10 February 2008

Matthew 4:1-11

I‘m going to begin this sermon by quoting two somewhat longish paragraphs from a website I visit frequently when preparing sermons. They’re from the United Church of Christ website one page of which gives some starting points or ideas for sermons based on the lectionary. I felt they were so appropriate for today that I would just quote them directly.


In "Lenten Discipline," her sermon on Luke's version of the temptation of Jesus in the desert, Barbara Brown Taylor gives a wonderful description of how Lent came to be (after all, it's not in the Bible). Many years after Jesus had not returned as quickly as expected, church folks "decided there was no contradiction between being comfortable and being Christian, and before long it was hard to pick them out from among the population at large. They no longer distinguished themselves by their bold love for one another. They did not get arrested for championing the poor. They blended in. They avoided extremes. They decided to be nice instead of holy and God moaned out loud" (Home by Another Way).

The church dug deep into its faith story, recalling the time (always with the number forty involved) that Israel, Elijah, and Jesus each spent in the desert, wandering and suffering, longing and learning: hungry. "So the church announced a season of Lent…an invitation to a springtime of the soul," Taylor writes, "Forty days to cleanse the system and open the eyes to what remains when all comfort is gone…to remember what it is like to live by the grace of God alone and not by what we can supply ourselves." Then as now, folks had their "pacifiers," as Taylor calls them, all the things and ways that we keep ourselves from feeling what it means to be human, even if that means being in pain or being afraid. Our pacifiers can convince us that we don't really need God. In fact, Taylor believes that just about all of us struggle with an addiction, "anything we use to fill the empty place inside of us that belongs to God alone. That hollowness we sometimes feel is not a sign of something gone wrong. It is the holy of holies inside of us, the uncluttered room of the Lord our God. Nothing on earth can fill it, but that does not stop us from trying" (Home by Another Way). (http://www.ucc.org/worship/samuel/february-10-2008-first.html)


So here we are, friends. At the beginning of another Lent; the start of another wilderness experience in the spiritual seasons of our lives. Of course Lent began last Wednesday and some of us began our observances at the Ash Wednesday service at which we were marked with ashes and reminded that we have come from dust and to dust we shall return. We face our very mortality this time of year. We face the desert. We face the dry empty feeling inside us that, as Barbara Brown Taylor observed, only God can fill.

Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, we’re told in today’s gospel. Sometimes we hear that he was driven there by the Spirit. What comes directly before this event is his baptism in the Jordan. Combined, it’s a narrative of contrasts: the wetness of the river with the arid dryness of the wilderness to which he was led; the crowds who witnessed his baptism versus the solitude in which he found himself there; the voice from heaven declaring him to be God’s son against the deafening quiet of the desert.

For forty days, we’re told, he was there in the wilderness; alone and fasting. Certainly by the end of that time he would be famished, as our translation puts it; famished not only for food but for companionship; for relief from the unending landscape of the barren land in which he secluded himself. And that’s, of course, when temptation enters in. That’s when we find Satan coming to him. The devil seeks out Jesus and tempts him three times. Jesus resists these pulls, even in the midst of his emptiness and hunger.

So here we are at the start of our 40 days of Lent this year, 2008. What wilderness experience do we expect to be driven into? It’s easy to ignore it, what with the busy lives we each lead: I’ll get to the wilderness later, you might think. I’ll face the deprivation of being mortal later.

But we lose out if we take that attitude. We miss something valuable. Because, as Barbara Brown Taylor has pointed out, there is an emptiness within each of us that is there just for God. We seek to fill it, and thus avoid the wilderness, with worldly things: money, tv, the internet…things. But it is God-shaped and only God will fill it. It’s a God-shaped emptiness that each of us carries around. And Lent is a time to discover that emptiness; to go to that emptiness, that wilderness which is within each of us sitting here.

Avoiding the wilderness won’t hurt you. You’ll be comfortable, after all. You won’t know the emptiness. But you’ll be foiled if you try to fill it with anything but God. The world will seduce you into thinking that it can fill it. Our culture is good at finding things that look like they will fill that emptiness. But it’s all chimera; fantasies that may work for a while and then will disappear and eventually leave us with that empty feeling again.

We as a congregation observe Lent together, which is good. For Chalice is entering its own period of Lent. Our congregation finds itself in the wilderness experience right now. We find ourselves, much like our spiritual ancestors the Hebrew people, in the desert, wandering, unsure of home, not certain to where we’re headed.

What is the emptiness within us corporately that we are trying to fill? With what are we being enticed? How are we being seduced? Who or what is extending a long slender arm and slowly crooking its finger at us, luring us to try to fill our empty place?


The desert is an interesting place. Its beauty is often hard to see; the dangers are hidden. But we are called there, both individually and corporately. We are called there to find those empty places; to seek out the emptiness within us. We are called there to be away from the inducements of our world, of our culture. We seek out God there in the deprivations we find all around us.

Empty yourself. Here at the start of Lent, empty yourself and find the place for God at the very center of your being. Turn away from the inducements that are lures. It’s not easy; no one ever said it was. Live your life, at least over the next six weeks, as though you were trying to fill that God-shaped emptiness within you with only God.

May God bless us all on this Lenten journey.