1st Sunday of Lent
By Reverend Canon Barry Rose, Sunday 1st March, 2009
For Lent I am reading the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lent book, “Why go to Church?” Yesterday found me reading a chapter on preaching which opens with this quotation, “The aim of preaching is to give moral or religious advice, especially in a tiresome manner”. The author, Timothy Ratcliffe, who of course does not agree with these sentiments, then quotes Anthony Trollope in Barchester Towers. “There is no greater hardship at present inflicted on mankind than the necessity of listening to sermons. The preacher is the bore of his age, the nightmare that disturbs our Sundays”
You can understand why, after reading this, I am scared to preach this morning, and yet not as frightened as I would be going into a desert or a wilderness. Of course I realise that if I did summon up enough courage to be bold I would discover that a time in the desert would be creative and renewing. After all deserts play quite a major part in the stories of the Bible and the Church.
In the Old Testament there are two great desert stories. One is the forty years experience in the wilderness after the Jews left Egypt. How the Jews hated it and blamed Moses for what was happening to them as they murmured in their tents. Then there is the exile experience some 900 years later. Taken away by the Babylonians from their beloved Jerusalem they were devastated by their experience in Babylon. It was truly a wilderness experience for them. They murmured again and cried out, “By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept when we remembered you, O Jerusalem. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”
But in these desert experiences, where they were tempted and tested, they discovered their vocation to be God’s people. Think of what came from them. The Passover celebrations and the ten commandments were the lasting marks of the 40 years in the Sinai desert. Then from those 48 years in exile in Babylon there emerged the vital understanding that God is everywhere and not just living in Jerusalem and that the Lord’s song could be sung in a strange land. From their experience in Babylon there developed the synagogue, the gathering together of the people to worship God, which has sustained Jewish religious life ever since. It is salutary and humbling to think that the Passover celebrations and synagogue worship are the foundations of this Eucharist. The roots, then, of this very act of worship are to be discovered in desert spirituality.
From today’s gospel we learn that Jesus, like Israel of old, also had his desert experiences for he was tested and tempted for 40 days in the wilderness. Later there were the long nights of prayer alone on the hillside which were the bedrock of His passionate and single-minded search for the will of His heavenly Father. Finally there was the Gethsemene experience which led to the cross. So like the Jews in Sinai and Babylon Jesus, in his deserts and temptations, met his Heavenly Father, discovered his will and was strengthened, transfigured and resurrected.
As the Church began to grow Christians also discovered the value of living in a desert and discovering God and their true selves. Those who dared to enter the desert became known as desert fathers and perhaps the most well known is St Anthony of Eygpt who in the year 251 retired into the desert to live a solitary life of prayer and fasting after giving away all his possessions.
As I ramble on about the desert in the story of the Jews and the life of Jesus and the Church you may be thinking, “Well, this is all fine but has no bearing on my life. I am not going to live in a desert and I am unlikely to become a nun or a monk.”
A few years ago my Lent book was by John Moses then Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. It was entitled The Desert and contained quotations from the Desert Fathers. In the introduction John Moses reminds us that the desert for us is not a place but an experience. The emptiness and the silence of the desert stand for us as symbols of the desolation, the isolation to which we are sometimes condemned at periods in our lives. The desert for us is not a place that we seek but an experience which surrounds us – it is the rough way through which we pass and it takes many forms – bereavement, sickness, disappointments, frustrations in our human relationships, loss of faith, loss of confidence, loss of vitality, an emptiness inside and appalling emptiness of life – the thought and fear of death.
These things are our deserts. When we first think about them they seem at first to have nothing to offer: no shade from the blistering heat of life. But this is not the way to think about our desert experiences. For us the desert is where we are self emptied, where we come to true self knowledge, where we are thrown back to our own resources and where we find them lacking, discover we need help. We then turn to God and encounter him and discover his will for us. Our deserts are experiences where we can be renewed, transformed, transfigured and resurrected and however they come to us, hold out to us the possibility of encounter with our true selves and God.
Lent is the time for us to focus on this. Let’s plan some desert moments of listening to God in silence, so that we can renewed by Him for the sake of others.
Sorry if this sermon has not touched you at all but I comfort myself with others words from Timothy Ratcliffe’s book “God cannot do without the stammering ways in which we strive to give utterance to the Word.” So perhaps you will forgive me for my 1000 words.
