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Lent 1

February 14, 2010 (Year C)

Preached at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

Brookline, MA

The Reverend Jeffrey W. Mello

 

Deuteronomy 26:1-11

Romans 10:8b-13

Luke 4:1-13

 

Preparing for a yard sale, or doing a major spring cleaning can be a transformative event.  We learn a lot about ourselves in the process of “cleaning house”.  Whether the items will end up in a yard sale or donated to a charity, chances are you are, when the time comes to spring clean, you are one of two types of people.  The first type of person seizes the opportunity with enthusiasm and looks at every item in their home with a suspicious eye.  Everything they see is scrutinized.  They scan the room and ask, “Do I really need this anymore?”  They go through the closet, tossing clothes in a pile.  They ask with great sincerity, “Do I absolutely need to keep this anymore?”  The item in question is then either placed in a bin, or it is spared and put back in its  place, at least for one more year.

 

The second type of person looks around the house and can’t imagine parting with anything.  They believe it’s all necessary, or maybe it will be needed, someday, possibly.  And then what would they do?  Many a treadmill and bread maker have been spared by this line of thinking.  As the look over their closet, they do not toss with abandon.  Instead fear grips them and they do nothing.  Maybe it’ll fit again, someday.  Maybe, who knows, it’ll come back in style someday.  And back in the drawer it goes.

 

Best of all scenarios, though, is when one of each of these types of people share the same space.  As one person places items in a bin, the other is following behind, carefully removing them from the bin and placing them back in their rightful place.

 

It is amazing what we can accumulate even over the course of one year.  The St. Paul’s Annual Yard Sale is a testament to how much “stuff” we manage to gather that, when we really think about it, we could probably do without.  Each year, every square inch of our parish house; the Lichtenberger Room, the Middle Room, the Great Hall, the backyard and the front yard from one corner of our property to the other is covered, and I mean covered, in items people at one time thought necessary, and then discovered they no longer needed.

 

If you are like the first type of person I described, nothing feels better than unloading those boxes and relishing in the new found space; you feel a certain lightness with all that “stuff” gone.  If you have too much of anything lying around, it’s old copies of “Simple Living” magazine.

 

If you are like the second type of person, however, letting go of “stuff” is a struggle. As you hand the box over, your eyes scan it one last time before letting go, in case you made a mistake.  Maybe you even go to the yard sale and buy something back.

  

Lent is, or it can be, this kind of an experience, too.  Lent is, in many ways, an annual house cleaning for the soul.  Lent is our own “spiritual spring cleaning”.  It is a time to look around with a careful eye at all the many things we’ve managed to accumulate over the year.  Things that have built up in our relationships with ourselves, with one another and with God that are now getting in the way. 

 

Lent is a time to look at all these things and ask ourselves, “Do I really need this anymore?”  “Is this still working for me, or is it just taking up space and getting in the way?”  It is a time to gather those things in a box and give them not to a yard sale, or a donation bin, but to God.  In Lent, we are asked to let go of all the things that we once thought we needed, and we dare to give them away.  In Lent, we dare to let put down, and get rid of, all the many things we protect ourselves with so that we might spend some time in the wilderness vulnerable and exposed before God.

 

Lent is when we are reminded who we are as a Christian community.  In Lent, we remember who we are, and whose we are.  But to remember, we must walk into the wilderness with nothing but our relationship with God to lean on.  And that can be a scary trip, indeed.

 

The wilderness is, by definition, a frightening place to enter.  Without our accumulated defenses to protect us, it is tempting to grab on to the first thing that comes along that might take away our exposed pain or confusion.  In the wilderness, we want to do whatever it takes to mask the doubt and fear and insecurity we had no idea was waiting for us underneath all that clutter.

 

The author of Luke’s gospel places Jesus in the wilderness for just this reason.  Because in the wilderness Jesus had nothing but his relationship with God to depend on.  The spirit leads Jesus to the wilderness directly after his baptism, because it is in the wilderness where God seems to have the best chances of breaking in.  Israel spent 40 years in the wilderness.  Elijah spend 40 days there.  So did Moses.  In the wilderness, without the clutter,  the necessary space is made to hear God’s still small voice.  Without anything to distract us, or numb us,  God’s presence can be fully known.

 

Jesus, too, was tempted to forgo his time with God.  Jesus was offered the chance to turn away from complete dependence on God and depend, instead, on himself.  Turn these stones to bread, prove that what you say about God is true, take power through compromise.  These were Jesus’ temptations.  These were the escape hatches offered to Jesus in the wilderness. 

 

And each of us has our own.  How do you react when you’ve suddenly found yourself in the wilderness?  What are your escape hatches when your heart, or your soul, or your spirit feel lost, or broken, or scared?  Some of us eat, some of us drink, some of us turn on the t.v., some of us withdraw, some of us get really busy helping others.  Some of us get paralyzed with fear, and some of us get paralyzed by anger.

  

Some of us spend all our emotional and spiritual energy avoiding the wilderness altogether, because we’re not so sure we ready to discover what we might find there.  We fear that, when all the clutter is gone, we will be left with a hole in our soul.  A hole in our heart that nothing seems to be able to fill.

 

But it is God who longs to fill that hole.  That hole has the potential to be God’s very dwelling place.  Hesitant to fill that hole with something we can’t see, or touch, or prove, we try to fill that hole instead with the comforts of our life.  Unfortunately, we fill that hole up with so many other things, God can’t get in.  And we can’t get to God.

 

Over the next 40 days, we have an opportunity to do some unpacking, some clearing out of the clutter; some emptying of what we have used to try to fill that hole in our heart. 

 

We get another chance to take a good look at ourselves, at our relationships with one another and our relationships with God and ask ourselves whether or not they are what we believe God created them to be; what God hopes for them to be; what we long for them to be.

 

If they are not, and very few of us would say that they are, accept this invitation into the wilderness.  Accept the invitation to risk putting down the defenses, get rid of the buffers, clear away the anesthetics and spend sometime exposed and vulnerable in front of the God who made you, the God who loves you, and who yearns for nothing more than to dwell within you, if you will only make the room.

 

 

AMEN.

 

© 2010 The Reverend Jeffrey W. Mello