Lent and Angels

1st Sunday of Lent

A few years ago, for Lent I decided to give up eating sweets and most anything that had added sugar. Candy, cookies, soft drinks, were all out for the forty days of Lent – Now, the amazing thing was that I went through some  physical withdrawal as my body detoxed from sugar.

During the first few days of my sugar fast—a low grade dull headache, and at time felt intense cravings for sugary food.  I even thought about sugar and candy more than I normally  might have----I can remember being at a meeting and being mesmerized by the bowl of Hershey kisses that kept making its way around the table.  

Perhaps though what is most unusual about my Lenten sugar fast is that I would even dream about sweets.   

I remembering having a very vivid dream during that time. I had a dream that I was at a conference. During the lunch break at the conference I am invited into this wood paneled library, a place where men might go after dinner to sip brandy and smoke cigars, but in this library there were no cigars or brandy—instead table upon table with every dessert you can imagine -strawberry shortcake, the strawberries glistened in the light.  The tables are covered with  Eclairs, and brownies and cakes, cannoli.   Hundreds of desserts and wouldn't you think that in my dreams I would partake- no  a chance 

My brain wouldn’t go there, it won’t even let me have one-little -bite.    I think it was my brain’s revenge for starving it of sugar.

During this season of Lent the church invites us into these self-imposed wilderness experiences- we are invited to fast, to give something up for the next forty days.  Some of us will go for the usual suspects, chocolate,  beer, sweets—other will take a different route-- I had  a friend who  one lent  gave up cynicism – others I know  have given up gossip –and a  popular one these days is to give up social media or Facebook for the next forty days.

I had a colleague who once said, “we abstain from food or sweets or alcohol, or things that give us pleasure, to help us remember… [that] our real hunger is for God [ that our real hunger is for God].”

But we are not only are invited into our 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 tone, a more somber, reflective flavor.  

We stop saying alleluia, we put the confession-- front and center, right smack dab at the beginning of the service--- 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 reflect on and repent of the sins, those things 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 us so that we might make a new beginning,   so that we find a new life, a more  full life.

The wilderness of Lent is not meant to be easy-  Let’s look at the story of Christ for a moment—40 days in the wilderness, 40 days without food,  I would imagine 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 the forty days are all over the gospel writer Luke says- Jesus was famished, he exhausted.  In Matthew’s Gospel, the story I just read,  he tell us  that the wilderness experience was such a harrowing time for Jesus ---that God  sends angels to care for 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 terrible illness rocks our world, when addiction overtakes our being, when the bottom falls out from under us, when crutches of life are ripped  away from us-- the wilderness show us that God will send his angels, that we can trust that God will stand with us.

 Today in the name of the church I invite you 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 the wilderness, by fasting and self-denial, by giving something up or taking something on--- by examining your life, by 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