It does not take me long to clamber up the hillside.
Geologically, Dun-I is not much to speak of – perhaps it is more of a hill than a mountain. Even so, it is the highest point on the Isle Iona, and the moment my climb ends, I seem to break into another place – an exposed place.
The seawind fills the world, playing among the breakers below, sweeping up the hillside bringing the taste of salt mixed with the ever-so-slight whisper of heath and sheep droppings. The island is an instant of land. I am on the edge. Behind me, everything I have known recedes – before me all that is unknown and compelling – rocks, seabirds, great reaches of open ocean. Stretching from the foreground, into the barely visible north, the immense headlands of Mull. Breaks in the cloud cover reveal, above, a flat dimension of light that shines like copper, or spills through as wild, indistinct strokes of watercolor.
The only other living things are the sheep that watched my ascent. A crow investigates my presence, gives an annoyed croak, and lets the air carry it away.
I am alone.
**
This morning is the first Sunday of the season of Lent.
There are a few ways to think about the Season of Lent.
If you think about Lent in terms of the Church year – which, after all, is how you and I experience it – it can be defined as the period between Ash Wednesday and Maundy Thursday. This is a forty day stretch of time that, this year, began last Wednesday, and will end on Maundy Thursday, in the middle of Holy Week.
Another way to think of the Lenten season is by trying to plot it in reference to the life story of Jesus Christ. This, after all, is how Jesus, who we follow, would have experienced it. Looked at in this way, Lent coincides roughly with the period between Christ’s Transfiguration and his eventual return to Jerusalem, with the flurry of dramatic events (the last supper, his betrayal, trial, crucifixion and resurrection) that came to pass when he got there.
It would be great if the two ways of defining Lent fell into place neatly, but that is rarely the case. Unfortunately, there is no evidence to suggest that the period between Christ’s Transfiguration and Christ’s crucifixion was actually forty days. What’s more, the word “Lent” is entirely absent from the gospels or anywhere else in the Bible.
This, not-so-minor detail is revealing. It tells us that the Season of Lent is not a Biblical tradition. Jesus didn’t tell us to observe Lent. He couldn’t have done that cause he’d never heard of Lent. It wasn’t a thing until much later. Lent is a tradition that appeared and gathered its ceremonial significance as an expression of the needs of the early church.
I do not point this out to undermine the significance of Lent as a liturgical observance. To be sure, as followers of Christ, we should pay special heed when Jesus offers us a direct instruction, but I don’t think that means that traditions that come solely from the church tradition should be dismissed out of hand. We, in the church, create traditions when we try to worship God in a way that makes sense in light of the urgent needs of our particular generation. This is how the traditions form. This is how our churches undergo change. Where would we be if we got into the habit of writing off all the traditions that grew from the needs of the church? I’m afraid we wouldn’t have a religious tradition at all!
This is not hypothetical. It’s real. We do this here at the United Church of Jaffrey.
And when we do this, we are acting out an impulse that has been ongoing in every generation for more than two thousand years.
This is important.
**
Every year our entry into the season of Lent is accompanied by an invitation to consider Christ’s time in wandering and fasting the wilderness.
I’ve always found this a little odd.
If the season of Lent coincides with the final stages of Christ’s life, why does the Revised Common Lectionary (the resource that tells Christian worship leaders worldwide, which passages to preach about) choose this Sunday to direct us to look at Christ’s wilderness wanderings – an experience that took place at the very beginning of Christ’s ministry.
The answer to this question gives us a fascinating and instructive glimpse into the life of the early church.
As I said earlier, the gospels don’t attach any significance to the forty days that led up to Christ’s death and resurrection. Dead silence. On the other hand, the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke all make a point of reporting exactly how long Christ spent fasting in the wilderness:
Forty days.
Forty days, of course, is the same period of time that the early church assigned to the Season of Lent.
So the timing of Lent may be placed before Easter in the church’s liturgical calendar, but the Season of Lent gathers its personality from the Biblical passage before us. As early as the 2nd century AD, the forty days that Christ spent in the wilderness was stitched to the preparation for the Easter rites.
Why?
In the early centuries of the Christian church, becoming a follower of Jesus was not for the faint of heart. Catechumens – people who aspired to become Christian – had to undergo extensive courses of study in the teachings of Christ and the sacred mysteries that surrounded him. They underwent multiple exorcisms to cleanse their souls, and finally, leading up to their baptisms during the Easter rite, they crowned all their work by emulating Jesus with a long fast. Casual initiates did not make it through. The faithful who made it through were the real thing: disciples, tried and true.
In what way, you ask, did this strict initiation process respond to the needs of the early church?
Remember, first of all, that in its earliest days Christianity was not a world religion. Far from it. Jesus’ name was known by a small group of faithful. Furthermore, the religious beliefs that developed from Christ’s life story required some instruction to be understood. Most significantly of all, during the first two centuries of its existence as a faith, the followers of Christ’s were actively hunted down and killed by the powerful armies of the Roman Empire.
To become a Christian, at such a time, was to accept a religion that was hard to understand, and could cost you your life. Careful vetting of catechumens would have been crucial to the survival of both the individual and the faith. It was in the practical and spiritual interest of both the baptized and the wanna-be-baptized, to be fully committed. A casual Christian would have been a threat to every Christian.
In such a historical context, the newly baptized had to fully understand and commit to the faith they were adopting. In such a historical context it made perfect sense to use the very robust scriptural tradition of Christ’s forty-days-in-the-wilderness to legitimize the urgent need to impose strict and involved rites of initiation.
**
Before this morning’s sermon I read not one, but two gospel accounts of Christ’s wilderness period. The passage that the lectionary designated for this Sunday was the second, longer passage from Luke. The majority of the detail in this version of the story is given over to the story of Christ’s temptation by the Devil.
I included the shorter version from the Gospel of Mark in part because I wanted to illustrate that both gospels are specific about the forty days detail – but also because unlike the Lukan version, the Markan version illustrates the direct connection between Christ’s baptism and Christ’s wilderness period.
In Mark, the two things – baptism and wilderness fasting are directly connected. One seems to be the result of the other. No sooner has Christ emerged from the water, and been blessed by a voice from a cloud, when:
“the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.”
The Bible, in this way, endorses the notion that a period of fasting is directly connected with baptism – but interestingly, the order is reversed. Lenten traditions required fasting as a preparation for baptism. Christ was baptized first, then fasted.
I wonder…
For the would-be-penitents of the early church, whatever spiritual purpose fasting had, was complemented by the distinctly practical purpose of proving their level of serious commitment. None of this was necessary for Jesus.
If Christ could be baptized without the necessary preparation of a period of fasting, why should he fast at all?
Why is Christ’s wilderness fasting period important enough to be carefully spelled out in three of the four gospels?
**
Since a version of the story of Christ fasting in the wilderness shows up every year at the beginning of Lent, I have preached about this story many times.
I realized this time around, that most of the other times I preached about this story, I have proceeded from the working premise that, in this story the “wilderness” does not mean the desert itself, but has the more of a symbolic meaning of referring to the times in our lives when we – you and I – find ourselves in the wilderness – times, that is, when we are spiritually lost or in despair.
I realize, this time around, that by equating “wilderness” with being spiritually lost, I have sustained the unnecessarily prejudiced notion that “being in the wilderness” was for Jesus, as it might be for us – a negative, fearful period of trial and tribulation – a kind of “dark night of the soul.”
I realize, this time around, that it is most certainly possible to look at wilderness in a completely different light.
Could it be that the wilderness fasting period was as crucial a part of Christ’s development as was the baptism? Could it be that the wilderness fasting period was not only a period of hardship (as it no doubt was), but also a time of revelatory transcendence, when Christ was awakened to a divine truth?
Could this be true for us too?
Could, in all their concern for practical matters, the early Christians have, in an act of blessed inadvertence, set the stage for generations of people experiencing transformative revelation?
**
On the hilltop, I am alone.
And yet, I am not alone.
My senses have an urgent immediacy. My eyes and my body absorb the moment with more clarity than I am accustomed to. The wind is strong, but it’s not cold. I feel a tingle of fear, but it is a kind of fear that is also joy. I don’t know that I have ever felt this before. Fear and joy, each filling the other.
In this moment, to speak of “I” or to think “my” – feels absurd.
My breath and the wind from the ocean break into each other, just as the sun breaks through the clouds.
It is as if I am experiencing all these things without the help of my senses.
I lie down. The wind shudders over the surface of a puddle. The rock is hard against my cheek. I become aware of the subtle beauty of the pebbles immersed in that stranded piece of rain.
To say that this place is exposed… is not to say that it is open to the wind.
It is to say that here, I am exposed to eternity…
Awakened to a consciousness far beyond my own, the world of things effortlessly falls away.
Amen.