March 17, 2002, Fifth Sunday in Lent

 

This past Friday, as we often do, Cheryl and I decided we’d take in a movie and grab a bite afterwards. I especially wanted time away since I had received notice earlier in the day that a former honors student of mine had died of a brain tumor. She was 25, married a little over a year. Her name was Tammy.

So out we went to "Hart’s War," which is quite a good film. Afterwards we found that the place we wanted to go to was too long a wait, so we went to Perkins. All was well until four high school kids came in and sat in the next booth. Now, I remember my high-school days with great fondness, but their behavior was outlandish. Laughing, poking, jumping up and down in their seats. At one point, one fellow turned his hat sideways, jumped up and down and screeched and scratched himself like a chimp. “Well,” I thought to myself, “Darwin was right after all.” Again, the perennial question occurred to me as I watched their inconsiderate behavior, “how do we become wise, engaging, thoughtful persons who know how to behave skillfully in a wide range of circumstances? Like Tammy.”

The short answer is the depths and breadth of Lenten experiences. Lent is the time of preparation for Holy Week, leading up to Easter. For many, it is a time to give up something. Feigning that it would be a great sacrifice, I even suggested to our Sr. Warden that we consider giving up committee meetings during Lent next year, but I fear she saw through my suggestion. And Lent has such bad public relations! A week ago, Cheryl and I watched Chocolat again (an early anniversary gift from her to me, I think, though that’s rather like me buying her a hard drive for our anniversary!). Once again, neither Lent nor the church came off looking too good. The byline of the movie seems to be “live a little!” and surely Lent doesn’t encourage that! Is Lent about dying a little? Who wants that?

Abode of the Desert

Lent owes much of its self-denying spirit to the forty days Jesus spent in the desert preparing for his ministry. We say he was tempted there, but a more accurate translation of the text may be "tested." The Jews viewed the desert as the abode of demons, especially that part of the desert where winds would howl around tall, forbidding stone. It must have been terrifying at night: dark, looming shapes, unearthly wailing of wind, movements of who knows what. Deserts and the dry bones of our Ezekiel passage, in fact, seem to go together.

When the Hebrews were led from Egypt to the Promised Land, they refused to take on the task of entering and taking the land. The ancient story tells us God forced them to ponder their attitudes for forty years in the desert. Lent, like the Hebrews' hard lesson, is bound up with themes of desert, death and purification. Maybe Chocolat has it right; let’s give Lent the old heave ho and live a little! Forty as a time period, in fact, appears often in Biblical stories—often as a period of estrangement or distance or separation from that which is most valuable. A contemporary movie that I will not dignify with its names has a view of 40 days of a kind of deprivation I will not identify. Culturally, at least, we seem convinced that 40 days is a long time!

The Son of God in the desert with the demons. What an image. When Jesus entered the desert, he left behind all the expectations of others, all the hopes, all the illusions. It was just Jesus, the presence of God in the mountains, and the Spirit beckoning in the wind. But in solitude, demons often come. It is interesting to read the reflections of desert monks. You would think it would be all spiritual bliss. Not so! Frequently, they write of the howling demons who roam the land in search of prey. C.S. Lewis, when he had completed Screwtape Letters, reported that he was exhausted. Lent is about confronting the demons that haunt our lives.

Illusions and Dread

Deserts give rise to mirages. I have always liked the word illusion. We are given to lots of illusions. We think we understand God, we think we know ourselves and those around us. We plan our lives and are shocked when these plans fall through. We try to impose our wills on God or even say we know God’s plans. What is real and what is an illusion? In the desert, Jesus had no illusions of his own to face and destroy. He did not come to bribe us with earthly bread, or astonish us with miraculous feats. In Lent, Jesus strives to free us from our illusions.

The desert experience is also about deprivation. For many people, however, deprivation is a great evil, and to be avoided at all costs. The chocolate cream puffs of Chocolat are perenially seductive. In deprivation, we discover that we are not all-powerful. We are slaves to our appetites, to the opinions of others, to pleasure. Ours is the pill-popping society, both legal and illegal pills. We cannot bear growing old, so we exercise furiously. I’ve noticed a couple of grey hairs lately and I have decided, “ah that’s just the mirror!” But confronting the harsh truths of the desert can strip away some of the illusions and give us a glimpse of the unvarnished truth of who and what we are.

During Lent, we have the opportunity to hear voices that are usually lost in frenzied, meaningless talk. We can enter into a private desert even in the midst of a world drowning in aspirations for wealth and face our own demons. Lent is about deserts and demons that force unusual honesty.

Thomas Merton, the monk mystic who died when a short in his fan electrocuted him, wrote about a kind of "dread." It is the nagging sense that we have missed something important or that we have somehow been untrue to what we are called to be. It may feel like a crisis of faith, as though we doubted God. In reality, doubt often originates in the deserts of our lives.

This "dread" is heightened by the fact that the God beyond our imaginings is so close to us, although we often do not recognize him. Thoughts cross our minds about this, but we push them away. Perhaps as you hear this you are thinking, "I'm not that clueless. I have faith. I know God personally." Is that true? God knows us intimately; we strain to glimpse through all the deserts we create to the God who is closer than our heartbeats. Lent is about honest listening.

During Lent, we are called to establish what’s important. Consider: after death, how will we view our favorite possessions: homes, cars, even guitars! That guitar over there is my prized guitar of all time; yet somebody else will eventually own it. As our bodies rot or are consumed by the fires of the crematorium, there will be no more illusions about the value of perfect skin or beautiful cars or fine guitars. As others line up to claim our possessions, our possessions will reveal their true value. Lent asks, what is real and what is illusory in our lives?

When we stand in judgment before God, we will have no illusions about our academic accomplishments, the place we lived, the size of our bank statement. All will be laid bare, and there will be no more hypocrisy, no more lies, no more self-spun illusions. Lent is the time to begin the honest work of determining what is real and what is an illusion.

God is in Our Midst

But for all this, whatever else Christianity is about, it is about hope. In the Orthodox liturgy, we repeatedly hear, "God is in our midst." Sometimes the deserts seem endless, the winds howl, and God seems to have allowed the demons free reign. But whatever else Christianity is about, it is about promise. In the face of deserts and the demons who roam those deserts, the laughter of the caustic, the plans of those who would hurt us, our hope is predicated on promises. God’s word, Isaiah assures us, does not rest until the promises are made good.

When we have abandoned our illusions and self-deceptions, we become ready for the grace that transcends and transforms all deserts. When Jesus had faced all the desert had to offer, when the demons had been allowed their day, the angels came to take care of him. In fact, as we come face to face with the wind-blown desert that is Holy Week, we can bet the meaning of our lives that the God of Easter has made full provision for us.