The First Sunday in Lent
“Then the devil left him, and suddenly angels came and waited on him.”
As many of you know, Shannon and I are Scout leaders with the local Beaver Colony (that’s 18 energetic 5-7 year olds) that meet on Wednesdays. A few weeks ago we joined Cubs, Scouts, and other Beavers from Summerside and Kensington for an evening camp-fire in St. Eleanors.
We did the usual Scouting stuff – opening and closing ceremonies, songs, skits, cheers, games, hot chocolate and so on. At one point, the Cub leader asked us to participate in something that brought me right back to my own time as a kid around campfires at our local Scout camp in Nova Scotia, something I had forgotten all about and that even I do not do enough of – he asked us to sit in silence for 30 seconds and simply to listen.
As you can imagine with a group of 30 or so kids 5-13 years old, the silence didn’t last all that long. We maybe made it to 10 seconds before whispering began, then snickering, laughter, talking, and it all fell apart.
But for a few fleeting seconds we managed it, and we listened. And even the kids when asked what they heard picked up on noises that might otherwise have gone unnoticed – birds, wind, distant voices, cracks from the fire. Noise and distraction is a thing from which it is very hard, these days especially, to liberate ourselves. We are all – kids especially – presented with so many temptations to preoccupy and distract ourselves that there is something we find deeply uncomfortable about doing nothing, about just sitting in silence and listening. It’s why you can find countless apps on your phone that teach you all about how to meditate; at their core the practices they teach are all about letting thoughts drift through our mind like passing clouds so that we can sit and think and do nothing.
And while I could wax on about the impact of media consumption in young people and ever shortening attention spans, the reality is that it’s affecting us all. The studies show that kids are reading less than they ever have before, but at the same time I am not able to read as I could when I was a kid, it always seems far more tedious than the instant hit you get from watching something short and funny on your phone. And yet I long so much for retreat time and for silence both interior and exterior.
We all need, from time to time, the clarifying company of silence and solitude. Some find it standing waist deep in a river in November with a fly-rod in hand, others at the top of a mountain after a hike, in a monastery, others in the arctic and many others in the desert. In the early centuries of the church there was an enormous exodus of Christians away from the busy, bustling cities where faith was secondary to pleasure and the rigours of daily life, and into the desert where silence could be found. Many of these early Christians would go on to be known as the Desert Monastics, or Desert Fathers and Mothers, people who went to war against their passions and their desires, their comfort and the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil to try and live with a singular focus on God.
We have volumes of their wisdom and sayings, things passed down from their students and those who visited them, wisdom that was gained through deep contemplation and intimacy with God in isolation and quiet. The sayings are often pithy and short, but give much to contemplate. In one story a brother monk in a sketis – a small community of hermits – is known to have sinned and so they called Abba Moses, the Father of the community, to a meeting with him but he refused to go. They sent another brother to call on the elder to come and sit in judgement of the brother monk, and reluctantly he stood and filled a leaky jug with water and carried it with him over his shoulder as he walked. When he arrived the brothers asked why he had taken a leaky jug of water, and he told them that his own faults and sins are left in his wake throughout his life, invisibly, just like the water falling to the sand – and so who is he to come and sit in judgement of another? The message of the monks is always that we ought first to look at ourselves and the way that the things which we accuse others of, or find frustrating or infuriating about them may already be a part of us, that every fault we see in others we are equally guilty of, and that care of neighbour is paramount, “Our life and death is with our neighbour,” said St. Antony the Great, “If we win our brother we win God, if we cause him to stumble we sin against Christ.”
This season of Lent is meant to be like a journey into and through a desert for us, a time of contemplation and self-reflection, of thinking about the ways that we have caused others to stumble, or the ways we’ve failed one another in love not, as I said on Ash Wednesday, so that we feel shame or self-loathing (this is not what sin is), but so that we can come to understand the gift of God’s forgiveness and how that forgiveness can change our lives, our love, and our desire now.
In the Gospel today Jesus is led into the wilderness, the desert, to face temptation by the devil. Now temptation is a funny thing, and too often I think we hear it in a moralized tone. That is – and to draw on a sermon I preached several weeks ago – we think about sin simply as the things we ought not do, things which God is deeply preoccupied with disliking, and temptation is the urge we get to do them. I think temptation is a bit like that moment around the campfire; we are faced with a chance for stillness inside and out, for attentive listening together in community, but yet there is this nagging part of us, this urge to break the silence, to not live with what is slightly jarring and uncomfortable and instead to crack a joke or to laugh or to natter about something unimportant.
For Jesus, the temptation beneath the three he was faced with in the desert were, fundamentally, the temptation to think and believe, “my will be done,” and not, “thy will be done.” This is always the temptation for us – a lack of trust in God’s presence, providence, and care. But in a more daily and insidious way our temptation, like at the fire, is often to just fill the silence with us, with our cares and concerns, with meaningless, temporal things instead of turning our minds to the things eternal and unchanging. Sometimes we need to go alone and sit in silence and solitude, to face our innermost thoughts free of the distractions of the world.
But this is what the desert does to us, as it did for Abba Moses. Jesus enters into the silence of the desert and we enter into the desert of Lent to learn about ourselves, and to learn most especially what we are not – that is, God. Which has the funny result of helping us to learn a great deal more about what we are and whose we are: that is, God’s.
The desert, as we learn today, is a place full of dangers and temptations – it can be scary to face ourselves and our shame – but it’s also the place where we come to know most truly our own weakness and our identity as dependent on God.
This is why I encourage you to give up something or take up something in Lent, something that will discomfit you and make this time a bit more like a desert and a bit less like everyday life, so that the wilderness and silence can clarify your vision and your spirit just a little more than normal, and that we can all be freed from the illusion that we are enough or that we are not God’s.
