Nathan Myers Sermon Archives

I'm employing this blog as an opportunity for others to journey with me and my immediate church community through checking out the messages I craft as we move forward. If you want the sermon to be more legible, just cut and paste and slap on MS Word (You have it, right?).

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Feb 10 Fasting and Lent and Wilderness and all that Jazz

(Psalm 103:8-19)

Why Lent? (Lent originated in the very earliest days of the Church as a preparatory time for Easter, when the faithful rededicated themselves and when converts were instructed in the faith and prepared for baptism; they believed it to be a commandment from the apostles). So before there was a “Catholic” church or Lutherans or Presbyterians or Brethren or Methodists or Pentecostals, there was the early followers of Jesus, and this was a commitment they made.

Significant of “40” (Think back to the Old Testament. Noah and company in the Ark watched rain fall for 40 days and forty nights. Moses was up on Sinai receiving the 10 commandments for 40 days. The Israelites wandered around the desert for 40 years. So why all these forties? Probably because it is forty weeks that a woman carries her developing baby before a new life can come forth from the womb. All these “forties” are a necessary and not-so-comfortable prelude for something new.

Rooted in the wilderness experience


Wilderness experience rooted in purifying us and simplifying life for the goal of us learning how to trust in God alone

It’s no coincidence that the word “wilderness includes the word ‘wild’”

BBT: Once, when I attended a workshop on teaching religion, a presenter talked about how he took his students on wilderness trips to give them a taste of life nearer the edge. Whether they went hiking or whitewater rafting, the point was to step outside their comfort zones long enough to encounter the untamed holiness of the wild.

“Excuse me,” a member of the audience said, “but are there predators in those places who are above you on the food chain?”

“Well, of course not,” the presenter said. “I wouldn’t put students in danger like that.”

“I wouldn’t either,” the man in the audience said, “but don’t lull them into thinking that they have experienced true wilderness. It’s only wilderness if there’s something other there that can eat you.”

Lent, like the Christian life as a whole, is a journey that requires commitment. This journey is not an adventure for tourists who want little snapshots or soundbites of spiritual insight, as if we can be a Christian without it involving the investment of all that we are, our time and energy. Lent is a yearly commitment, an anticipation and purification time as we prepare for the second pinnacle of the Christian year, which is Easter.

If we decide to honor the worship season of Lent, we should expect to face two important realities. First, we will be led to remember the life of Christ including his ministry, sacrifice, and resurrection. And second, we will be led to face ourselves.

In Lent we are encouraged to care for those things that ultimately matter and to leave behind those things which stand in the way of our full participation in the life of God and the life around us. It involves a separation from the securities and attachments of our life for the sake of discovering a little more of the truth about ourselves and the truth of who God is. As we remember with honesty the way things are- who Christ is and who we are- we will learn to sit still. This is the invitation of Lent- to move through the wilderness of self-deception into the truth of Christ.

Movement into the wilderness

Throughout biblical and church history the people of God are frequently found living in the wilderness. The wilderness is the geographic setting of the Exodus and Jesus’ temptation.

But the term wilderness has also been used to show the reality of the human heart. What does the term desert bring to mind in you when you think of it? “Desert” expresses the barrenness, dryness, and harsh conditions, and maybe the confusion or wildness often felt within us.

Many people have purposefully entered the wilderness in history in order to submit themselves to physical as well as spiritual conditions that expose who they really are. On the other hand, some of us through being abused by others or facing the grief of losing a loved one or facing physical shortcomings find ourselves in spiritual wilderness against our wills.

The effects are the same: the wilderness exposes and lays bare. In it we are tempted and suffer as Jesus was tempted and suffered. Being in the desert, whether we chose to go there or not, is that by it God is able to reveal the true condition of the human heart.

As the first step of Christ’s ministry began in the wilderness, we are called each year through Lent to return to that uncomfortable place. In our willingness to give something up for a time that has brought us security or comfort, we let the Spirit lead us into the wilderness, to bring us face to face with the reality of our temptation and our vulnerability to sin.

The wilderness is a dangerous place. If we’re honest about the evil which lies hidden within ourselves, there is always the risk of trivializing our guilt on one hand or falling into a destructive despair on the other. If we’re completely focused on our sin and fail to keep before us the character of this God we serve in Psalm 103, we will progress no further than despair or depression. On the other hand, if we think God’s grace will allow us to claim his forgiveness without honestly facing the depth of our rebellion and repenting, then, as 1 John 1:8 says, “we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.”

To know Christ is to know the God who is full of mercy and forgiveness, but in order to know this God of mercy and forgiveness, we must have a deep and constant awareness of our need for mercy and forgiveness in the first place.

When Jesus is led by the Spirit into the desert, he is tempted to act outside of the bounds of his relationship to his Father. In the first temptation he is tempted to exercise power for himself rather than to trust himself to the care of his Father. In the second temptation, Jesus is persuaded to use God for his own purposes (the God who is the cosmic vending machine) rather than to serve him. And in the third and last temptation, Jesus is tempted to put himself in the place of God- to commit idolatry, the deepest sin as defined by the Old Testament, the sin that Adam and Eve committed.

In each temptation is the desire to live self-sufficiently; to rely on himself for getting power, pleasure, and position. And each time, when Jesus responds, he roots himself in the experience of the nation of Israel during the Exodus, where they were tested to see if they would trust God fully as their Lord and Provider. (Deut 8, Deut 6, Deut 6) The victory of Jesus’ response came through his faithfulness in relationship with the Father.

Each temptation was an attack on this relationship, and each response of Jesus honored this relationship. Sin, therefore, is a rejection of our relatedness to God and the rest of his creation. We live either obediently in that relationship, or we become alienated from God and from others in the darkness of our own disobedience and selfishness.

If we believe the Bible to be true, and we have eyes to see the disobedience in our society, we will see it all over the place…but that begs a question, If it’s all over the place, how are we (as people, in general, everywhere) not in tune with how broken we really are?

Reality: We medicate ourselves

Now this may be just me speaking out of my own experience here, but I can’t help but think that somehow we are deeply afraid as a culture. I think we are afraid of ourselves, we are afraid of honest relationships with others because we are afraid of ourselves.

I find it incredibly hard when I sit down in my car to not flip the radio on or put a CD in to listen to all the time. I find it incredibly hard when I sit down to do school work on a computer not to go to the Internet to a bunch of my favorite websites, only to look up later and find I’ve spent several hours looking at these things, many of which are relatively unimportant in the long haul.

And I have found when I do sit down by myself for longer than five minutes to pay attention to who I am and to pray, as I focus on letting my mind that’s constantly running on spin cycle slow down, I am confronted with myself. And that confrontation is not always pretty and clean. If I’m honest, I am probably more of a mystery to myself than I am to other people. I often don’t understand why I do the things I do or think the things I think or act the way I act, and when I continue to do those things even when I think I don’t want to, then things get real dicey.

And when I spend time thinking about who I really am and what I really want, I quickly get uncomfortable, because I realize how deeply my selfishness lies within me and how deeply my rebellion against God lies within me. Because I love Jesus, I hate that part within me, but it’s not going away very quickly, so I have to learn to live with that discomfort.

So a lot of the time, to stay away from the reality of who I am, I keep the radio running or the computer on or I stay around people to talk to, and I do all of these things up until the very last second before I fall into bed so I don’t have to pay attention to what’s going on inside me, and I can do this for weeks at a time if I let myself.

I think this discomfort plays out in relationships as well. Persons in dating relationships, married couples, and groups of friends go out of our way to keep ourselves occupied when we’re around one another, we have to “do something”; we can’t just BE with each other. This is the temptation, because if we let this rule our lives, we end up renting movies or watching shows that literally waste our time or end up twisting our desires for the sake of doing something.

Families come home and whip up some food to eat after a day of work, and we’re tempted to flip on the TV as we eat so we can “have something to do” and maybe possibly if we’re focused on the TV, we’re much less likely to have conversations that might bring us to have to face who we are.

We can do this kind of thing for years spending time around friends or family or a husband or a wife; even sleep in the same bed and not ever really know the person…often because we’re uncomfortable with who we are.

William Blake’s simple etching “I Want,” illustrates the point that sin involves us as individuals doing what we want, but is more fundamentally the rejection of identity in relationship. The ladder shows a person climbing away from others. But what it most directly at stake are the relationships affected by this individual’s act. What we see in Blake’s etching is how movements away from our neighbor and toward our own desires “I want! I want!” neglect the impact of our actions on the world around us.

This is why fasting is a part of honoring the Easter holy day. When we recognize that we medicate ourselves with TV, radio, reading, video games, food, or a variety of other things, choosing to give up this thing that is masking who we are and how broken we are brings us face to face with who we are; it brings us into the wilderness where we get honest with ourselves and get honest with God.

(watch Clint Kemp Spiritual Journey Video)

1 Comments:

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6:30 PM  

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