Lent 1: Facts, Questions and Opinions

Facts, Questions and Opinions Re: Lent

Fact: It is Lent. Four days of Lent have passed. Sundays are of Lent, not in Lent: Lent consists of forty weekdays. We are already one-tenth of the way through Lent.

 

Question: Are we one-tenth of the way into Lent? Have we started our self-examination, repentance, prayer, fasting, and reading and meditating on God’s Word like we said on Ash Wednesday?

 

Opinion: Mark 1:9-15 gets the story of Christ in the wilderness just right: Two sentences. No indication of how many temptations there were. Jesus was in the wilderness forty days with Satan, wild beasts and angels. No recorded conversations. Just the bare facts. Seems far more intense somehow.

 

Question: Can we imagine what it must have be like to have angels “wait upon” you?      

 

Fact: That we are told he was there forty days recalls the forty-year wilderness sojourn, a time of testing and preparation for becoming a people of God. It was also a time and place of creation – the creation of a new people of God.

 

Question: Jesus has just learned one sentence earlier that he is God’s Beloved Son. What does that mean? Mark had already called him “Christos,” anointed, or in Hebrew messiah. What does this all this mean?

 

Fact: The Hebrew word for “wilderness” is midbar, which means something like “wordless.”

 

Question: Does this mean the “silence” of a true wilderness? Or, does midbar reveal that such areas are places to which God has not yet spoken a creative word to make them blossom and flourish and leap into life? What does a “wordless” place look like and feel like?

 

Opinion: The lack of detail in storyteller Mark’s account leaves much to the listener’s imagination. Yet, the spare number of details we are given have deep roots in Israel’s history.

 

Fact: we recall that John calls Jesus “the Word” – The Word that brings creation and order out of chaos, “In the beginning.” The Word is being sent, driven, blown into a Wordless place. A place in need of The Word.

 

Question: Is Satan tempting or testing?

 

Fact: Satan can be an adversary out to ambush and destroy Jesus. Or, as the tradition also suggests, satan is a tester, or Inspector General, testing all parts of creation to see if they are as solid and sound as they appear to make sure, on God’s behalf, that nothing shady slips by.

 

Question: Is this Satan destroyer? Or, is this the Inspector General making sure Jesus is up to the task of being God’s Beloved Son and Christos, messiah, all rolled into one?

 

Fact: The Spirit is pneuma in Greek, meaning wind, breath and spirit, like the Hebrew ruach which blew across the waters of creation, “In the beginning.”

 

Question: What does this spirit-wind-breath sound like as it drives Jesus into the wilderness? A soft hissing, sound? Or, a tempestuous hurricane-like wind?

 

Fact: The Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness. He did not choose to go there.

 

Opinion: If this is how God’s Spirit treats God’s Beloved with whom God is well pleased, perhaps we are meant to imagine where this same Spirit means to take us.

 

Fact: Some people suggest that Lent is a time for us to “go to” the wilderness ourselves.

 

Opinion: I think not. We promise to follow and obey Jesus in our baptism. He does not go there. He is sent.

 

Question: So, just where does Jesus go? What kinds of places does he go? What kinds of people does he seek out? Do we ever seek out those same kinds of people he does?

 

Fact: Jesus says, “I am the way …” (John 14:6)

 

Opinion: We typically limit this claim of his by thinking there is only one way among a thousand. Whoever follows the longing of the human heart, whoever is seeking to be with God, however, is on the way. Jesus takes us in many different ways, not just one way.

 

Fact: Mark says nothing about fasting at all. Only that he there to be tested as to his fitness to be Beloved, messiah and Christos.

 

Opinion: So being on “the way,” following Jesus, means letting one’s self be driven by or led by the Spirit. That is, we are not in control. That’s hard.  

 

Fact: Jesus says the Spirit blows where it wills. No one knows from whence it comes or where it goes. You cannot fit the Spirit into a flow chart!

 

Opinion: The wilderness can be said to be nowhere and everywhere.

 

Fact: Put a little space in the word “nowhere” and you get the words “now here.”

 

Opinion: So, the Wilderness, or Nowhere, is closer than we think! It is Now-here!

 

Fact: We have already created our own wilderness Now-here: Any place a child, a teenager, can access a semi-automatic weapon and commit the murder of seventeen other people is already a wilderness.

 

Opinion: Exile is another word for Wilderness in the Bible.   

 

Question: How much mass murder, guns, drugs, opioid overdoses, domestic violence, sexual harassment, millionaire sports-felons, starving people, caged children, authoritarian dictatorships, racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, LGBT-phobia, neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements do there have to be before a society finally admits that it is already in exile?

 

Opinion: So, to get to the wilderness, or exile, we do not have to go very far. Now-here is already a wilderness; an exile of sin and alienation.

 

Question: So, Lent is not about how to get ourselves into the wilderness. Rather, how do we get out? How do we withdraw from the wilderness? How do we come home from exile? How do we turn away from sin and alienation?

 

Fact: Jesus withdraws from the central power structures of Jerusalem, what John calls a “Den of Vipers!” He goes as far away from Jerusalem as one can get: Galilee. There he proclaims Good News he found in the wilderness: Repent, turn back. God’s reign is at hand. Now-here.

 

Question: If Jesus’s forty days is about withdrawal, from what do we need to withdraw?

 

Opinion: We need to withdraw from the wilderness of Sin and Alienation.

 

Facts: Sin is related to the word “asunder.” Sin tears asunder the wholeness in which all beings and all creation belong together. Alienation suggests uprootedness from one’s true self, from others, and from God.

 

Opinion: Jesus calls us to turn back from the wilderness of sin and alienation and look toward God. This is the essence of repentance.

 

Fact: Jesus says a world under the reign of God is right here, right now. Or, Now-here!

 

Opinion: The way out of Sin to Salvation is the way from alienation to belonging.

 

Fact: Belonging is the essence of life and being human.

 

Opinion: This highlights our need to withdraw from nowhere and Now-here where we feel alienated and allow the Spirit-wind to move us back to belonging. With God. With Jesus. With one another. Welcoming all others.

 

Fact: On Ash Wednesday Jesus commends three spiritual disciplines in this order: Almsgiving, Prayer and Fasting. [Matthew 6:1-6,16-21]

 

Question: Why do modern day Christians tend only to focus on the third, fasting, in Lent? And not the other two? How might our journey out of the wilderness be facilitated by focusing more on Almsgiving and Prayer?

 

Fact: We talk a lot about giving up certain foods, deserts, alcohol, TV, smoking, Facebook, Twitter, our addiction to “screens,” etc etc etc in Lent.

 

Question: Are we doing this to free ourselves for the Spirit to blow us somewhere new? Or, for reasons of personal perfection?

 

Opinion: The way out of nowhere and Now-here is not through taking control of our lives, but by giving up all control and allowing ourselves to be led by the Spirit. By letting go of all those things that keep us bound up in sin and alienation.

 

Fact: Such letting go is what it means to repent, to return, to come home to God. For God is at home, it is we who have gone out for a walk! It is we who have lost our way.

 

Question: Lent is already one-tenth gone. When are we going to begin to let go and let the Spirit-wind begin to drive us out of exile, sin and alienation into the Now-here way of following Jesus? Amen.