1st Sunday of Lent
Again this year for lent I have decided to give up eating sweets and most things with
added sugar. Candy, cookies, soft drinks, juices are all out for me for the next forty
days – Now, I am always amazed at how much my body craves these sugary foods
when I give them up for Lent. I almost wonder if there is some sort of biochemical
addiction that we humans have to sugar.
During the first few days of my sugar fast- I often experience a low grade dull
headache,
I have a hard time not thinking of sweets and notice them at every turn. Just the
other day at a meeting I found myself staring at the bowl of Hershey Kisses that kept
making its way around the table- as the meeting is going on, I even began to wonder
if any of Kisses were dark chocolate- now I really don’t like dark chocolate, but I
began to think that maybe dark chocolate doesn’t have sugar. Googled it, it does.
Perhaps though what is most unusual about my Lenten sugar fast is that I will even
dream about sweets.
Just two or three nights ago, I found myself dreaming about being at the conference.
During the lunch break at the conference I am invited into this wood paneled
library, a place that you might sip brandy and smoke a good cigar in a high back
leather chair, but this library has table upon table covered with every delectable
pastry, every dessert you can imagine -strawberry shortcake, the strawberries
glistening in the light. The tables are covered with Éclairs, and brownies and cakes,
cannoli. Hundreds of dessert and wouldn’t you think that in my dreams I would
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partake- no way. My brain won’t go there, it won’t even let me have one-little -bite.
I think it’s revenge for starving it of sugar.
During Lent the church invites us into these self-imposed wilderness experiences- we
are invited to fast, to give something up for the next forty days. Most of us go for
the usual suspects, Sweets, cigarettes, beer, but I had a friend who one lent gave
up cynicism – others I have known have given up gossip –and a popular one these
days is to give up Facebook.
My friend, Father Sammy Wood said in his Ash Wednesday sermon a few days ago,
that “we abstain from food or sweets or alcohol, things that give us pleasure, to help
us remember… [that] our real hunger is for God [ that our real hunger is for God].”1
But we are not only are invited into a self imposed wilderness experience--the church
plunges us into the wilderness each and every Sunday morning in Lent. Our
worship changes--our liturgies take on a different flavor, a more penitential, a more
somber, reflective flavor.
We stop saying alleluia, we sing less, and spend more time with our mouths clamped
shut in silence, we roll through things like the five page Great Litany-- beseeching
God to change us, beseeching God to hear us-- we put confession-- front and center
right smack dab at the beginning of the service [that comes next week] We recite the
ten commandments.---We use lent to examine all the nooks and crannies of our livesexamining those things tarnish the image of God deep within us- in Lent we work
to bring to light the sin that draw us from God.
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https://www.facebook.com/notes/the-church-of-the-advent-boston-ma/are-you-awake/10151265126436035
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And we do this not to make ourselves feel bad, but we do this with every intention
of starting over, of releasing those things that shackles and imprisons us so that we
might make a new beginning, so that we find a new life, a more whole life.
The wilderness of Lent is not meant to be easy- look at the story of Christ for a
moment—40 days in the wilderness, 40 days without food, there were days where all
Jesus wants to do is eat the tiniest morsel of bread and what happens- the devil
arrives with loaves of freshly baked bread-- the devil arrives and says to Jesus you can
have it all- all you need to do is just walk away, turn from God.
But Christ doesn’t-- And when it’s all over, when the forty days are up Luke saysJesus was famished, he exhausted. Luke doesn’t note it, but both Matthew and
Mark in their gospels tell that the wilderness experience was such a harrowing for
Jesus that God has to send angels to care for to Jesus, to drag him home and put
him to bed.
The wilderness experience reminds us that when everything is stripped away from
our lives, when everything is left behind, what remains is God and God’s angels.
The Wilderness is not meant to be place barren and devoid of God, the wilderness
helps us to remember our need for God, the wilderness is a place that reminds us
that we desperately need and hunger for God in our lives. The wilderness is a place
that we go during Lent, so that when we find ourselves in the wildernesses of life,
when illness knocks us down, when addiction overtakes our being, when the bottom
falls out from under us, when crutches of life are ripped from us-- the wilderness
show us that God will send his angels, that we can trust that God will stand with us.
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I invite you in the name Church to the observance of a Holy Lent. I invite you take
some time over the next forty day to dip your toe into the waters of wilderness, by
fasting and self denial, by giving something up, by examining your lives and
repenting of those things that are not of God, by reading and meditating on God’s
Holy Scripture.
Wade into the waters of the wilderness, it won’t be easy, but God will be there with
you and God will give his angels charge over you.
AMEN
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