The First Sunday in Lent

"The Lenten Desert"

The Rev. Stephen Elkins-Williams

Some thirty years ago, I had the privilege of helping to lead a pilgrimage to Israel. Our five weeks there included a trip into the Sinai desert. Bouncing along in a jeep for hours through rocky terrain where there were no roads, we neophytes felt very dependent on our guide. Nothing familiar comforted us – no road signs, no other traffic, no signs of other human beings at all, just dry, arid landscape promising nothing ahead beyond the next outcropping. We found it eerily beautiful in some ways, but fearful and abhorrent in others.

Lent is our time in the desert. Like it or not, the Spirit drives us along with Jesus into the wilderness where nothing is familiar, where our usual coping mechanisms are insufficient, where we quickly find that we are not in charge. We are not the first, of course. Not only did Jesus precede us, just after his divine Sonship was revealed at his baptism. The Israelites themselves, after being delivered from slavery to Pharaoh, wrestled in the desert with their identity as God’s people, fully accepting the mysteries of that demanding reality before finally being brought into the Promised Land. Any true schooling in God’s ways seems to lead through the desert. That is where, in the words of today’s psalm, God “teaches sinners in his way.” There God “guides the humble in doing right and teaches his way to the lowly.”

On our desert excursion, I remember suddenly coming across two young men trying to walk their way through this wilderness. They gratefully accepted a ride after draining almost to the bottom the canteen of water we offered them. Our guide was barely restrained in his contempt for their arrogance in thinking they could conquer the desert on their own with no help or resources to call on. He lectured them as if they were his own children, as well he should. Their very lives were at stake.

It is one thing to be driven into the desert by the Spirit, to learn by humbling experience that you are not self-sufficient but that you receive all that you have from the hand of God. It is quite another to tempt fate, to think that rules do not apply to you, that your own strength is enough to take on any challenge that offers itself. Desert experiences come along often enough without seeking them out. Someone dear to us dies. We lose our job. Someone cherished by us betrays us. We fail in a major responsibility. We find our life altered by our or another’s addiction. Our economic security becomes shaky. Loneliness threatens to drown us. Our health or our parents’ or our children’s is no longer dependable as it once was. When the Spirit seems to drive us into the wilderness, as it did Jesus, we learn to let go of control and to seek God’s presence and grace. In the midst of the wild beasts, we allow the angels to minister to us.

Our goal thirty years ago in daring the bleak hospitality of the desert was to stay at a Bedouin oasis, rising at 3:00 a.m. to climb the two hours to the top of Mount Sinai, where Moses is believed to have received the ten commandments, and to hike back down to be out of the dehydrating sun well before noon. Later we toured the centuries-old St. Catherine’s monastery there, carved into the side of the mountain. I vividly recall an ancient room piled high with the skulls of hundreds of monks who had lived there. Because of the pervasiveness of rock, they had to reuse over and over shallow graves for those who died, collecting and preserving their bones when a grave was again needed.

Our times in the desert remind us of our mortality. It is simply a given. As we heard on Ash Wednesday, we are dust and to dust we shall return. When all is good and abundant and we live as in a garden, that context fades. But the stark reality of the desert, where nothing is easy and all is hard, deepens the awareness of that undeniable mystery within us. Death does pervade life.

But ultimately it does not overcome it. Our Christian faith teaches us that no matter how many deserts we pass through, life overcomes death. No matter how arid our landscapes might get, God’s bountiful life is the ultimate reality. Even on a Lenten Sunday, with its focus on the desert and on temptation, our ultimate proclamation is of Jesus’ triumph, of God’s covenant with us, of the nurturing waters of baptism, which assuredly bring life and prosperity and resurrection to God’s people.

The evening we returned to Jerusalem from the Sinai Desert thirty years ago, I wrote in my journal, “I am glad to be out of the desert. It was beautiful in many ways, but so stark and so barren. It would be choking to try and live there.”

When we find ourselves in the desert, facing the wild beasts and aspects of life we would rather be free of, it is good to remember that life is more than the desert. Time there always comes to an end. God is with us and angels minister to us, and the Spirit will drive us back out of the desert once again.