The Rev. Shanda M. Mahurin February 9/10, 2008
The season of Lent has arrived. Even if you avoided the ashes on Ash Wednesday, even if you’re planning to dodge the Great Litany next weekend, there’s no sidestepping Lent. This is the season when the church highlights that phrase in the Lord’s Prayer: “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” Literally translated, the Lord’s Prayer says, “Save us from the time of trial and deliver us from the evil one.” Temptation was very real to Jesus every day of his very human life, just as it is very real to us.
Matthew’s Gospel says that as soon as Jesus was baptized by John and blessed by the Holy Spirit, the same Holy Spirit led him into the wilderness where he fasted forty days and forty nights, just as Moses had on Mt. Sinai before he received the Law. Then, famished, weak and vulnerable, Jesus was tempted by the devil.
You see the connection, I hope. First—baptism; then—wilderness and temptation. Nowadays, the sign of the cross made on our forehead at baptism seems far less momentous than it did for Jesus and the early Christians—unless you live in Sudan or Pakistan or parts of the world where baptism is still life threatening. But appearances are deceiving, because even for us baptism is spiritually momentous. The oil comes off, but spiritually that cross on our forehead is irremovable and eternal. It is our ordination for ministry. As we grow and mature in our faith, we will discover that every call to ministry is accompanied by a call to the wilderness and to temptation.
That’s where the other cross on the forehead comes in—the ashy cross of Ash Wednesday. “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.” The two crosses are the two sides of our spiritual life. Just as we are sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and “marked as Christ’s own forever,” we can’t escape our humanity, our vulnerability to temptation, our “dustiness” as we answer the call to ministry.
Today we heard not only the story of Jesus’ temptation, we also went back to the beginning—to the Creation story in Genesis 2—the older of the two creation stories. Here we are reminded that God formed us from the dust of the earth and breathed life into us. Out of the dust we came, molded by God’s own hand, and until God breathed into us, we had no life.
The fact is that ever since the first man and woman, we’ve all been struggling to accept God’s priority in our lives. We’ve been struggling to admit our own dustiness and our reliance upon the breath of God. Only by the breath of God—which is presence of the Holy Spirit within us—can we live as God has created us to live.
When we follow Jesus and accept the call of our baptism, we take our turn in the wilderness, rediscovering our ashy vulnerability to temptation. We can expect that the very second the devil senses that the Holy Spirit is at work in us, the evil one will get active, tempting us to over-reach our capacity, to eat of that dangerous fruit of rivalry with God. So thank God for Lent! Lent is the time to remember that to be baptized into Christ, as St. Paul says in Romans, is to be baptized into Christ’s death, so that, just as we are buried with him, we might also be raised with him to newness of life. Our Lenten journey leads to Easter, but we go right through the wilderness to get there. Amen.