Beloved in the Wilderness

Luke 4:1-13

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’”

Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, “To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.” Jesus answered him, “It is written,

‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’”

Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, 10 for it is written,

‘He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’”

Jesus answered him, “It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.

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The wilderness seems kind of close these days if you ask me.

Maybe it’s the news again – our politics, that tornado that ripped through Alabama last week, everything going on in places like Venezuela and Haiti and Great Britain, Alex Trebek has pancreatic cancer…

Maybe it’s that the Methodist Church went the other direction – the wrong direction, in my opinion – when it comes to loving gay and lesbian and transgender people… (I’m not judging the Methodists, mind you, so much as I am lamenting with them and with all those who are scandalized by that decision.)

Maybe it’s the sadness of yesterday’s funeral for Joe Richards and all that led up to it…

Maybe it’s the threshold of Lent we crossed over on Ash Wednesday… or that I’m getting ready to head to the actual desert, out in of Phoenix, later this week… or it could just be one less hour of sleep thanks to Daylight Savings Time.

Whatever it is, the wilderness doesn’t seem so hard to find… or very far away… or easier to get into than out of these days. 

And I’m always fascinated with Jesus and his time out there in the wilderness. This Gospel story is one of those oldies and goodies most of us have heard before where the Devil and Jesus seem to be playing this well-choreographed, back-and-forth kind of dance and dialogue:

First, Jesus is hungry. Starving, even, after 40 days of fasting. And the devil says:  "If you are the Son of God, you could turn these stones into bread." Jesus insists that man doesn't live by bread alone. So the devil hurls him around the universe, shows him all the kingdoms of the world, and tempts him with a promise: "All this will be yours if you’d just worship me." And Jesus, faithfully, says, “No, worship the Lord your God," and that's that. So the devil takes him high atop the pinnacle of the temple and says, "So prove to me that you're really God's son and take a dive … you won't get hurt if what God says about you is true." And Jesus refuses, reminding himself and Satan that our God isn't one we ought to test.

The point of Lent – and the point of this Gospel story this time around, for me, anyway – is to wonder what it means to be called into the wilderness. I think we’re called to seek out and to put a finger on the evil and darkness and temptation in our own lives. We’re called to name it, to stop denying it, and to confront it in ways we neglect too much of the time.

But that's hard to do, this wilderness wandering – whether it’s the First Sunday of Lent or any other day of the year – or we would do it more often, more faithfully, with more resolve and courage and success, I believe. We don’t head out into the wilderness enough of the time, following the Spirit’s lead. We’re more likely to find ourselves pushed there, dragged there, kicking and screaming. Or we end up there, in the wilderness – much to our surprise – before we know what’s coming. And then the temptation of it all is to let it overwhelm us – the grief of it; the fear of it; the unknown and uncertainty of it all, whatever the case may be, in the wilderness.

And so we fail the tests too often, don’t we? We fill ourselves with all the wrong things too much of the time. Where Jesus refused to turn stones into bread – we grab the potato chips or the ice cream; the booze or the weed or the cigarettes or the pills.

Where Jesus turned down the offer for more power and glory, we go after as much as we can grab and look for it in all the wrong places – work, money, things and stuff, just for starters.

And where Jesus refused to put God to the test, we do… every time we throw up our hands and wonder why God won’t – why God hasn’t – just fixed everything that’s wrong with us, with the world, and with this wilderness.

And I think the reason we fail the tests too much of the time is because we forget something Jesus knew and held onto, from the start. Remember, Jesus entered into the wilderness “full of the Spirit” and “led by the Spirit,” on the heals of his baptism. I like to imagine that his hair was still wet when he met up with the devil in the dessert. He was fresh from the Jordan where the heavens had opened, a dove had appeared out of nowhere, for crying out loud, and God had declared him beloved, “the Son, the Chosen” with whom the Creator of the Universe was well pleased.

And it’s with all of that in his back pocket, that Jesus made his way into the wilderness to duke it out with the devil. So it’s easier for me to imagine that he might have resisted all of that temptation and passed all of those tests with flying colors, don’t you think?

And that’s our call and invitation, too. To remember, however and whenever we find ourselves in the wilderness, that – just like Jesus – we can enter it all on the heals of and filled with the promises of our baptism. And when we live like that, our chances of resisting the temptations… of passing the tests… of making it out alive are infinitely more likely, it seems to me.

I came across a poem by Jan Richardson, an artist and author and United Methodist pastor, who says this better than I could. It’s called, “Beloved Is Where We Begin.” It goes like this:

If you would enter into the wilderness,
do not begin without a blessing.

Do not leave without hearing who you are:

Beloved,
named by the One who has traveled this path before you.

Do not go without letting it echo in your ears,
and if you find it is hard to let it into your heart,
do not despair.

That is what this journey is for.

I cannot promise this blessing will free you
from danger,
from fear,
from hunger or thirst,
from the scorching of sun or the fall of the night.

But I can tell you that on this path
there will be help.

I can tell you that on this way
there will be rest. 

I can tell you that you will know
the strange graces
that come to our aid
only on a road
such as this,
that fly to meet us
bearing comfort
and strength,
that come alongside us
for no other cause
than to lean themselves
toward our ear
and with their
curious insistence
whisper our name:

Beloved.
Beloved.
Beloved.

The wilderness seems too close… too easy to find… too hard to navigate… too difficult to escape too much of the time.

The temptation to quit… to choose the selfish, prideful, destructive way… to take the devil’s hand and follow his lead… the temptation to despair can seem like a watering hole in the parched places of our lives.

But if we enter into those desert places… If we engage the temptations of this life, filled first with and led by the Spirit of our creator… If we enter into the wilderness with the waters of baptism still dripping from our foreheads and the promises of God ringing in our ears.

We don’t have to fear any of it, knowing that we and those we love will come out of it alive – in one way or the other – on this side of God’s heaven or the next – always beloved, in the end.

Amen

Ash Wednesday Thresholds

Mark 15:33-39

When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land - until three in the afternoon. At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ When some of the bystanders heard it, they said, ‘Listen, he is calling for Elijah.’ And someone ran, filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink, saying, ‘Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down.’ Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. Now when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, ‘Truly this man was God’s Son!’

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This Lenten season, some of you have heard, we’re inviting each other to “do Lent” a little differently, by learning about and engaging some ancient, Celtic Christian practices as part of our journey to Good Friday and to Easter’s empty tomb – which is what these Lenten days are all about. All of this was inspired by a conversation I had with Pastor Teri Ditslear, from Roots of Life, our friends up in Noblesville, when she and I got together to brainstorm about ways we might walk this Lenten walk in a new way this time around.

In a nutshell, my hope and intention are that we will learn something new about these ancient traditions and disciplines and that we’ll find ways to engage some timeless faith practices in active, hands-on kinds of ways from one week to the next so that this Lenten season of faith, sacrifice, redemption, hope – and more – will be front and center for our hearts and minds in a deliberate, meaningful way.

All of it is inspired by a book called The Soul’s Slow Ripening: 12 Celtic Practices for Seeking the Sacred, which you won’t need to have in order to play along, but which some of you might want to have if you’d like to go a little deeper with all of this. The book also teaches about 12 of these practices, all of which we can’t cover in our handful of midweek services. If that’s the case, sign up for a book on the table with the devotionals out there, in the entry, and we should have a book for you by Sunday morning, thanks to the ancient Celtic discipline known as Amazon Prime. They cost $15.00 each.

Okay, enough with the pre-amble. The first Celtic practice that made me think about Ash Wednesday and all that brings us here this evening is what is called “The Practice of Thresholds.”

According to Christine Valters Paintner, the author of the book, thresholds were important to the ancient Irish monks who begat these practices we’ll learn about in the weeks to come. Thresholds are just what you think, I believe. They are the point of crossing over from one place to the next; from one room to the next; from one space to another. A threshold is the space between one time and another, a place of transition. “The Celts describe thresholds as ‘thin times or places’ where heaven and earth are closer together and the veil between worlds is thin.”

In other words, a threshold can be tangible and worldly – like a turnstile at the train station, or the bank of glass doors at your school or office; like the double doors to our sanctuary, or the door from your garage to the kitchen or laundry room of your house.

A threshold can also be an intangible, spiritual thing – like the moment between dusk and nightfall, or dawn and daylight; like a move from illness to healing, or health to illness; like the change of seasons. A threshold can be the transition from one phase of life to another – graduation, marriage, divorce, retirement. Or a threshold might be that thin, mysterious, holy moment between life and death – living and dying – which is where these ashes call our attention to be this evening.

So the value in “the practice of thresholds” – as the ancient, Christian Celts understood it – was to be aware of just how thin these times and places and seasons of transition in our lives can be. And to live differently because of that thinness.

I read an article in The Christian Century magazine last year about a smart phone app that changed a man’s life. I’m not talking about Facebook or Twitter; SnapChat, What’s App, or Words with Friends. This app is called “We Croak.” It’s icon looks like this, though it has nothing to do with frogs.

The app does daily – 5 times a day, actually – what these ashes mean to do for us, once every year, at the beginning of Lent. The app notifies you five times every day, that you are going to die – nothing more and nothing less. From what I can tell, the app has evolved since I first heard about it. Whereas the notifications used to say, simply and repeatedly, 5 times a day, “Don’t forget, you’re going to die,” nowadays, you are invited to open the app when the notification hits your phone for a short, sweet quotation about death from a poet, philosopher, theologian, or other notable thinker.

The inspiration for the app is a Bhutanese folk saying that suggests, in order for a person to be happy, one must contemplate death five times daily. So, these are just some of kinds of reminders that have hit my phone since I downloaded the app a month or so ago:

“Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.” (W.H. Auden)

“Despite the sound’s alarming roughness, it’s unlikely that the death rattle is painful.” (Sara Manning Peskin, M.D.)

“Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.” (Doris Lessing)

“Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.” (Alice Walker)

And, just to bring us back to this notion of “thresholds,”:

“How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.” (Jane Hirshfield)

This 21st Century app, these ashes on our foreheads, and now, I hope, this ancient practice of thresholds at the beginning of another Lenten journey all serve the same purpose if we choose to embrace them:

To remind us of just how thin the veil is between life and death; how easily crossed the threshold; how swift and surprising, sometimes, it comes, no matter how sure and certain for each of us – we know – it will one day be.

“Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

“Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

As followers of the way. As believers in Jesus. As disciples of Christ, we are invited to remember, to not forget the truth of our impending death, because we need not fear the threshold between this life and the next – for ourselves or for those we love.

Because of Jesus, the curtain has been torn in two; the veil has been lifted; the threshold between this life and the next is a thin one; the kingdom of God has broken into our midst so that light and life shine into the darkness and death that pretend to threaten us on this side of the grave.

In Jesus, the love and grace and mercy of God conquers this death, wipes away these ashes, bridges that gap, crosses over the threshold that pretends to mark a distance between sin and forgiveness; judgement and redemption; anger and love; despair and hope; death and new life.

So, our sacred Celtic practice for the week to come, if you choose to play along, is to take notice of the worldly, earthly thresholds in your daily life – work, home, school, church, your neighborhood as you walk, the city limits or the county line as you drive, whatever. And to take notice of the spiritual, less tangible thresholds of your daily life, too – dawn and daylight; dusk and darkness; sleep and wakefulness; work and rest, whatever.

Download the “WeCroak App” if you dare – the author of that article I mentioned suggests there’s something as charming as there is challenging about all of that. Or pick up one of the “threshold stones” as the ancient Celts called them, that I’ve left on the table out front, and leave one or two at the threshold of some place that’s meaningful for you – your home, your office, your school. Let that stone be a reminder for you – and a strange curiosity, I would imagine for anyone who sees it – a reminder of what matters about your life, in that place, on this side of the grave.

And I hope all of this will help us recognize that we are invited to be mindful that we live with one foot in both worlds… in this kingdom and the next… on earth as it is in heaven, if you will. And let us not be afraid of this truth – that we are dust and to dust we will return – and let us rest assured in the promise of God, that nothing – no threshold is deep or wide or strong enough – not even the threshold of death – can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Amen