us, no matter how much we want to nurture and deepen our relationship with God, there is simply to much to do from day to day, too many other demands on us. In the end, it may be that all we have time for is an hour or an hour and a half on Sunday morning.

The rigors of a Lenten discipline that deepens our understanding of our dependence on God, that deepens our faith, and that makes us more deeply aware of our of our relationship with Christ, that sort of discipline seems infinitely remote from the daily existence we lead, the routines of work, family, and whatever else that occupies our time and energy.

So we come to church this first Sunday of Lent, and hear the alien language of the Great Litany, and encounter the penitential tones of the litany and of our liturgy today. And then we hear the words of scripture; the story of God and the people of God two thousand years ago, and we wonder how our stories, the stories that brought us here relate to that story.

For there is an enormous chasm between our lives and our world, and the world of the texts we’ve heard.  The texts we heard had their origins in very different worlds from each other too.

With the gospel, we are actually picking up the narrative we left off back in January when we heard the story of Jesus’ baptism. Today’s gospel recounts the very next episode in Jesus’ life. It may be a familiar story, but like so many familiar stories from the gospels, we often overlook those details that are most important for helping us make sense of them. In this case, the story begins with the observation that “Jesus, full of the holy spirit … was led by the Spirit into the wilderness.” Luke is reshaping Mark’s version of the vent significantly, for Mark says that the Spirit “drove” Jesus into the wilderness. For Mark, at least on this occasion, the spirit seems to be a less than benign force, while Luke emphasizes its comforting presence for Jesus.

The temptations, too, are significantly in the two gospels. Mark says only that Jesus was tempted in the desert. Luke and Matthew agree that there were three temptations although they change the order slightly. They are temptations about who Jesus is, about his relationship to God, and about the nature of his ministry: Satan tests Jesus, perhaps even taunts, by asking him to make bread from the stones. Satan tests Jesus, by offering him earthly power. And finally, Satan urges Jesus to test God, by urging him to throw himself down from the pinnacle of the temple, so that the angels might save him.

Each time, Jesus responds to Satan by quoting scripture; more precisely by quoting the book of Deuteronomy. In Luke’s sequence, in the last temptation, Satan quotes scripture of his own to Jesus. In a way, theirs is a battle over scripture, but in a sense, too, Jesus is battling with other Jewish interpreters over the meaning of scripture. It is a battle over the story of scripture, of what it means and to whom it belongs. It is a battle he would continue to wage throughout his public ministry.

The story of the Israelites in the wilderness is a story of a people testing God, complaining when there was no food or water, when the way looked long and arduous. The Jews of Jesus’ day were looking for a political Messiah who would deliver them from their Roman occupation much as the Maccabees had freed them nearly two centuries earlier.

But Jesus rejected that way and as he did, he interpreted scripture in a way that was new and challenging to the religious elites of his day. He was telling a new story. The temptations he faced are a clear rejection of the path of political and military power, and the full implications of the path Jesus chose would only come clear on his last journey to Jerusalem.

Paul, for that matter, is battling in a somewhat similar way in the letter to the Romans as he tries to find a way for including Jew and Gentile in this new community that is being birthed. But Paul gives us reassurance, again quoting from Deuteronomy, that scripture is not beyond our ability to understand or grasp—indeed, scripture lies within us: “The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart.” The passage from Deuteronomy that Paul quotes makes clear that the “word” refers to the commandments, the law. But for Paul, the story of scripture was not an exclusive one, it extended to Gentile as well as to Jew, to all of us.

The Invitation to a Holy Lent that is read on Ash Wednesday also encourages us to “read and meditate upon God’s holy Word.” It is an invitation to enter into and make scripture’s story our own, and to interpret our stories in light of scripture. I suppose that if I could encourage you to do anything this Lent, it would be that, to take the time, even if it’s only a few minutes, to read the weekly lessons, but to do it early in the week before they are read on Sunday. That’s what I try to do each week. Ideally, on Sunday afternoon, after I’ve recovered from Sunday morning services, I will read through the next Sunday’s lessons and allow them to float around in the back of my mind for a few days.

To read and meditate upon scripture is to enter into and reflect on the story of God and the people of God, to let that story begin to shape our own stories. We see in today’s reading from Deuteronomy what seems to have been some sort of ritual enactment. As part of that ritual of giving thanks for having received the promised land, the story of God’s mighty acts on behalf of God’s people was recited. It is a story that defines the people of Israel in a particular way, “My father was a wandering Aramean” and goes on to recite all that God did on their behalf.

We tell such stories repeatedly, our liturgy is itself such a story—We give thanks to you to God, for the goodness and love you have shown to us in creation, in the calling of Israel. … in the word made Flesh. Stories like this tell us who we are, where we belong, and for what purpose we live.

Yes, it may seem sometimes as if all of that—the story of the liturgy, the story of scripture—seem infinitely remote from the stories we live out each day but Lent invites us to reflect anew on those deeper connections and as we do, to deepen our connection to God.