Mark 8:27-9:1; Psalm 68:7-10

Introduction

I was interested during the week to receive an e-mail from an overseas friend, telling me that she has decided to "do Lent" this year. She's giving up chocolate. She hasn't been a regular church-goer for years and the Baptist Church where she grew up, like many Baptist churches, never followed the church seasons. But she has been reading some books by Michael McGirr, a former Jesuit priest, and been impressed by the ritual and discipline of the Catholic traditions, which in his books exist alongside an honest struggle for faith and meaning, and she has decided that a period of fasting for Lent made sense.

I

Discipline and fasting are what we think of when we turn to Lent. Our banner reminds us of denial and failure, although it very deliberately portrays the rising sun signifying a new day and new possibilities. The traditional gospel reading for the first Sunday of Lent is the passages describing the temptation of Jesus. Depending on which year it is we might read the simple description in Mark of the event following Jesus' baptism: "the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan, and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him." Or we might have the longer stories in Matthew and Luke, outlining the temptations to turn stones into bread, to seize authority, and to prove his special status by putting God to the test - one sermon I read described them as the "big Mac attack," the "Dress for Success" scheme and the "Play for Power". While in the gospels Jesus comes through the temptations with flying colours, Luke ominously finishes his version of the episode with the statement "the devil departed from him until a more opportune time." But all gospels agree that the testing time for Jesus took place in the wilderness.

II

Now the word "wilderness" probably has more negative connotations than positive. We might use it as a synonym for "wasteland", "desert", "God-forsaken places". When we hear that the Spirit led Jesus out into the we realise it must have been for some bigger purpose. Was it a test of his divinity, or a rite of passage like the initiation rites of indigenous cultures, or was it a way for the Jewish writers of the Gospels to identify Jesus with the Israelites of the Old Testament, giving his ministry legitimacy despite its radical nature in relation to the Jewish faith of the time?

And in a sense perhaps all those things are true. We know that the ancient Jews didn't like the wilderness - it was a harsh and unnerving place, a place of trial and testing. References to it were usually uncomplimentary. But we shouldn't lose sight of the paradox that the pilgrimage of the Israelites through the wilderness was a cherished memory for them. It was what forged them as a nation. It was in the wilderness that character was developed and covenant was embraced. It was the wilderness that marked them as the people of Yahweh - the God they had met in the desert. Far from being a god-forsaken place, it was where they had seen the character and wonders of God. An extract from Psalm 68 printed on the back of your bulletin is one of the positive recollections in the Old Testament of what the wilderness meant for Israel (read it?): God had gone before them, led them through the wilderness, made it a fertile place, led them home, provided for the needy; and the repetition of the phrase 'the presence of God' acts as a clarion call to remember that God WAS with them in the wilderness.

And if we think about it almost every one of the great prophetic leaders of the Old Testament had wilderness experiences that helped form their understanding of their call to God's service. And the great leaders of our times to whom we often refer: people like Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Sister Theresa, Bonhoeffer, Mandela; each of these had wilderness experiences too - times when their direction was formed and choices were made to give their lives in service to others in order to work for peace and justice.

III

When Jesus went into the wilderness he went because God called him there. He went to be with GOD, not primarily to meet Satan. In the wilderness he would have spent time internalising the stories of his faith. He WAS identifying with his forebears - with the stories of those early days when national purpose was pure and the relationship to God was at its clearest. According to the story that has been preserved Jesus spent one day for every year of the traditional 40 year wilderness sojourn. He was there to be alone, to concentrate on the Divine Presence, to focus his life on spiritual things and prepare for his ministry. Again, amongst our ecumenical friends, it is the Catholics that do this best. They build times of retreat and reflection right into the fabric of their working year, whereas we tend to see retreat just as an extra privilege if we can manage to get away for a few days.

Of course this time of concentrated reflection and preparation would have included the need to sort out how the human desires of overindulgence, fame and power could be subsumed to the call to live a different way. I doubt that we would have seen a devil or a temple if we had been out there watching him, but we would have seen a man alone with his thoughts, struggling with himself, wrestling with the issues of life and facing the probable danger to his reputation and well being should he go down the path to which he felt called. We would see him thinking all these things through, finally coming to the point where his mind was made up. We would see him emerging with a quietness and a calm certainty about what he would do with his life. It was the quiet deliberation that we hear in his words to his disciples months or maybe years later, as he set his face to Jerusalem. Again he is tempted in the same way, and again he responds with disciplined determination - "get behind me satan - you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things." Quite often, in fact, we see Jesus in the gospels helping his disciples see that they too must struggle with the meaning of their calling as disciples and messengers of God's good news.

IV

And we too are invited to enter the wilderness with Jesus, to seek places where we can listen for the voice of the spirit and discern the will of God for our lives. This is what Lent is supposed to be for us - a way of discovering our call to be God's people, to internalise the songs and stories of faith so that we too might live joyfully and purposefully. So here is the positive message of this season: welcome to the wilderness! Welcome to Lent! This can be a valuable time for you - a time to deepen and enrich your lives. Lent is an invitation in a world of chaos and difficulties to draw aside and be with God for a while. Lent is an opportunity in the fast-paced, constantly changing existence of ours to slow things down, to find the centre again, to know the presence of God at the centre of your being.

And don't we need the wilderness? Don't we need a desert experience, a special time of the year to rethink our faith, to find God's presence in the midst of the things that happen to us and around us. Don't we need the opportunity to discover who we are and what we are on about?

You know that I've had a couple of trips to Central Australia in recent years, visiting my parents who have been living there. On both visits I have been profoundly moved by the sense of spirituality so alive in the vast red centre, amongst the rocks and ancient geological formations. The wide horizons and clear nights seem to put things into perspective, giving to me at least a gratitude for the gift of natural beauty and a strong sense of peace. And I have been amazed to see the abundance of life there too: lizards, birds and mammals, the wildflowers that spring up so quickly after rain, gums and hardy succulents that seem to thrive in the hot days and cold nights. A wonderful place we visited was the "Desert Park" just outside Alice Springs: with its displays and demonstrations of the wide range of habitats and the vitality and variety of species living there - you come away with the sense that the desert is alive and vibrant. Let me read to you a poem written by Bruce Prewer that says more eloquently what I am trying to say about the Wilderness:

WILDERNESS EXPERIENCE

Always the place of testing

and paradoxically resting

the desert knows its own

and nurtures them in ways

that comfortable, urbane folk

can never find in town.

What city folk see out there

as landscape harsh and bare

intolerant of living things

under searing sun and wind

is to the desert people

most providentially kind.

There things mate, seed and grow

such as townsfolk never know

with roots that dig down far

below the shifting sands

into that sturdier ground

which wise souls love yet fear.

There roo and desert oak,

spinifex and patient folk

prophets and Mary's son

find angels' food and strength

to go to any length

trusting in things unseen.

© B.D. Prewer 2000

A degree of discipline is needed to develop the eyes to see life, sustenance and strength in the wilderness experience, which I think is the point of spending time fasting, reading, and reflecting during Lent.

V

The reading that Moriah prepared for today is the turning point in the gospel of Mark: Jesus sets his face to Jerusalem and all that is implied in that. As we turn in the church from a focus on the cradle to a focus on the cross, this text acts as a challenge to us. Will we, like Jesus, choose the way of the cross? Will we follow Jesus? Will we choose a life of self-denial for the sake of the gospel?

These words are lofty and hard to grasp in our ordinary lives, but I think they are about the way we choose to live. Will we intentionally live more simply so others may simply live? Will we choose to live non-violently in all our relationships? The World Council of Churches asked all member churches to be committed to making 2001-2012 a "decade for overcoming violence", identifying seven circles of influence in which choices for peace or violence can be made. These circles from the centre are firstly: personal, secondly: family, thirdly: religious and cultural, fourthly: local community, then national, international and ecological. Work at all of these levels can create ripples of peace that continue to spread outwards to influence the world.

Today I have been focussing most on the inner circle - the level of the personal where each of us can choose to enter the wilderness with Jesus, rediscover our call to live as people of God, to live joyfully and purposefully. Each of us are asked in this season to remember what it means to follow Jesus on the way to the cross. Later in the season I will look more at the other spheres, in particular the relationship between Christianity and ecology. Since our next newsletter is on this theme too I hope there will be some sharing amongst us as a congregation as we reflect on this responsibility.

As you move into this Lenten season, I hope you will feel welcome, not bowed down with guilt; I hope you will find joy, not the burden of denial. I hope it will be a time to discover new depths in your relationship with God, and new directions on your path of faithful following. May the Spirit lead us and God bless us all in this time.

Acknowledgement: I found two Lenten sermons in Pulpit's Digest helpful in preparing this sermon: "Welcome to the wilderness" by John Killinger in 1995 and "A wilderness sojourner" by Jonathan Almond in 1996.