February 25, 2007

Clay Nelson

Lent 1     Luke 4:1-13

Why do we put ourselves through Lent? Aren't things in the world and perhaps in our own lives bleak enough without stripping the church of Marianne's lovely flower arrangements and giving up chocolate or some other favorite vice for forty days? We can be forgiven for thinking it is one more instance of the church taking away life's simple pleasures, as if fun was a dirty word. Need an example? Think of St. Augustine's making sex a sin. For obvious practical reasons it is acceptable for procreation, but only if you don't enjoy it. Making it an excellent example of a “necessary evil.” Of course he didn't push this brilliant idea until after he'd enjoyed plenty of the non-reproducing kind himself.

The church has a well-earned reputation for lauding deprivation, but in spite of Lent's focus on fasting and repentance, I think Lent is more about connections. Perhaps, ironically, and certainly counter-intuitively, it does this by mimicking or re-living with Jesus his forty-day test alone in the wilderness. It helps us make connections by moving us ritually into a place of deprivation and isolation. The point is to remind us that the experience of the wilderness within or the wilderness we find ourselves in is universal. There are plenty of examples in Scripture alone: Noah's 40 days and nights on a floating zoo; Moses' forty years of wandering in the wilderness munching manna wondering where he put the map; and Elijah's 40 days of fasting and sulking before hearing the “still small voice of God.” No one, not even Jesus, escapes its desolation. Everyone has experienced a place where even God seems absent.

Because it is universal we all know how difficult it is.

There is wondering if it is ever going to end. The number forty for the Hebrews is shorthand for a long time that seems endless. More precisely, it is the length of time it takes water to boil when you are parched for a cuppa tea or how long a bad sermon can seem to go on.

Then, there is the sense of dislocation and feeling helpless. There are no landmarks to orient us. How do we get out when we don't know where the exit signs are? We know the temptation to grasp at anything that might make the pain go away. We dream at night of the quick fix or hope to wake up in the morning to discover it was all a bad dream.

Matthew and Luke say Jesus was led to the wilderness. That he went willingly. They make him sound like my dog thinking he is going for a walk in the park. Mark, on the other hand, says Jesus was driven into it, and not on a tour bus. That sounds more like it to me.

Never the less, sometimes the wilderness finds us and sometimes we find the wilderness.

We learn that after years of faithful service we are being made redundant. Our partner tells us that they love another. We hear the doctor say our child has a terminal diagnosis. One minute everything is bright and shiny and hopeful, the next it has all gone to custard. We have been driven into the wilderness.

More often we meander into the wilderness. We make a series of small bad choices or have a bit of bad luck and we wonder how we are going to make the mortgage or we learn that our hopes for advancement are no longer to be anticipated or worse, we achieve our long-sought goals, yet feel empty inside wondering why we bothered. We have found the wilderness. We drove there but it wasn't our intended destination. It was a case of getting lost.

There is another way we get there. It is the way Matthew and Luke allude to. We go there voluntarily. Lent, while giving us survival skills for when we are driven there, calls to go there voluntarily.

Luke tells us that Jesus, filled with Holy Spirit, began his ministry of connecting us to God in the wilderness. That is theological code for being filled with God. Which is another way of saying he was filled with transforming love. He went into a place where God was absent trusting that God was within him or perhaps he went there like us and discovered where God was while trying to stay warm while famished during a cold desert night. Either way he went. Either way he came out knowing God was within him. He seemed to know that to fulfill his mission meant his first stop had to be the wilderness. To be connected he had to first separate. It was a necessary evil.

Sometimes acting out of conscience or passion, that is, living out our baptism, is an isolating experience. For often it means being at odds with the culture or popular opinion. Since our humanity craves to belong, risking scorn and rejection feels like a dangerous place to be. That came home to me several times this week, suggesting it could be a long Lent.

This week's SMACA, our online theological e-zine, raged against the injustices the church has either committed or supported in the name of Jesus. It challenged whether or not Anglican unity was worth more than delaying full acknowledgement of human rights to gays and lesbians. Few of our issues have generated so much response.

Recently I read in the paper that Brian Tamaki of Destiny Church, several Evangelical leaders, and even the Catholic Church opposed a national statement declaring that New Zealand had no state religion and respected all faiths. Their position is that New Zealand should declare itself a Christian nation because that is our heritage. As an American who cut his teeth on the importance of separating church and state, this hit a big hot button for me and I wrote a response for the Herald with no intention of sending it in. I was just venting, I told myself. After reading it, my spouse told me I had to send it. As life is tough enough without asking for an all expense paid trip to the wilderness, I sent it reluctantly. Its publication on Ash Wednesday condemned me to fielding emails, phone calls and letters the rest of the week.

Also on Ash Wednesday the Primates of the Anglican Communion met in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. Surrounded by the AIDS epidemic, genocide, famine and extreme poverty, they debated whether or not the Episcopal Church should be permitted to remain in the Anglican Communion because they had the temerity to ordain a gay Bishop in a committed relationship and routinely bless same-sex marriages. In Christian charity all but seven of the Primates shared communion with the US Primate and then told her that if the US does not renounce these practices by September 30 they are no longer part of the Communion. It is inconceivable to me that the US House of Bishops would move backwards on this issue. It has been too hard fought for the biblical forty years. The effect of this week's meeting is that worldwide Anglicanism is preparing to drive the US church into the wilderness and the Episcopal Church is choosing to go there voluntarily. The situation now is a little like telling the boss, you can't fire me, I quit! Feeling very attached to the Episcopal Church historically and theologically I experience the Primates' ultimatum very personally. The worst part is I could be wrong. The Episcopal Church might decide it will step back from their progressive Christian act of including gays and lesbians fully in the church, to remain included in the Anglican Communion, claiming it as the latest church-inspired “necessary evil.”

What this week has highlighted for me is that choosing the wilderness, choosing to disconnect from the prevailing views is spiritually dangerous. The true danger is not the rejection of others. The true danger is to make it all about us: to begin to define ourselves by our separation. This is what Jesus' encounter with Satan is all about? Satan fails with Jesus, will he with me, Lent asks?

Jim Wallis, a prominent American Christian Evangelical with a strong social justice agenda, points this out candidly:

“Humility is difficult for people who think they are, or want to be, 'radical Christians.'

Humility is difficult when you're always calling other people – the church, the nation, and the world – to stop doing the things you think are wrong and start doing the things you think are right.

Humility is difficult for the bearers of radical messages.

When we're always calling other people to repent and change, it's not always easy to hear that message for ourselves.”

He concludes, “There is a real and very deep tension between humility and the prophetic vocation.”

Going into the wilderness voluntarily without humility is to stay there. That's not what Lent is all about. Lent ends. The water eventually boils; the bad sermon eventually is over. Lent is about going into AND leaving the wilderness no matter how we got there.

Lent is our call to disconnect that we might be truly connected. Connected to the God we discover within us when isolated and, recognized beyond us in one another when we return.