	Thought of the week
	Faith story
	Special events

About Us	\| What We Do	\| What's On	\| Services	\| Sermons	\| Links	\| Photos	\| Contact Us	\| Home

February 21, 2010 Sermon

We Were Made For This (Deuteronomy 26: 1-11; Luke 4: 1-13)

Rev. Sally Harris

Awaken us God, and shed your light upon us that we might behold you and come to recognize the hope that you always hold out to us. Amen

Today is the first Sunday of our pilgrimage from ashes to palms. Someone once wrote that: 'to engage Lent and to be engaged by it is to render oneself vulnerable to the reality of who we are as human beings.

In some way Lent invites us to take the time to embody our faith; embody our humanity; our very selves. And so we start at the beginning when divine life was shared and from the dust we were given life. From ashes we begin because In Lent we are offered an Olympic size opportunity – we can take the time as individuals and as a community to find out what we are really made of and to discover that we are made for this…

Lent always begins in the wilderness. A place we most likely are all familiar with on some level. Wilderness happens in times of transition, in times of loss. We end up looking inside ourselves and outside ourselves trying to find our true identity. The wilderness hits us in tragedy: when our business falters, our job vanishes, our health fails, our family crumbles, our intimate relationships deteriorate or when death invades our security. It happens when we are faced with a life change, even a new job, a new baby, a new home. Suddenly we are wandering aimlessly, looking for some hint of an identity that we have lost. Wilderness, wastelands, uninhabited regions are not comfortable places. Yet Lent calls us to the wilderness. Why? Because we were made for this… at least that is what Luke seems to be saying.

Luke places Jesus' wilderness expedition (a distance of only five verses) between his baptism and his sense of purpose. Jesus' wilderness pilgrimage is pocketed between the affirmation of his baptism and the recognition of his calling.

    How did Jesus end up there? The Spirit led him.
    What was he full of? He was full of the Holy Spirit.

A crisis did not pull Jesus into the desert. He was led there and it was there, in the wilderness that Jesus reaffirmed the source of his being and was empowered to take up his true identity. The rest of Jesus' life flowed from this wilderness for out of that ordeal he had the courage to live his life intentionally: as an arrow not as a target.

The wilderness freed Jesus to be himself. It freed him from all attempts to distract him from his true purpose, from hungry craving for things with no power to give him life, from any illusion he might have had that God would make his choices for him. After forty days in the wilderness, Jesus learned to trust the Spirit, the same Spirit that had led him there. In the wilderness Jesus discovered he was made for this… can we?

Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor compares the wilderness to a kind of an Outward Bound for the soul. No one has to sign up for it, but if you do then you give up the illusion that you are in control of your life. You place yourself in the hands of strangers who ask you to do foolhardy things, like walk backwards over a precipice with nothing but a rope around your waist. But this is not the real test. The real test comes when you go solo.

The strangers put you out all by yourself in the middle of nowhere and wish you luck for the next 24 hours. This is when you find out who you are – what you are made of… This is when you find out what you really miss and what you are really afraid of. Some people dream about their favorite food. Some long for a safe room with a door to lock and others just wish they had a pillow, but they all find out what they use to comfort themselves. When all the distractions are gone we find out what we are made of and what our bedrock is…

So you see Lent really is an invitation to an intentional wandering in the wilderness. It is a journey of Olympic proportions. It is a sacred time to create a space to discover our true identity - not only as individuals but as a church - as the Body of Christ. Jesus, in his spiritual vulnerability knew that the word was near him on his lips and in his heart. He had committed himself to loving God with all his heart, with all his soul and with all his strength. In the wilderness Jesus was given the options of understanding where the source of his power was and to live out of this source as his spiritual authority.
        To find out that he was made for this.

So maybe this story is not so much about resisting temptation as about identity. Jesus firmly planted his identity, his soul in the source of his being - the creating and recreating energy we name God. No quick fixes. No power trips. No unconscious living. Jesus claimed the word that was near him. Through and beyond the temptations in the wilderness Jesus established his identity on the power of healing and freedom given by God.

"Lent," comes from an English word meaning "spring"--not just a reference to the crocuses pushing their way out of the ground or the buds decorating the trees but also to the greening of the human soul--pruned with repentance, fertilized with self-reflection, watered with prayer, warmed by the presence of the spirit and each other. Lent is not about punishing myself for being human nor is it about giving up my favorite chocolate bar or taking on religious aerobics. It is about remembering where I come from and to whom I belong… it is about growing my soul more intentionally.

So I invite all of us to step back from the busyness and demands of our modern existence to find out what we are really made of…. Lent is our invitation to wilderness journeying. There will be no easy answers and fast solutions, no ultimate control, no sleeping through one's life expecting God and the angels to take care of it all. It is a pilgrimage with God as the source of our being - for the long haul. Lent calls us to be faithful to God not seduced by worldly kingdoms. Lent calls us to claim responsibility for the ministry and mission we have been given as the Body of Christ.

Perhaps it is only in creating a space within ourselves and
within our church that we will know God,
as the source, the heart, of all we do and say.
Perhaps it is only in journeying through our wilderness
that we will find out:
we really are made for this…
Do you believe?

Print/Download this in Word.doc

All are Welcome!