A Sermon for the first Sunday in Lent
My sermon for the first Sunday in Lent here in Kew. The bit of me that read a lot of Adrian Mole as a teen wants to title this sermon The Wilderness Years, but I resist (ish). After a bundle of time putting together our Lent Study for this year, this one mostly seemed to write itself.
The readings were Deuteronomy 26:1-1; Romans 10:8b-13; Luke 4:1-13.
I
Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.
This is perhaps one of the most famous lines written by St Augustine in his Confessions, which are, in effect, his memoir of his experience of searching for the meaning of life and, finally, finding it in God. For Augustine this was a journey towards God through what we might call a kind of wilderness, in which none of the ways in which he sought to find satisfaction and meaning—sex, drugs and rock and roll (if rock and roll were all the ancient philosophies one could want)—could offer them in a lasting way.
Wilderness, as a place or a period of wandering and seeking, is a theme in the Bible, particularly the Old Testament: Jacob wanders seeking safety; the Israelites wander seeking a home—in the exodus and after the exile; the prophets are often to be seen in various hostile locations. And then, as we read in today’s gospel, Jesus is led into the wilderness before he begins his ministry in its fullness.
Jesus’ wilderness is a desert place. But it is also a place of hunger, of loneliness, of fear. A place where people lose sight of who they are and how they are going to survive intact. It is where people struggle to exist—a struggle that manifests itself in visions, dreams, and in encounters with the spiritual world. But it is also a place where people can meet with God.
And wilderness, I think, is where we find ourselves today: in Britain and in what we’ve come to think of as ‘the west’—if not throughout the rest of the wider world. Perhaps this has been especially visible in the past couple of weeks, as the vulnerability of international order we’ve become accustomed to has become apparent. Fear, loneliness, hunger—for food and for other things that give us sustenance and meaning—are present with us as individuals and communities. It’s not that we are restless, in the sense of being fidgety—it is that it feels as if there is no safe place to rest, nowhere that is stable enough to trust.
Economic, environmental and political shocks, social and cultural shifts and the coronavirus pandemic have rocked us over the past two decades. Our sense of who we are has become fragile—our sense of what it means to be human, to belong to particular groups or communities, and our sense of what it means to live in the world and to feel at home in it, safe and recognised and valued. And that is before we get to any personal crises that we might be experiencing and that we might describe in the language of wilderness—moments which all of us will experience at some point in our lives.
Our reaction, perhaps naturally, is to seek security and control, and a strong sense of who we are and what we’re about. We see this in our political reality right now, as nations and leaders seek resources, power, strong borders—and to define what it means to belong, and who is allowed to hold that identity.
“If we can build our own little world and ward off all threats, then we can rest” we think.
We might at this point name names of leaders and influential figures. It can be useful to do so, sometimes—and it sure does feel good. However, it can also tempt us to think that we do not feel these things, that this wilderness does not affect us and shape our lives, that we are not a part of this bigger picture. But Lent is a season for being honest about the fact that it does.
II.
Our reaction is perhaps natural, I said. It is comprehensible—even if the consequences of it often seem counterproductive.
Theologically, you see, our world can be said to be a wilderness. Since the fall, its fundamental condition is one of brokenness, disorientation, existential angst. The Genesis narrative describes this in the story of humanity’s expulsion from the Garden where Adam and Eve walked with God into a world in which they had work and struggle for survival. It is a world in which death is a reality, and encounters with God are more occasional—where trust and faith are hard. Restlessness, rather than resting in God, is the norm.
Adam and Eve are sent out of Eden to work the ground—ha Adamah in the Hebrew—from which they were taken and to which they are now told they will return. Of dust we are made and to dust we shall return, as we say on Ash Wednesday.
And yet… dust is not all we are. It is not all we are made of, not all we are made for, and the things of the ground are not all that sustains us. In our gospel reading today, Jesus says, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’ Actually, he says anthropos–humanity, and this line is a quotaton from a passage of Deuteronomy. And the word in Deuteronomy’s Hebrew is adam: the one made ha-adamah, of the ground, taking us back to this Genesis narrative. The children of earth shall not live by bread alone is how the priest and Hebrew scholar Wil Gafney translates it.
Since the fall, the world has become a wilderness for humanity—but it was not intended to be so. The wilderness was made to be a garden, and the ground of our being is not just the ground, the dusty earth that has become wilderness, but the ground that was made by God. Humanity was made of dust that God breathed life into, to live in the garden—not the in wilderness.
And God does not intend to leave us in the wilderness. Even as wilderness is a theme in the Bible, so is liberation—rescue, healing, restoration. We see this in the stories of the Exodus, the return from exile, the promise of the Messiah—and in the incarnation of Christ, Jesus’s life death and resurrection, the gift of the Spirit and the promise of Christ’s return. In our Deuteronomy reading today we find the promise of a land that is abundant: flowing with milk and honey. It is perhaps less a literal piece of land than a picture of a new Eden. In the New Testament reading, Paul writes to the Romans of the promise of salvation. In both we see people encouraged to make a claim on God: you said we could depend upon you, and you would give us life.
In our gospel we see Jesus confronting the wilderness and what it throws at us: hunger, isolation, powerlessness—the possibility of death. This is manifest in the temptations, in which the devil says, you don’t have to be this vulnerable. You don’t have to experience these things.
Jesus is offered bread.
He is offered power over the world—and particularly in Luke the dangers of the human world.
And he is offered the power of life over death.
And he says—no. He refuses to test God, and he refuses to turn away from God and from his trust that only God is the answer to the fears, the hungers, the restless insecurity of the wilderness and the world. The source of Jesus’ sustenance and strength in the wilderness is the Spirit who leads him out there, and the Spirit in whose power he returns to Galilee (if you sneak ahead to v.14!). It is the same Spirit who accompanies us in the world—and who is with us in the wildernesses in which we find ourselves.
III.
So yes, Lent is a time in which we recognise that we live in the wilderness and that as dust-worn humans we are tempted to reach for the things that Satan offers Jesus, to sate our hunger, our desire, our fear—the things that we are tempted to believe will let us rest safely and securely.
But Lent is also a time in which we remember that we are not just dust-worn humans—we are also Spirit-animated humans. The Spirit accompanies us in the wilderness, as she did Jesus. She helps us to resists the temptations that we are offered and to encounter God upon whom we can depend—the source of all life and the one who makes it possible to rest in this restless world.
It is in this Spirit that we may choose to set aside certain things in this season, or to take up certain other things—creating time and space in our lives and in the wilderness to draw closer to God again. Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God. May this season of Lent be, for each of us, a time in which we find that rest again—even in the wilderness.