Good
morning. I’m Gary Hall, and I work
at Washington National Cathedral.
We had to cancel our first two services this morning because of weather,
so believe me when I say that I am really happy to be here in Palm Desert
today. Indeed, it is a joy to be here with you at St. Margaret’s
this weekend for many reasons. As a Californian temporarily marooned in
the east, it is always personally renewing to be back in God’s country, and the
desert is a place I have always loved. I’m old enough to remember coming to
Palm Springs with my parents, staying at the El Mirador Hotel, going to the
Racquet Club, and taking in dinner shows at the Chi Chi in the 1950s. But
enough geriatric reminiscence.
It’s also a pleasure to spend some time with my friend Lane Hensley, your
rector. Lane and I have known each other for about a decade. As a
graduate of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, Lane served on the school’s
board during my time as dean, and he was a great personal and professional
support to me and to the school community when we went through a hard but
visionary change process several years ago. I am so glad that he and this
great parish found each other. And Kathleen Dale has been a close friend
of my wife Kathy’s and mine since our clerical collars were brand new. I
still regularly rely on Kathleen’s insight and wisdom as I continue to surf on
the wave of a late life career in the church.
And finally: it’s great to be here because today we all celebrate the
ministry of David Rhodes, your new vocational deacon. In what follows I
won’t say much about the diaconate, but as we begin Lent together it’s
important to remember just how vitally deacons make Jesus real for us in our
worship and ministry. Deacons represent Jesus by reading the Gospel,
visiting the sick, and serving the world. The best thing that could
happen to us this Lent is for some of David’s diaconate to rub off on all of us.
Today is the First Sunday in Lent, and our Gospel for this morning pushes us
right out into the moving flow of the season:
And the Spirit immediately drove [Jesus] out into the
wilderness. He was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan; and he
was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him. [Mark 1: 12-13]
The word our Bible renders as “wilderness” is the Greek word ἔρημον
an adjective meaning “lonely” or “solitary”, and when used as a noun it can
also be translated “desert”. So, we’re in luck. Here we are, on the
First Sunday in Lent, imitating Jesus’s 40 days in the wilderness. And,
like him, we are also in the desert! Hey, we’re already half-way
there! We’ve got this Lent thing licked. Just go to the desert,
spend 40 days there, and you’ll be ready for Easter! It’s a snowbird’s
spiritual paradise.
But not so fast. The desert in Jesus time was anything but a restful
retreat. So far as we know, there was no El Paseo in Galilee—no spa treatments,
mud baths, outlet shopping, or rounds of golf. The desert in Jesus’s day
was indeed a wilderness—a scary place. Unlike you and me, ancient people
did not love nature in its rawest form. They loved the city because it
was a place where nature’s chaos had been brought into order. For them
the desert, the wilderness, was a zone of disorder, a place whose outer chaos
mirrored the inner turmoil marked by the confusion of human drives and
passions.
In 2015 you and I come to the desert to find renewal in the hills, the cholla,
and the sunsets. In 30 A.D. people like Jesus went into the desert to
confront something wild and dangerous in themselves. “He was in the wilderness
for forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the
angels waited on him.”
From its earliest days, the Christian community has seen Lent—the forty days
before Easter—as a time patterned on Jesus’s forty days in the desert.
It’s a time, as our Ash Wednesday liturgy reminds us, of “self-examination and
repentance”; a time of “prayer, fasting, and self-denial”; a time for “reading
and meditating on God’s holy Word.”
So, we might put this morning’s questions this way: what, for us, is Lent
in our personal, modern desert about? How might we use this time as Jesus
used it, to go where he has gone?
Year-in and year-out I return each Lent to Thomas Merton’s great collection of
desert father and mother sayings, The Wisdom of the Desert. In the first days of Christianity, men and
women imitated Jesus by moving out from the safety of the city to the solitude
of the deserts in Palestine, Syria, and Egypt. They went as he did on a
wilderness journey of self-discovery. If you know only the civilized part
of yourself; if you pretend your unconscious, with all its conflicting desires
and drives, does not exist; then you never really come to know yourself.
And if you don’t know yourself, you cannot accept yourself; worse, you cannot
accept the depth of God’s love for you. So, as Thomas Merton tells us,
What [they] sought most of all was their own true self, in
Christ. And in order to do this, they had to reject the false, formal self, fabricated
under social compulsion in “the world.” They sought a way to God that was
uncharted and freely chosen, not inherited from others who had mapped it out
beforehand. They sought a God whom they alone could find, not one who was
“given” in a set, stereotyped form by somebody else. (Thomas Merton, The
Wisdom of the Desert. New York: New Directions, 1960, pp. 5-7)
Jesus went out in the wilderness, the
desert, on a forty-day journey of self-discovery. The desert fathers and
mothers did likewise. The point of their journeys was not only to come to
know and accept themselves; the point of their journeys was also to come to
know and experience something that they uniquely had to learn through
themselves and tell us all about God.
As Merton says, "There was nothing to
which they had to “conform” except the secret, hidden, inscrutable will of God
which might differ very notably from one cell to another!” They came to learn
not only their own truth but the particular truth that God had to tell
them. Like us, they lived in a culture of conformity and received
wisdom. Unlike us, they were not battered by thousands of messages a day
telling them what to purchase, how to think, and what to desire. Their time of
self- and divine-discovery in the wilderness empowered them to see
themselves as they were, flawed, fragile, chaotic, yes, but also loved
accepted and uniquely precious in the sight of the God who was continually
making, loving, and sustaining them even in the internal chaos of their
personal deert.
In his great and terrifying poem, “Desert
Places”, Robert Frost meditates on coming to know yourself in the experience of
emptiness. He talks of “Snow falling and night falling fast, oh fast” and the
way snow creates real loneliness, what he calls a “blanker whiteness of
benighted snow/With no expression, nothing to express.” He sees in that outward
loneliness something that reflects his inner desert back to him. And then
he tells us in a final, chilling stanza:
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars - on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
Between stars - on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
A great and scary poem, true, but here’s the difference. Skeptic that he is,
Robert Frost looks at the empty, snowy field and sees nothing but his own
internal emptiness. Jesus goes out into the desert wilderness and, as we
hear it told, “the angels waited on him.” How can two people have such a
different experience of the desert? They can, because they had radically
different interior lives. Jesus knew who he was and who he belonged to.
As Mark’s Gospel tells us, before Jesus went out there he heard God say this:
“You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” [Mark 1:11]
So here we are, starting our forty days in the desert wilderness, embarked on a
journey of self- and divine-discovery. What will we see look in
there: an empty field reflecting back our own internal absence? Or the
angels waiting on us? As we set forth on this journey, let’s each and
together remember the words that Jesus heard said to him by his Father:
“You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
By all means, uses this forty days to know
and love and accept even those parts of yourself you don’t know or think you
want to know. But as you examine yourself in all your complexity,
remember God’s words to Jesus: ”You are my child, the beloved. With
you I am well pleased.” God shows us to ourselves so that we can know and
love ourselves, and in knowing and loving ourselves we can thereby come to know
and love others and the world.
So , this season, let’s all make the
only Lenten journey we can authentically make, the pilgrimage
within. Let’s go into that interior desert knowing what Jesus knew, that
we are God’s beloved, God’s children. With you and me God is well
pleased. Let’s go in there both in solitude and community, with Jesus and
each other, aware that both blessings and surprises await. And remember,
as that guy used to say each week on Hill Street Blues, “Let’s be careful out there.” Amen.
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