First Sunday in Lent
March 9, 2025
Luke 4:1 – 13
I don’t remember when I first learned about Lent, but I do know where I learned it: it would have been in the little Methodist Church where I grew up. Our church was a somewhat atypical United Methodist congregation for the early to mid-1970s in that we did observe Lent. Even as a child, I recall being encouraged to give up something for Lent, or say a prayer every day at the same time, stuff like that. Then as I got older, I remember that our youth group would do a 30 hour fast during Lent. We would ask the congregation for financial pledges of support, and then we would have a youth lock in or retreat where we went without food for a day, and all the money we collected from the pledges would go to organizations that worked to end hunger.
But even though I learned about Lent as a child, I could never really understand why we did it. I appreciated the idea that we were fasting to help hungry people. It felt good to do something for others. But we already knew how the story ended. It ended in Easter, in resurrection. So when I was a kid I could never understand why we didn’t just skip repentance and self-denial and jump ahead to the jellybeans and chocolate rabbits.
Today, I see things a little differently. I actually find Lent necessary for my own spiritual life. And here I’m going to repeat a few things that I said at our Ash Wednesday services this past week. So if you were there, please just bear with me for a few minutes.
Observing Lent is an ancient practice in Christianity. As early as maybe the 100s or early 200s, a time of fasting and prayer became pretty standard in Christian churches to prepare and reflect on Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection at Easter. By the year 340, a church leader named Athanasius wrote that the entire world fasted and prayed before Easter. So even though he’s exaggerating a little when he says the entire world observed Lent, by the time Athanasius came along it was just sort of what Christians did. Lent was understood as necessary then, and I think today it’s more necessary than ever.
I think Lent is necessary because our world is almost purpose built to distract us from spiritual life and keep us off balance. Of course, human beings have always faced the basic distractions of material, embodied life. Our shoelaces break at the worst time, when we’re late anyway and trying to get out the door. Or we go out to the car and the tire’s flat. We get sick, or our kids do, when we can least afford the time and hassle, stuff like that. This physical world is subject to physical laws that we didn’t invent and we don’t control, and that can be pretty frustrating at times.
But today, those distractions are just the beginning. In 2017 (so eight years ago now), a study done by a marketing industry group estimated that most people in this country with an average online life, watching average amounts of TV, driving an average number of miles per month, are exposed to between 4000 and 10,000 advertisements every day. And believe it or not, I read this in an article in Forbes magazine that was intended to teach people how to create online advertising campaigns. (So I guess the good news is that irony is not dead?)
Whether it’s the constant attempts to make us buy shiny things we don’t need, or political news that aims to whip us into a frenzy of fear and outrage, or the nearly inescapable urge to define ourselves – or for that matter just keep our jobs – through huge workloads and ever increasing levels of productivity and exhaustion, or the chaos all around us that comes from what’s been called the age of acceleration, with information and social and economic change coming at us too fast to track, with no context or background: none of those basic conditions of everyday life tell us to slow down, breathe deeply, open our hearts, look inside ourselves as unflinchingly as we can, and ask the questions that have always been at the center of Lent: what stands between us and deeper relationship with God? What prevents us from being truly who we are called to be, when our hearts are most open and trusting and unguarded? How can we ask God to remove those obstacles, so the image of God in which each one of us is made shines through us more brightly?
I think that’s one way of describing the work of Lent: to slow down, to look past the distractions, so that we can meaningfully ask those questions, meaningfully invite God in to continue the work of transformation in us.
I think that broadly speaking, there are two ways of doing that, two ways of slowing down and offering that invitation. Christianity uses both, as most religions do.
On one hand, we can retreat from the world’s distractions, purge them from our lives, put most or all of our energy into meditation and prayer. Maybe we get really hardcore and join a monastery or some other intentional faith community to build our lives around that kind of introspection and simplicity and spiritual practice. Or maybe we just radically simplify the lives we already have – cut down to very few possessions, go without or minimize our use of things like TV or computers or phones or cars. That’s one way we can try to get beyond life’s distractions, although even then they will be oddly persistent, because ultimately distraction is in our minds, not our schedule.
I think Lent is an opportunity to eliminate some of those distractions, at least for a specified amount of time. We give things up because they take up too much space in our awareness; or we take on new spiritual practices like additional scripture reading or serving others or prayer time because they slow us down and help us see the world differently. Either way, those things can help us focus on God.
But there’s another way to deal with life’s constant distraction, and that is to look for God in the distractions; to find God in our everyday experience. I once heard a wise monk say that we often fall into the trap of declaring a kind of spiritual nuclear war on our distractions. But in some sense, he said, our distractions are just our mind at work. Instead of declaring war on them, maybe we should learn what they are teaching us, or what God can teach us through them.
I know I’ve quoted the writer and teacher Paula D’Arcy before; she says, “God often comes to us disguised as our lives.” I think there’s something deeply Christian about that notion – not that it doesn’t show up in other religions; it does. But it resonates throughout Christianity: God comes to us looking strangely like a first-century Galilean Jewish peasant. He has no form or comeliness that we would look upon him, as the prophet Isaiah says. We might run into him anywhere. He’s just a human being, poor, from a town that everyone knows is on the wrong side of the tracks, living day by day in this normal, material, physical, distracting world. And yet somehow he sanctifies that world because even as he is a particular human, he is also God. He is God fully committed to the world, God fully present within it.
Like I said, it’s a very Christian idea: that our everyday life, distracting and irritating though it may sometimes be, is where we find our spiritual life. We encounter God among the distractions and the noise of every day. God is sanctifying it all, making the common things holy.
So that’s another way to think about Lent: as an intentional time of leaning into spiritual practice and self-assessment, so we can be mindful of God in the moment, in the midst of whatever else might be going on.
Throughout Lent this year, I’m going to be preaching a sermon series called “in the flesh,” about the God who comes to us disguised as our lives. And I thought this remarkable little story from the Gospel of Luke, of Jesus facing temptation in the wilderness, was a good place to start.
In the Gospel story to this point, Jesus has not begun his public ministry. He hasn’t done any preaching or teaching or healing. He’s been baptized, and then Luke tells us the Spirit guides him into the desert, where after he fasts for 40 days, he is confronted by evil, this character referred to in the story as “the devil.”
So the devil tries three times to distract Jesus from the work he’s called to do. First, he challenges Jesus to satisfy his hunger by changing a stone into a loaf of bread. Then he offers Jesus vast political power if he’ll agree to fall down at the devil’s feet and worship him. And finally, he challenges him to beat death, to jump off the top of the temple so God will protect him.
There’s been an enormous amount written about these temptations: why these three, what they have in common, what’s at stake in this scene. And it’s worth thinking about. Like most Bible stories, there are lots of ways to understand this one. But as I’ve thought about it over the past few weeks, I realized that all three of Jesus’ responses have one thing in common. Jesus withstands these temptations, he stays devoted to his calling and to God, not by using some miraculous power, but by choosing not to use it. Jesus is presented with very human urges and desires: hunger, the desire for power, the power to survive even death. He withstands these temptations by refusing to do anything miraculous. He accepts the limitations of physical, human existence.
I think the devil is trying to get Jesus to betray his mission by using his power for his own gain: turn stones into bread, rule all the earthly Kingdoms, even escape suffering and death. But instead, Jesus refuses to do anything that an ordinary human could not. He follows his Godlike calling by embracing his humanity.
The classical way of describing Jesus, really from the first few hundred years of the Christian movement, is to say that he is in every moment both fully human and fully God. And I think one thing that tells us is that we find God right here, in the physical, embodied, distracting conditions of this life. There is no miracle necessary – or you might say that is the miracle. God is right here in this world: in human love, in natural beauty, in kindness, in humility, in giving of ourselves and what we have for the good of others. In all these things we come to know God who is at work in us and around us and through us, working to redeem and restore this beautiful, flawed world to its intended holy glory. And if Jesus can do that by embracing his humanity, well, maybe we can too. Thanks be to God.