A sermon
preached at Croydon Minster on the First Sunday of Lent, the reading were
Genesis 2.15-17; 3.1-7; Romans 5.12-19; Matthew 4.1-11.
“One does not
live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God’
+
Lent has begun!
And we are taken in our gospel reading, for
this first Sunday of Lent, to the Judean Wilderness, where ‘the Spirit led
Jesus to be tempted by the devil’.
From the dust and ashes of Ash Wednesday,
the solemn marking of the sign of the cross in ash upon our heads, we are taken
into the dust, sand and grit of the Judean Wilderness.
In the Bible the wilderness is physically a
barren place, but spiritually a fertile place.
The prophet Isaiah says ‘the wilderness and
the dry land shall be glad; the desert shall rejoice and blossom like the
crocus’ (Isaiah 35.1):
Things can happen in the wilderness that
can’t happen elsewhere, or at least, the contrast is seen more clearly.
The twinkle and beauty of a star is far more
powerful in the darkness, than when a star shines in the daytime. We miss it!
So it is with the wilderness: where all is
stripped away, so that nothing can impede one’s immediate experience of the
deeper realities of life, exposed in all their starkness: what we truly depend
on is revealed to us.
*
For Jesus the forty days and forty nights in
the wilderness culminate in the three temptations placed in front of him.
Temptations placed in front of him when he
is at his lowest ebb: famished through fasting; windswept; sunburnt in the day;
frozen at night; utterly exhausted.
The wilderness bespeaks the extremes of
physical and spiritual experience. Indeed, the physical and spiritual are
inseparable.
There’s no hiding place in the wilderness. And
as we heard about Adam and Eve, the human propensity is to cover up, hide,
‘dissemble and cloak’, as the Book of Common Prayer puts it.
Jesus did not hide from the devil. He faced
the devil and endured the temptations of being fed when famished, the
temptation of being given security and safety in a hostile environment, the
temptation of the allure of power: all which would be received if he would only
turn away from God.
He was tempted as we are. But the depth of
his relationship was God was such that he did not succumb.
A definition of sin is the fracturing of our
relationship with God: in that Christ did not sin.
We will be tempted; temptation never goes
away.
What Lent is about is schooling us in being able
to name and to face down what fractures our relationship with God and begin to
find ways to repair it.
In the temptations in the wilderness Christ
reveals his fidelity to God and opens to us the possibility of living life
without masks, life without being trapped in the power games and manipulations
of so many human relationships.
*
I have been to the Judean Wilderness, albeit,
like many pilgrims in the Holy Land, I did as a passenger on an air-conditioned
coach. For the modern-day pilgrim to the Holy Land the physicality of the
wilderness is a very different experience from the experience of the People of
Israel and indeed for Jesus.
One evening, on my most recent pilgrimage
there, we were travelling from Jericho to Jerusalem. The lights of the Holy
City were far away, but visible, and the coach pulled over at the side of the
road so that we could see a Greek Orthodox Monastery that is built into a rock
face above a dried-up wadi, a little
stream. Just like the first monastics, known to us as the Desert Fathers,
people like St Anthony of Egypt, those monks live out the wilderness experience
of prayer and fasting.
But we needed to be in Jerusalem for Mass at
a church there, and we were running late.
We stepped down from the coach and my mind
was taken to the Temptations in the Wilderness and also to the book of Exodus which
describes the movement of the People of Israel through the Wilderness of Sinai after
their liberation from Egypt.
Their experience in the wilderness is a
microcosm of our human condition with its ups and downs; our experience of
closeness to God at times and distance at others.
The Israelites wandered in that wilderness
for forty years. A migrant people: they marvelled at what God had done for
them; and wrestled with what they were doing stuck wandering in the middle of
nowhere. They drank from miraculous streams of water flowing in the desert; yet
they grumbled about the lack of food, saying, ‘shall God prepare a table in the
wilderness?’ (Psalm 78.20).
Speaking with our local guide we decided
that rather than hurry to Jerusalem and perhaps be late to the service, we
would celebrate the Eucharist there, by the roadside, in the wilderness.
It is perhaps one of the most beautiful
masses at which I have ever presided. I had with me all we needed: bread, wine,
the Bible. And so we found two large stones which we placed on top of each
other which formed an altar about a foot high.
And there we celebrated the Eucharist. To
answer the Israelites question: yes, God can prepare a table in the wilderness!
I read from Psalm 78 which narrates the
people of Israel’s experience in the wilderness:
‘So
God commanded the clouds above and opened the doors of heaven.
He
rained down manna also upon them for to eat and gave them food from heaven.
So
man did eat angels’ food for he sent them meat enough’. (Psalm 78.25)
And the gospel we read was the one we have
read today. Hearing that gospel standing in the very wilderness where Jesus
fasted forty days and forty nights sent a tingle down the spine. But it was
more than that. Where we saw stones on the ground, we heard the words, ‘command
these stones to become loaves of bread’.
There in the wilderness we ate the bread of
angels in the Eucharist, and the reminder that we live ‘by every word that comes
from the mouth of God’.
Here. Now. We come to eat the bread of
angels. Into barren places God’s presence blossoms and we learn to be his
people, once again.
