Leatherhead, St John’s College
Choral Evensong
Sunday 29th February
Readings: Deuteronomy 26:1-11/Luke 4:1-13
The one and only time that I have felt really thirsty, and dry in the mouth, was when I holidayed in Greece as a student. It was summer-time, my companion had gone back home, and I had a week left on my own. I decided to take a bus from Athens up into the Boeotian mountains, where I spent a very happy few days. On the Sunday evening, I was allowed to stay at a convent, though in a room with a door outside the main walls. For breakfast the next day I was given a small cup of Turkish coffee, a glass of goats milk, a rusk, and fifteen dried olives. And I was sent on my way to walk the fifteen or so kilometres back to the nearest town. The sun shone hard – so hard that I got a headache and bad sunburn. The ground was parched dry. My North European body was not standing up to the punishment of this Mediterranean weather very well. I longed for the shade, even a bit of rain, and a glass of ice-cold lager.
Walking through what felt like a desert, I was thrown back on my own resources. Of course, I knew that the journey would come to an end; and I was traveling light, so there wasn’t a big problem about my rucksack. But I felt very much on my own. No one in sight. Not even any animals, though the occasional insect. It got to the stage where I began to wonder if all this was really happening to me. What were my parents thinking at that moment, back home near Edinburgh? What about the friend who had left me behind – how was his journey getting on? What about the world to which I was going to return, studies, hobbies, future plans and all? In between the occasional laugh at the ridiculousness of it all (life can be absurd!), I had some serious thoughts, some deep thoughts, some thoughts about what I might do with my future. But I’m afraid the last thing I ever thought I would one day do is come here to preach to you on the First Sunday of Lent as Bishop of Portsmouth!
Lent is an old word for Spring, a season in which we are given the chance to look at the almost relentless way in which new life slowly bursts out of the ground; green replaces gray, spring flowers come and go in their natural rhythm of seasons – though global warming has given us a few surprises here and there. The overall ‘message’ of Lent is that we have something to look forward to: new life, new hopes, new achievements – through the death of what went before. That much, probably everyone can agree on. It can be proved by what we see and what we know and what we experience, and it helps us understand life’s processes.
But there is a journey to make that connects what I experienced in that Greek mini-desert-experience with what I have just said about the spring-time of Lent. And that journey is about looking beyond what we can see and know and experience, to the business of faith, which is about placing one’s trust in something less obvious, which many people call God. I was acutely aware – in that desert – that either God existed, and had everything to do with who I was and what I was doing, or else he did not exist at all, and I had arrived at that moment in time, for those set of experiences, in a random way which would only have meaning if I decided that there was any in the first place: it was either God, or me, and nothing in between.
A similar set of connections can be found in tonight’s two readings. First we hear, in the book of Deuteronomy (which means ‘second law’, because the ‘first law’ is in an earlier book of the Old Testament), about the identity of the People of Israel; the need to tell the story of how they were descended from Abraham, and wandered from one part of the Middle East to another, becoming increasingly aware of the hand of God, the purpose of God, in those wanderings: there was, in other words, nothing random about them. Then in the second reading, we read of Jesus’ wanderings, not for a few hours in the heat of a Greek mountain-range in the summer, but for forty days in the wilderness, probably beyond the River Jordan, in Israel. Here, Jesus is driven back on his own resources; there is nothing in sight but himself and the desert sands. And he begins to think about his future. What should he do with it?
Three alternatives are given him – and he looks carefully at each, and rejects them one by one. The first is to work for feeding the hungry: a very worthy occupation, which organizations like Christian Aid do exceedingly well. But only doing that won’t really do. It would be like saying God is only interested in our bellies – when, in fact, he recognizes that we have other needs as well, which are more important. The second is to grab power: another worthy occupation, which big business and politics are all about, and sometimes, again, do very well. But that would be like saying that God is only about power and domination, not serving, healing, forgiving, or challenging people to think more deeply about the lives they lead. The third is to take the ultimate risk of all – and see if someone will step in and rescue you if you throw yourself from a great height, which is ultimately about self-destruction, giving in to life, ending things right now. But that would be like saying that God did not value human life, and all he wants is an end to it, when in fact (we believe) he created life in the first place, and wants it to flourish, enrich, and learn from achievements as well as mistakes.
Out there in that desert, Jesus came to terms with his mission. He was tempted, tested, and came through. As we take stock of ourselves this Lent, we could do a lot worse than look at the kind of people we are, the things that we stand for, and perhaps realize that life is about far more than we can see, and know, and experience; and that its challenges, even (especially) when they are painful or difficult, can help to make us better people, more loving, more forgiving, more merciful, to ourselves and one another.
+ Kenneth Portsmouth
