Sermon for the First Sunday of Lent - In The Wilderness

First Sunday of Lent, 9th March 2025

And Jesus full of the Holy Spirit retuned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil.

The wilderness of the desert has always held a fascination for Christians.  The desert is a place of silence and stillness and vast open space; and it’s also a place that’s dry and barren, a place of danger and hostility, where it’s easy to get lost, and the temperatures are experienced in extremes; a place where silence becomes deafening, and stillness becomes stifling.

It’s a place away from the city, away from human concerns, a wild place inhabited by angels, by the devil, a place to be alone with our hopes and fears.

Our forty days of Lent are marked out for us, that we ourselves might pay a visit to the wilderness of the desert. 

And we go in the company of Elijah, who spent forty days there waiting to hear the still small voice of God; and with Moses who waited forty days on Mount Sinai for God to give the Law; and following Israel, who spent forty years in the desert journeying in the hope of the Lord their God.

And we go today with Jesus, who was led into the desert by the Spirit, to spend forty days learning to listen and to trust in the God who had called him his beloved son.

The fathers of the early church followed on in the same way, going out into the desert; giving up material possessions and comforts, to live out lives of austerity, and solidarity with one another.

And that tradition continues. Eary in the Twentieth Century, Carlo Carretto, an Italian Catholic priest, who had been an active evangelist and teacher felt that God was calling him into the desert – “Leave everything and come with me”, he heard God say, “it is not your acts and deeds that I want; I want your prayer and your love.”

He became a member of a community of desert contemplatives – the Little Brothers of Jesus – and his time in the wild was marked by struggle, and through it, an ever-increasing love of Christ.

And so our forty days of Lent are, for us, an opportunity to explore the place of the wilderness and the tradition of spending some time there.

And our wilderness will be the place we find ourselves in when we strip things back a bit.

Sometimes this happens without us having to do anything – grief, ill-health, or sudden life changing circumstances, will carry us abruptly into the wilderness without much preparation.

But during the season of Lent, we have time to plan a little – and one of the traditions set down by the church has been that of fasting and of giving things up.

By giving up something that we like, or perhaps something that we’re attached to, or take comfort from, we’re giving ourselves the opportunity to notice how much our bodies and our minds crave particular things; how much we argue with ourselves internally about what we need and what we want; and we begin to see how much we try to prop ourselves up with the stuff of this world.

Sometimes it’s not material things that we have become attached to, but patterns of behaviour – perhaps a tendency to blame others, or to talk about our own achievements, perhaps a need to maintain control, even a need to care for others; perhaps there’s constant chatter going on in our minds.

All these things, rather deceptively, make us feel real, and give us a false sense of meaning in our lives.

Giving some of them up purposefully allows us to begin to see ourselves more clearly, to see ourselves as we really are, underneath our wants and desires, underneath the surface of things.

And that’s when the little Lenten wilderness that the church gives us can begin to fill with wild beasts and a cacophony of voices ringing in our ears.

The real work of giving things up, and letting things go – is daunting, because it feels as though we are losing our foothold.  If we really love chocolate, for example, then giving it up will be a struggle.  Not because it’s particularly hard in itself, but because, in doing so, we have to begin to confront the voices in our head that argue over that chocolate, and to notice that there’s a part of us that really needs it, or thinks it needs it.

If we give up a particular habit of behaviour, the same thing happens.  And we begin to wonder who we really are.  Who is the real ‘me’ when I’m not controlling a particular situation, or when I am not caring for someone, for example.      

Giving things up and living in a barren land for a while exposes the wild-beasts of self-doubt and despair; feelings of emptiness develop, feelings of being lost.  This is all to be expected in the desert. 

But when we do remove some of the scaffolding of our lives, when we give something up, however small, we begin to open ourselves up to the real source of life that is God.  And that opening up, that letting go of our props and our false securities, leads us deep beneath the wilderness of our wants and desires. 

We have only to look to Elijah, and Moses, and the people of Israel, and to Jesus himself, to see that the fruit of forty days of waiting and of wrestling in the wilderness is the rediscovery of the truth of God – and the relief, that it is God who is the source of all life, and not ourselves.

Of his time in the desert, Carlo Carretto, writes of learning to love, and to pray – and of letting go of all his efforts to make things happen and to get things done in the name of Christ – they were, he says, a sham. And so he writes, “After so many years, I feel I have found the solution to the only real problem we have on earth. I have recognized my powerlessness and this was grace. In faith, hope and love I have contemplated the all-power-fulness of God and this, too, was grace. God can do everything and I can do nothing. But if I offer this nothing in prayer to God, then everything becomes possible in me.”