February 17th, 2013
St. George’s Episcopal Church, Nashville, TN
Today we enter Lent, the most solemn and penitential season of the church. Lent first developed within the early church as a time of intense preparation for the celebration of the resurrection at Easter. The church sought to imitate Christ in his 40 days in the wilderness, by focusing on “dying to self” through self-examination and penitential acts, as preparation to then enter the “promised land” of new life into which Jesus ushers them through his resurrection, which is celebrated at the end of those 40 days with Easter. This focus on sin and dying to self, while intended to help us find greater freedom and joy in Christ, often seems to take on a spirit of gloominess and guilt.
The Reverend Jay Sidebotham, rector of Church of the Holy Spirit in Lake Forest, Illinois and popular church cartoonist, captures this common sentiment about Lent when he considers how the greeting card industry might go about creating a new line of greeting cards for the season of Lent. He offers a few suggestions of what such cards might say to get you into the spirit of the season: “Vino, sugar, coffee cup, now’s the time to give it up!” or “Think Lent is a downer? It’s really an acronym: Let’s End Negative Thinking!” or “If you think your life’s a bust, just remember you are dust.” The man on the cover of the third card looks gloomily up at the smudge of ashes on his forehead and says, “Thanks a lot.” Father Jay admits at the top of this cartoon that perhaps the time for this idea has not yet come. But Lent can come across as a dreary time of remembering just how bad we are to the point of wallowing in it. As we stand here, perched on the edge of this season, it is a good time to ask, What is Lent about? If it’s not supposed to simply be a long drag through the mud or a slog through the catalog of our sins, how does this season edify?
To begin answering those questions, we look at Jesus in our gospel reading for today, out in a desolate wilderness. Just prior to this, Jesus has gone out to John at the River Jordan and been baptized by him; and when he came up from the water, there was the voice from heaven saying about him, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” Before launching into his full-blown ministry, Jesus retreats into the wilderness for a time of fasting, of prayer. He is alone, hungry, and thirsty. On top of all of that discomfort, he is being bothered by the devil, who sees this as the perfect time to test Jesus and throw him off track. Satan crafts three temptations that, if successful, would radically distort Jesus’ focus from his Father’s mission to his own worldly gain. Satan encourages Jesus to give into his desire for physical satisfaction, for world domination, and to attract attention and adoration from people. Satan never offers anything for free; however; each temptation comes at a cost. Like a good salesman, Satan doesn’t dwell on the price, but the trade-off is that Jesus must forfeit his trust in and his allegiance to his Father in heaven. At the root, each of these temptations seeks to undermine Jesus’ relationship with his Father. Out there in the wilderness, when times are tough, when all his external sources of comfort are gone, when the glorious pronouncement that he is God’s beloved son might be fading in his ears, Jesus must decide whose voice to listen to and believe, the voice of Satan, or the voice of his Father that he heard at the Jordan River.
It is clear from his responses to Satan that Jesus chooses to listen to the voice of his Father, for he responds each time with the words of Scripture: “Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God”; “Worship the Lord your God and serve him only;” “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” We see Jesus has received and accepted the affirmation of his Father, “This is my Son, my Beloved.” His sonship is so central to his sense of self that he is able to withstand the temptations of the Devil. He trusts that as God’s beloved Son, his Father will provide him with the food, the strength, and the protection that he needs, without resorting to the lures of the devil.
I suspect that the gloominess that can prevail during Lent is a symptom of forgetting the voice of God and letting that other voice speak into our hearts. When we are in the wilderness, we too, like Jesus, must decide which of those two voices we will believe. We might expect the voice of God and the voice of Satan to sound starkly different. But Satan is a sneaky little devil, who has figured out that twisting the truth just so is a pathetically easy way to confuse us and get us off track. Satan has a favorite tactic that pairs very nicely with temptation – the tactic of accusation, seeking to undermine our sense of identity and security in the Father’s love. Satan has found that temptation works best when he precedes it with a round of accusations, knowing that when we feel hopeless or useless, we are more likely to succumb to a temptation that seems to temporarily relieve the burden of our sin. If we are feeling insecure about ourselves, we are more likely to reach for food, or power, or fame in order to feel better about ourselves, to shore up our crumbling sense of identity and self-worth. Those accusations might sound like this: “You’re such a sinner that God couldn’t love you. There’s no hope for you. If people knew everything about you, they’d abandon you. You’ll never change.” People of God, when we feel crushed by guilt and believe that there is no recourse for our sin, that is not the voice of God. That is the voice of the accuser, who comes to kill and steal and destroy. He accuses us, trying to push us deeper into the slough of despondency and despair, where we believe that we are beyond the reach of God’s grace. He has figured out that if he can’t tempt us with visions of world domination or mass approval, he can lure us into one of the most subtle forms of idolatry, the idolatry of focusing obsessively on our sin, which leads us away from God’s mercy and reaps only despair.
We must never confuse that voice for the voice of God, or for the message of the gospel. In the midst of self-examination and repentance, we are called to remember the voice of our Father throughout Lent, which echoes what he said about Jesus – “You are sealed with the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever.” God’s voice tells us that we are his children, rooted in the Father’s love.
This does not mean that God brushes off our sin or ignores it. The conviction of God is like a sword that cuts cleanly between the truth and the lies and obfuscation of sin; it speaks a truth that we cannot escape. The key is that the conviction of the Holy Spirit is always swiftly followed by a word of grace. It never leaves us hopeless. That is why the liturgy gives us the comfortable words immediately after the confession and absolution – to make sure that our recognition of our sin is always paired with the word of grace and hope. Immediately after we confess, we hear the voice of God in Christ say, “For I so loved the world that I sent my only Son... Come unto me, and I will give you rest and relief from your burdens.”
One of the most famous conversion stories is that of John Newton, who was a slave trader in the 18th century and wrote the famous hymn “Amazing Grace.” I was interested to learn that Newton was not a completely godless person his whole life until his conversion; rather, in his childhood and young adulthood, he tried many times to reform himself and be a better person, but those efforts were always short-lived, and eventually he gave himself over to the sin with which he had struggled. Many years later, he was a captain of a ship that transported slaves across the Atlantic. One night his long struggle with sin and righteousness came to a breaking point when a great storm on the sea threatened to capsize his boat. He tried everything he could to save the ship, but knowing that they might not survive, he said to one of his shipmates, "If this will not work, the Lord have mercy upon us!" His own words caught him by surprise, and he thought to himself, "’Mercy! What mercy can there be for me?’ This was the first desire I had breathed for mercy for many years!"
After a few hours, the water had left the hold of the boat, and Newton realized that they might not sink after all and saw God at work in their rescue. He said, "I thought I saw the hand of God displayed in our favor. I began to pray. I could not utter the prayer of faith. I could not draw near to a reconciled God and call him Father. My prayer for mercy was like the cry of the ravens, which yet the Lord does not disdain to hear. In the gospel I saw at least a chance of hope, but on every other side I was surrounded with black, unfathomable despair." At that moment when Newton realized the depths of his sin and his distance from God, he could have succumbed to the voice of the accuser – surely God couldn’t love me, I’m too far gone down this road – the response from God was not deeper guilt but a sign of hope and of forgiveness to which he clung with all his heart. As he describes that event’s significance later, he says, “On that day the Lord came from on high and delivered me out of deep waters."
In life we also enter deep waters and wildernesses of our own; times when we are dogged by voices of accusation and of temptation. When our sin feels like a heavy burden, may we not forget to look up and see grace hanging on the cross for us in the person of Christ. In the presence of Christ, we have the strength to look our own sin squarely in the face and repent, knowing that no matter how bad it gets or how far we fall, no matter how loving and holy and good we become; regardless of the spiritual heights or depths we attain in life, our salvation has never rested on our being good enough, not even for a nanosecond. Jesus has gone before us, and though he was tempted in every way as we are, he did not sin but instead won for us the victory. He stood in for us at every turn and remained faithful to his Father, not simply for himself, but so that we might become righteous through him.
Friends, as we enter this Lent, I invite you to see it as a mirror before which we stand, entering into a time of self-examination guided by the light of the Holy Spirit; but may we never forget that the mirror has these words written across it, “Beloved child of God, bought with the blood of Christ.”
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