Lent I Year B 2009
Lent is a time for introspection. But introspection that does not become focused into outward
action is mere daydreaming. Every where we turn we find people who are seeking fuller lives, who
intuitively feel that there must be more to this whole business of living. This search for deeper meaning
in daily life is basic to us all.
Vitor Frankl, the Vienese psychiatrist, wrote: “Every drive and need in us – the need to satisfy
hunger, gratify our sex drives, achieve status or attain power – is secondary to the search for something
tto fill up the inner emptiness and loneliness of life. We search for ultimate meaning.”
Surely, one of the tasks of the Christian Church is to provide the setting in which our deepest
needs can be met – the need for belonging; the need for a sustaining fellowship; and the need for
ultimate meaning.
Those needs were also felt by a fellow human as He struggled with himself. He, too, felt that
need for belonging, the need for ultimate meaning and the need for a sustaining fellowship. His needs
drove Him to a man of God – a preacher of repentance – a baptism and a journey to solitude.
Lent begins with Jesus alone in the wilderness. Mark tells us: ‘The Spirit immediately drove
Him out into the wilderness. And He was in the wilderness forty days…’ There, Jesus struggled with
Himself and with the call of the Creator upon His life and His ultimate meaning. There He came to
know himself more completely and to discern more clearly the task God the Father had laid upon Him.
Dag Hammarsjold, in his book Markings, wrote: “The longest journey is the journey inward.”
During the weeks of Lent we could have our lives enriched and fulfilled if we, too, went into the
wilderness to pray, if we too took the journey inward. If we are willing to take this journey inwards, we
will be involved in three engagements. Three challenges in the wilderness of our heart, our mind, and
our will.
The first engagement is with oneself.
Can anyone really come to know Jesus Christ in depth unless one also knows oneself? ‘The
quality of life,’ that phrase is the ‘in’ thing to talk about these days. Usually we mean the environment
in which we live – our economic, social, political, and physical environment.
But what of our inner environment? What about the inner self we carry with us wherever we go?
What about the spirit we bring to our family, to our business, to our closest relationships in life? Too
often our daily activities become more important than the state of our inner being.
In a Gallup poll, sixty percent of Americans said that their lives are dull and routine. We know
that most of us use only a small fraction our brain power, our creativeness, our potential, and we are
vaguely dissatisfied with our daily existence. The church can be an instrument for personal growth. In
prayers, worship, and community the church helps us on that journey inward where we encounter
ourselves.
The second engagement is with God. We want to seek commitment and find the ultimate
meaning of life, yet we are timid. We are afraid to believe that God in marvelous graciousness wants to
bestow upon us the incredible gift of the Holy Spirit. Not one of us here present has arrived fully in
faith. We are all beginners. We are becoming Christians. All of us doubt and struggle and search for
the Devine in the midst of life.
So, we, as a community join together on this journey inward. The church is a place that doesn’t
apologize for treating the meaning of life as a serious question and it doesn’t rebuke anyone who doubts
and stumbles before the meaning of the Good News. We come together seeking the faith that shall
make us whole. And we are making that journey together. There cannot be any vital Christianity
without a sense of belonging to a community and sharing the burdens and the joy of faith together.
So the third engagement is with each other. The scientist Loren Eiseley has a moving passage
about humans first walking across this earth and realizing that good and evil would walk with them
forever. I paraphrase the passage. For the first time in four billion years, living creatures had
contemplated themselves and heard, with a sudden loneliness, the whisper in the night reeds. Perhaps
they knew, there in the grass by the chill waters, that they had before them an immense journey. In this
vast universe – knowing full well how weak and fragile we are – we long for others to share with us the
immense journey. As we live work, worship and struggle together within this community we begin to
say: ‘I am willing to belong to you, share life with you, and be concerned with you. And I am willing to
do that with no strings attached, for we will grow to accept each other just as we are!’
That is the very way Christ accepts us. We recognize the risks of community life; but without
risks there can no love. In life together, in Christian community, lies the power to love more fully.
If we so chose we can enter Lent on a journey – the search for ultimate meaning. In that journey
we encounter ourselves. We encounter our God. We encounter each other. Jesus went into the
wilderness to start this journey. We do not have that ability. In the midst of every day living we must
find the time and the space to enable the journey to take place.
In faith, hope and love we can journey together through Lent. Together discerning our faith;
building hope in our lives; greeting each other in love.
So that on Easter Day, it will not be as a collection of individuals; but as a Community of
Believers; we greet the Risen Lord.