1st
Sunday of Lent
Again this year for lent I have decided
to give up eating sweets and most things with added sugar. Candy, cookies, soft
drinks, juices are all out for me for
the next forty days – Now, I am always amazed at how much my body craves these sugary foods when I give them up for Lent. I almost wonder if there is some sort of
biochemical addiction that we humans have to sugar.
During the first few days of my sugar
fast- I often experience a low grade dull headache, I have a hard time not thinking of
sweets and notice them at every turn. Just the other day at a meeting I found
myself staring at the bowl of Hershey Kisses that kept making its way around
the table- as the meeting is going on, I
even began to wonder if any of Kisses were dark chocolate- now I really don’t like dark chocolate, but I
began to think that maybe dark chocolate doesn't have sugar. Googled it, it does.
Perhaps though what is most unusual
about my Lenten sugar fast is that I will even dream about sweets.
Just two or three nights ago, I found
myself dreaming about being at the conference. During the lunch break at the conference I am invited
into this wood paneled library, a place that you might sip brandy and smoke a
good cigar in a high back leather chair, but this library has table upon table covered with every
delectable pastry, every dessert you can
imagine -strawberry shortcake, the strawberries glistening in the light. The tables are covered with Eclairs, and brownies and cakes, cannoli. Hundreds of dessert and wouldn't you think
that in my dreams I would partake- no way.
My brain won’t go there, it won’t
even let me have one-little -bite. I think
it’s revenge for starving it of sugar.
My friend, Father Sammy Wood said in his
Ash Wednesday sermon a few days ago, that
“we abstain from
food or sweets or alcohol, things that give us pleasure, to help us remember…
[that] our real hunger is for God [ that our real hunger is for God].”[1]
But we are not only are invited into a self imposed wilderness
experience--the church plunges us into the wilderness each and every Sunday
morning in Lent. Our worship changes--our
liturgies take on a different flavor, a more penitential, a more somber,
reflective flavor.
We stop saying alleluia, we sing less, and spend more time
with our mouths clamped shut in silence, we roll through things like the five
page Great Litany-- beseeching God to change us, beseeching God to hear us-- we
put confession-- front and center right
smack dab at the beginning of the service [that comes next week] We recite the ten commandments.---We use lent
to examine all the nooks and crannies of our lives-examining those things
tarnish the image of God deep within us- in Lent
we work to bring to light the sin that
draw us from God.
And we do this not to make ourselves feel bad, but we do this
with every intention of starting over,
of releasing those things that shackles and imprisons us so that we
might make a new beginning, so that we find a new life, a more whole life.
The wilderness of Lent is not meant to be easy- look at the
story of Christ for a moment—40 days in the wilderness, 40 days without
food, there were days where all Jesus wants to do is
eat the tiniest morsel of bread and what happens- the devil arrives with loaves
of freshly baked bread-- the devil arrives and says to Jesus you can have it
all- all you need to do is just walk away, turn from God.
But Christ doesn't - And when it’s all over, when the forty
days are up Luke says- Jesus was famished, he exhausted. Luke doesn't note it, but both Matthew and
Mark in their gospels tell that the wilderness experience was such a harrowing
for Jesus that God has to send angels to
care for to Jesus, to drag him home and put him to bed.
The wilderness experience reminds us that when everything is
stripped away from our lives, when everything is left behind, what remains is
God. The wilderness is a place that reminds us that we
desperately need and hunger for God in our lives. The wilderness is a place that we go during
Lent, so that when we find ourselves in the wildernesses of life, when illness knocks
us down, when addiction overtakes our being, when the bottom falls out from
under us, when crutches of life are ripped from us-- the wilderness show us
that God will send his angels, that we can trust that God will stand with us.
I invite you in the name Church to the observance of a Holy
Lent. I invite you take some time over the next forty day to dip your toe into
the waters of wilderness, by fasting and self denial, by giving something up,
by examining your lives and repenting of those things that are not of God, by
reading and meditating on God’s Holy Scripture.
Wade into the waters of the wilderness, it won’t be easy, but
God will be there with you and God will give his angels charge over you.
AMEN
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