The Rev. Kristin Krantz, St. James’, Mt. Airy
Lent 1C, 3/6/2022
Deuteronomy 26:1-11, Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16, Romans 10:8b-13, Luke 4:1-13
Gracious God, take our minds and think through them, take our hands and work through them,
take our hearts and set them on fire. Amen.
The word Lent comes from an Old English word for “lengthen” and refers to the gradually lengthening days of late winter and early spring. Over the centuries, Lent evolved into a 40 day period of reflection, repentance, and preparation – not only for Holy Week, but also for the subsequent 50 day celebration of Eastertide.[1]
In the ancient scriptural imagination 40 was both a shorthand way of saying “for a long time,” and a way of resonating with other key 40’s in Israel’s sacred memory: the flood’s 40 days of rain, Moses’ 40 days without food on Mount Sinai, Elijah’s 40 days without food as he journeyed to Mount Horeb, Israel’s 40 years of wilderness wandering.[2]
Jesus’ 40 days of wilderness temptation continued this line, and in Lent we are invited to step into our own 40 day pilgrimage.
It began on Ash Wednesday with the reminder that we are dust, and to dust we shall return – a literal reminder of our mortality. It will end during the Easter Vigil when celebrate the first Eucharist of Easter and the promise of the resurrection.
The journey before us, this yearly pilgrimage we take from death to resurrection, is all about trust – trusting that God’s love is so strong and so complete that nothing, not even death, can keep us from it.
In this way Lent is a season for soulful spring cleaning – practicing the Lenten discipline of self-examination by examining our trust in God and reflecting on how we can strengthen it.
Today’s gospel reading is overflowing with examples of what trust in God looks like.
Our story begins just after Jesus’ baptism. And what happened at his baptism? The heavens opened and a voice from heaven proclaimed that Jesus was God’s beloved.
He trusted that belovedness, and it grounded his entire life and ministry – and even his death and resurrection. What would it look like for us if we trusted our baptism? If we believed in our own belovedness and that the water and oil were indeed outward and visible signs of that inward and spiritual grace? That’s something you might reflect on and pray about this Lent.
After his baptism Jesus was full of the Holy Spirit and trusted her when she led him into the wilderness. The wilderness – that place with no maps, where scarcity is a threat, and where we can feel cut off and alone.
But also the place where we are pulled away from the distractions of everyday life that can be like blinders to what really matters, where our discomfort makes us pay attention in new ways, and where we have to give up on the pretense that we can do it alone.
Jesus trusted that God was with him for those forty days and nights, and through the temptations offered up by the devil.
Those temptations can be summed up with three questions, questions that we would do well to reflect on this Lent: Whom do you trust for your nourishment? Whom do you trust with your service? And whom do you trust to love and care for you?
Jesus responded to each of these questions with, you guessed it, trust. But not blind trust, because that’s not what we’re talking about at all here. The trust Jesus models for us is trust rooted in the wisdom and knowledge of all who came before him in faith.
That’s why he responded to every temptation put before him with scripture. He called on the experience of his faith community, gleaned over centuries, to ground and re-center himself. He knew that he wasn’t truly alone, but that he could fall back on the great cloud of witnesses, what we would call the communion of saints, to guide him in the way of God’s love.
We can glean such wisdom from the created world as well. This is the reflection from our Lenten florigraphy card for the First Sunday in Lent:
It’s easy to think of Jesus’ wandering in the desert (or to think of winter, or of Lent, or of any lean time) as something that’s gone wrong. But for plants that grow from bulbs, like tulips and daffodils, these times are necessary. They have leaves and flowers for a few short weeks, and use that time to make and store food for the other eight months of the year. And without a period of cold, they won’t emerge from their bulbs again. For them, winter isn’t a bug in the program, it’s a feature.
For us, Lent and wilderness time aren’t bugs in the church calendar and our lives, they are integral parts that teach us how to re-center our lives through self-examination and repentance.
And so as we make our Lenten journey from death to resurrection, this 40 day pilgrimage of trust, let us reflect on how God is present in our lives, sustaining, loving, and trusting us to respond with faithfulness. Amen.
[1] Salt Project Lectionary Commentary for Lent 1.
[2] Ibid.