A Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent 2006  ©
The Rev. Dr. Bill Doggett
Christ Church, Washington Parish

It is poignant, perhaps to the point of irony, that in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, our first reading on the first Sunday of Lent, so soon after Mardi Gras, should be about Noah and the Flood. Indeed, it’s a very watery Sunday, with Peter’s reflections on the waters of salvation and Mark’s account of Jesus’ baptism. “Water, water everywhere,” as Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner says. 

And yet the confluence of water images is probably not  why the compilers of our lectionary, in their wisdom, chose these readings for this, the first Sunday in Lent. For they have something else in common, and in common with Lent itself. 

After Jesus is baptized by John, he is hurled into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit to face forty days of fasting and temptation. Forty days, not by coincidence, is the length of the destructive rainstorm endured by Noah, his family, and the animals on the Ark. Forty days, also not by coincidence, is the length of the season of Lent. 

Forty is the number generally associated with waiting, fasting and testing in scripture. Moses was on the mountain forty days. The Israelites wandered in the desert forty years. Forty is the number of incompleteness, of longing, of the need for fulfillment. 

And so, during Lent, we remember all the days of longing in our long history: the longing of humankind for rescue, for food, for comfort, for God. And as we remember our human hunger for God, and for the good things God provides, it is altogether fitting that we honor and enter into that hunger by fasting, and to meditate on that hunger by prayer. 

Jesus spent his forty-day fast in the wilderness, driven there (the word in Mark, ekballo, actually means “flung” there) by the Holy Spirit. In Hebrew, wilderness meant any place where crops could not be grown. The wilderness of ancient Palestine was desert, hard and unforgiving, not at all like the lush green wilderness of our experience. 

And in the wilderness, Jesus faces temptation. Mark’s gospel doesn’t elaborate, but the other Synoptics show us that Jesus wrestled with his gifts – his powers and abilities – whether he should use them for self-gratification or for God’s purposes. While the scriptural accounts of Jesus’ temptations are dramatic, the temptations are the same ones we face every day. God has given us each powers – to act, to persuade, to create, to make relationships – and we are constantly tempted to use those powers in dishonest and self-serving ways. 

And yet we seldom have the luxury of forty days alone to make good choices. Even forty minutes might help. 

Here’s an idea for a Lenten discipline: forty minutes in the wilderness. Get up forty minutes early every day in Lent and use the time to ponder what the day ahead holds for you: what temptations you might face and what choices you want to make when the time comes. It could, as the commercials put it, change your life. 

There is one marked difference between our forty day Lenten fast and the forty day biblical trials and tribulations that we remember with it. If you take a look at your calendar, you’ll see that Lent is actually forty-six days long. It’s not a trick; it has to do with the unique claim we make about our fast.  

You see, when we number the forty days of Lent, Sundays don’t count. Sundays are always feast days, never fasts. As followers of Jesus, we make, and try to live out the claim that the resurrection changed everything. We do not pretend to forget Easter during Lent so that we might experience it anew. We say rather that the claim of resurrection on our lives is so complete that it always outweighs any claim that sin or the need for repentance might have on us.  

In the burial rite, we say “All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song…” and then comes that word we don’t say in Lent. And that is the truth that we enact with our Sunday feast in the middle of our Lenten fast: that even in the wilderness we are Easter people; we are children of the resurrection. 

The ‘forties” in the Bible always end with mighty acts of God: new covenants, new commandments, new homes, new lives. God sees us lost, alone, yearning, weeping, and brings us out of the wilderness into the divine embrace with unfailing promises of God’s favor and guidance. And sometimes, like Jesus, we find ourselves hurled into the wilderness, forced, whether we like it or not, to consider our choices, our options, the meaning of our lives. 

Lent reminds us of the need for those clarifying experiences. Perhaps, if we take our Lenten fast seriously, Lent can be such a clarifying experience for us. But the Sundays of Lent remind us that our deepest hunger, our deepest thirst for God’s presence, God’s hope, God’s love, is already and eternally satisfied in the Easter we both know and look forward to.