A Lent 3 BFC
2017
Exodus 17:1-7
March 19, 2017
There
are Biblical stories or teachings I will preach from again and again because I
believe we must discern part of our tradition that require our focus and
emphasis. As many of you know, this is
why I will preach from the Beatitudes again and again. The Beatitudes are the reversal of a world
gone mad with violence, arrogance, and injustice.
Also
today, we arrive at one of those great Scriptural stories that has a long
history and invites us to a greater spiritual depth as we engage its rich
tradition. The Wilderness or Desert
Story always heads up the beginning of Lent as the Spirit drives Jesus out into
the wilderness to fast for 40 days to mirror the story of the Children of
Israel remaining in the wilderness or desert for 40 years where they struggled
with the basic needs of food and water.
Lent becomes that time when we work on our spiritual rigor and become
more focused on the primary Christian disciplines or practices of prayer,
almsgiving, and, of course, fasting.
Spiritual teacher, Christine Valters Paintner, describes it this way,
The word for desert in Greek is eremos and literally means “abandonment” and is the term from which we derive the word “hermit.” The desert was a place of coming
face to face with loneliness and death. Your very existence is threatened
in the desert. You can only face up to yourself and to your temptations in life
which distract you from a wide-hearted focus on the presence of the sacred in
the world.
The kind of fast drawing me this season isn’t leaving
behind of treats like chocolate or other pleasures. This season I am being
invited to fast from things like “ego-grasping” and noticing when I so
desperately want to be in control, and then yielding myself to a greater wisdom
than my own.
I am called to fast from being strong and always trying to hold it all together, and instead embrace the profound
grace that comes through my vulnerability and tenderness, to allow a great softening this season.
I am called to fast from anxiety and the endless torrent of thoughts which rise up in my mind to
paralyze me with fear of the future, and enter into the radical trust in the abundance at the heart of things, rather than scarcity.
I am called to fast from speed and rushing through my life, causing me to miss the grace shimmering right here in this holy pause.
I am called to fast from multitasking and the destructive energy of inattentiveness to any one thing, so that
I get many things done, but none of them well, and none of them nourishing to me. Instead my practice will become a beholding of each thing, each person, each
moment.
I am called to fast from endless list-making and too many deadlines, and enter into the quiet and listen for what is ripening and unfolding, what is ready to be born.
I am called to fast from certainty and trust in the great mystery of things.
And then perhaps, I will arrive at Easter
and realize those things from which I have fasted I no longer need to take back
on again.[1]
And this is not just how we
are to work out our individual spiritual practice, but how we are to understand
ourselves more deeply as a community and a nation. Ash Wednesday begins with the prophet Joel
calling the whole nation to a fast. Ken
Sehested has written that our practices or disciplines are to:
. . . represent
strategic interventions designed to confront gluttonous appetites—appetites
that are seeded and nursed in ways even the most kindly fail to see. The
deadliest thing about privilege in the midst of privation is that we often are
not even aware of it. Lent’s aim is to disabuse us of such innocence. Not to
molest us (discomforting as it may be) but to amend and befriend us according
to the Beloved Community’s covenant terms.[2]
I would also argue that our collective
disciplines or practices are to give each other hope. As a pastor, you cannot imagine how I am
sustained by your faithful lives as I see you sometimes struggling in the
wilderness, wondering where God is, continuing to act in ways that may seem
nonsensical and futile in a world hell-bent on who has the most toys, who is
the biggest winner, and entertaining ourselves with who can eat the most hot
dogs. (I hear if you stick bun and hot
dog in water, they are easier to wolf down.)
You, in lives that struggle and trudge through times in life absent of
meaning, give me hope for my own journey.
Once
again the Wilderness or Desert story reminds us that our spiritual ancestors
were pilgrims, immigrants and refugees, seeking liberation and salvation in a
promised land. Salvation, in Hebrew,
literally means a broad and spacious land given for community life and conduct.[3] Moses begins the story by asking Pharaoh, for
some Sabbath, to let the Children of Israel go out a three days’ journey into
the wilderness or desert to worship God there.
Pharaoh refuses. Sabbath is
denied. Fasting, in the end, is a
refusal to be a slave, and an acknowledgment that God has appointed rhythms of
rest and celebration for all of us.
The
Wilderness Story does not tell us how life ought to be, it relates how life is,
the way life works. The Wilderness Story
is not a moralistic story about how bad the Children of Israel were in the
wilderness. The Wilderness story holds up a mirror to all of us when we find
ourselves walking in the wilderness, in unfamiliar territory, without the
landmarks we have come to know so well, when we have to depend that God is good
and will daily provide in ways we have never known. And the story says that when we walk in the
wilderness, we are all grumblers and whiners, crybabies and rebels. “Moses, we want to go back to Egypt.”
We
find ourselves fighting against all change, even the change which will benefit
us, because we want to keep things the way they were, no matter how unhealthy
and terrible things were back in Egypt.
Rather than worship the Living God who leads us onward with a fiery
pillar by night, cloud by day, and breaks open the water from the rock in the
wilderness, we find ourselves crying and clamoring for the God who reminds us
of a former time.
The
Hebrew people were liberated from their former lives, lives of slavery and
oppression, but they do not immediately cross over into the promised land. The Hebrew people had to walk 40 years,
Biblical language that is a metaphor for a very long time, 40 years in the
wilderness before they could cross the mucky and messy waters of the Jordan
River and enter into the promised land.
The Guatemalan refugees in Mexico, almost all
of them indigenous Maya people with different languages, different traditions,
and different ways to order community life, used to say that the Children of
Israel had to spend 40 years in the wilderness because it took them that long
to get organized—a reflection of their own struggles to become a political
force that could make demands of the Pharaohs within their own country.
The
Children of Israel end up whining and complaining because they would rather
live in slavery where all the landmarks were familiar and at least there,
there, there in Egypt, they knew where to be fed, where to get food and
water. The Children of Israel would
rather live in slavery and oppression in Egypt than walk in the wilderness
where they wonder whether God will be present and provide for them day by day
by day.
So
when we find our church communities corporately whining and complaining, we
might want to look around and ask if we are in a necessary wilderness. For also remember that the wilderness is the
place where the people learn the rules for how they shall live as the children
of freedom in the promised land. The
wilderness is the place where they organize and learn and determine how they
shall be with this Living God and how they shall be with each other. The
wilderness is the place where the people receive the 10 Commandments, a listing
of “Thou shalt nots” which basically amount to saying, “Thou shalt not be like
the arrogant, violent, murdering, thieving, lying rulers of Egypt.” Fast
from Egypt.
The wilderness is the place where we learn that
God is not Pharaoh. We learn that God
is good and how we must be aware of that goodness and pay attention so that
bread from heaven, quail season, and water flowing forth from the rock do not
go unnoticed. And finally, our journey
in the wilderness reminds us that life will never be the same and cannot be the
same in the promised land. Once we are
baptized in the waters of the River Jordan, we cannot enter into the promised
land planning to ever be the same again.
My
belief is that almost every local Christian church spends a great deal of time
in Egypt or in the wilderness pining for Egypt, full well scared of wilderness
chaos and hoping that somehow, some way the promised land will appear
miraculously under our feet. There is
that change thing we really do not like in the church too much. Who really wants to be in a place where the
answers do not come readily or easily?
Who really wants to be in a place where you are not sure how you will be
fed from one day to the next? But if we
could journey together in that wilderness . . . learning to be the children of
freedom and the children of God . . . learning how we shall be in relation to
God and to one another (Remember that you were immigrants and strangers in the
land of Egypt, you know well the feeling, immigrants and strangers you are not
to oppress ) . . . .
The
wilderness tells us that if human life is to be lived in the promised land we
will have to struggle to learn who we are in the wilderness as the children of
freedom. It is human nature to exult in
our liberation and then whine in the wilderness. We may ask as the Children of Israel did in
our Scripture passage from this morning, “Is the Living God among us, or
not?”
“Moses,
we want to go back to Egypt.”
So
let this Lent be a fasting from the things of Egypt, so that we might become
transformed by what might seem like the barrenness of the wilderness. Let us fast together so that we might give
each other hope. As we walk in the
wilderness together, let us all learn how good God, the Creator, Mother Earth
is and to see that God’s goodness in places where our eyes have not been
trained to see the Maker of All Things in the daily gifts we receive. As we walk in the wilderness, let us all
learn who we are as the children of freedom, who we are as the children of
God. Though it may seem like walking a
mighty long time, we are preparing for life in the promised land, with its
rhythms of rest and celebration. You,
you are not slaves. You are the Beloved
Children of God, God’s Beloved Community, given to each other to bring hope to
a weary world. Praise God. Amen.
[1]
Christine Valters Paintner, “A Different Kind of Fast – Ash Wednesday
Blessings,” Abbey of the Arts,
February 28, 2017.
[2] Ken
Sehested, “Lent is the season when ‘Moonlight’ upstages ‘La La Land,’” prayer and politiks, http://www.prayerandpolitiks.org/articles-essays-sermons/2017/02/28/lent-is-the-season-when-moonlight-upstages-la-la-land.2487935.
[3] Harper Collins Bible Dictionary, ed. by
Paul J. Achtemeier (San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), p. 960.
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