First Sunday in Lent A

When I was at Clergy Conference this past week,

Archdeacon Gail Winslow was talking about a week-long fast he did years ago with Father Adam Trambley.

I have read about people doing week long fasts, typically with week long silent retreats,

it seems like a bit crazy. 

To not eat or talk for a whole week?

One on its own seems bad enough.

But Archdeacon Gail said

that it wasn't too bad, eventually your body moves past the hunger pains and into detoxification mode.

The problem then, he said, is that you stink.

All the gunk your body has stored up inside of you

gets thrown out

and he said he felt like he needed to shower every couple of hours.

I myself have never fasted that long.

I did the 30-hour famine as a teenager.

One year for Lent, I fasted on Wednesday and Fridays.

But the idea of a week long fast and cleaning out the body is interesting.

We do tend to store up, both inside of us

and around us,

junk we think we need or wish we could use or just simply stuff we cannot deal with right away

and we need those times of spring cleaning

in order to deeply cleanse ourselves.

Jesus took a 40 day fast.

And the way it is written in the Gospel of Matthew makes it seem so simple.

He went into the wilderness and fasted for forty days and nights.

And then Satan visited him.

I would have been tempted... well, tempted not to go into the wilderness, 

tempted to walk home right when I got there, 

tempted to eat after about 6 hours... 

tempted at every step of the way.

I doubt it was really that easy for Jesus.

But during that time Jesus changed his focus in life.

Whatever business he had attended to

as a carpenter taking up his father Joseph's shop

or a family or whatever he was doing before he was baptized,

this is the turn around for him.

The deep cleanse.

From here, he sets out on a new mission.

On God's mission.

To share the Good News.

Lent is a season of wilderness,

a time to do some deep cleanse of what is inside of us

It can be really hard to do so with some kind of guide or tool

we can get sucked into the abyss and find ourselves without an anchor

but Jesus goes there with us and we have him to be with us.

There are many tools,

spiritual disciplines, and guides

which can help us on our journey

the idea is that by the time these forty days are up

we can know, in the deep seated parts of us,

in our minds, our bodies, and our hearts

that what Jesus does for us is out of love for us

and we can be grateful and rejoice in what God does for Jesus

and for us through him.

We cannot fool ourselves by saying it doesn't matter what we do.

Jesus died on a cross because of what we do,

so what we do definitely matters.

We cannot fool ourselves in thinking that if we scratch the surface we are doing enough

Lent should be a journey

one in which you wished you were better prepared

or had a figurative another pair of socks

or could take a shower more than once a day.

Just as sometimes you have to have conflict in your relationships to grow,

sometimes you have to have conflict within yourself in order to grow.

Becoming awake to the gifts which God is offering to us requires

taking a hard look at what we are doing to stop ourselves from accepting those gifts.

As a community, we have been offered some gifts

and sometimes it seems we do not want to receive them.

We need to be mindful of what we do and how it will impact the future.

We need to be mindful of what we do and how we are responding to the working of the Holy Spirit in our life together.

Many of the things we pile up inside and around ourselves 

are the things pertaining to our brokenness.

Our mistakes, our broken relationships, the things we have not forgiven ourselves for,

the responses to our sins, and their consequences.

While the church has latched onto the idea of seven basic sins,

since the fourth century when Evagrius Ponticus wrote about the seven evil thoughts he found plaguing him:

Pride, envy, anger, lust, gluttony, sloth, and greed,

the Enneagram says there are nine, the seven with vanity and fear added in,

no matter how many basic sins there are, 

We all tend to fall into temptations of one sort or another. 

Typically by our personalities we are prone to one or another. 

Not just in the regular sense, but in other sense as well.

Over-procrastination can be sloth, glutton for overindulgence in many ways

Anger, even when it is always repressed. 

Vanity, not just in image but in success or a specific area of life.

We are tempted by these things.

Transformation doesn't mean we get rid of our temptation, 

we can cleanse ourselves from the vestiges of what we were tempted by before,

we can learn and grow,

but then our temptations grow with us,

and as we do, we know more fully the ways in which we are tempted.

Sin is what draws us away from the love of God.

Anything which gets between us and God is sin.

Lent helps us see things from a new perspective.  

It helps us detoxify

Strip away all the outer layers of what is going on in the world 

and expose the heart, expose the mind, expose the body.

So we can take a good long look at the truth.

Sometimes we have to realize that evil speaks scripture, 

affirmations, and praise, to stoke our belief in things which are not true.

I know that deep inside of me is a frightened little girl wondering if she is loved, 

I know that deep inside of me are hurts which have not healed, 

wounds which have not been forgiven, 

relationships which are built on quick sand, and as long as things stay in their status quo, 

things will remain.

But God always calls us to go deeper. 

Deeper into our selves. 

Lent is a hard season. 

But its a very authentic and honest season. 

It calls us to go out into the wilderness to look at our temptations and recognize them. 

To say, Yes, I am greedy because I hoard other people's affections 

or I am envious of other people's attention 

or I am vain because I want people to see me in a certain way.

We have to experience what we see, know, feel, and think 

to be able to come to the truth. 

We have to actually be awake and alive. 

One of the ideas behind fasting, is not simply that you are sacrificing yourself by going without food, 

you are also waking yourself up to feelings inside of you. 

You can't fast without feeling hungry.

And once you allow yourself to feel hungry, you can start feeling other things. 

Your body, the way your mind thinks, your soul crying out in longing.

Fasting from other things tries to wake us up to systems we are a part of 

which are not the way we want them to be.  

Whether you fast from food or drink or Facebook or reading dirty novels

whether you take on prayer or a new spiritual practice this Lent,

My hope and pray for you is that you are cleansed

inside and out.

So that you can go into Easter 

in awe and wonder at what Jesus has done for us,

with lots of room in your heart and mind and body 

for God's Holy Spirit to grow new life.

Amen.