SPEAKER_01: A reading from Deuteronomy.
SPEAKER_01: When you have come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, and you possess it and settle in it, you shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground which you harvest from the land that the Lord your God has giving you, and you shall put it in a basket and go to the place that the Lord your God will choose as a dwelling for his name.
SPEAKER_01: You shall go to the priest who is in office at that time and say to him, Today I declare to the Lord your God that I have come into the land that the Lord swore to our ancestors to give us.
SPEAKER_01: When the priest takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before the altar of the Lord your God, you shall make this response before the Lord your God.
SPEAKER_01: A wandering Aramaean was my ancestor.
SPEAKER_01: He went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous.
SPEAKER_01: When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors.
SPEAKER_01: The Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression.
SPEAKER_01: The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders.
SPEAKER_01: And he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.
SPEAKER_01: So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, the Lord, have given me.
SPEAKER_01: You shall set it down before the Lord your God and bow down before the Lord your God.
SPEAKER_01: Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you and to your house.
SPEAKER_01: He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High.
SPEAKER_01: He shall say to the Lord, You are my refuge and my stronghold.
SPEAKER_01: Because you have made the Lord your refuge.
SPEAKER_01: There shall no evil happen to you.
SPEAKER_01: For God shall give the angels charge over you.
SPEAKER_01: They shall bear you in their hands.
SPEAKER_01: You shall tread upon the lion and adder.
SPEAKER_01: Because they are bound to me in love, therefore will I deliver them.
SPEAKER_01: They shall call upon me and I will answer them.
SPEAKER_00: Because if you confess with your lips that Jesus is the Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
SPEAKER_00: And one confesses with a mouth, and so is saved.
SPEAKER_00: The scripture says no one who believes in him will be put to shame.
SPEAKER_00: For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek.
SPEAKER_00: The same Lord is generous to God.
SPEAKER_02: After his baptism, Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil.
SPEAKER_02: He ate nothing at all during those forty days, and when they were over, he was famished.
SPEAKER_02: The devil said to Jesus, If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.
SPEAKER_02: And Jesus answered him, It is written, one does not live by bread alone.
SPEAKER_02: Then the devil led Jesus up and showed him in a distant in an instant all the kingdoms of the world.
SPEAKER_02: And the devil said to him, To you I will give their glory and all this authority.
SPEAKER_02: For it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please.
SPEAKER_02: If you then will worship me, it will be yours.
SPEAKER_02: Jesus answered the devil, It is written, Worship the Lord your God and serve only God.
SPEAKER_02: Then the devil took him to Jerusalem and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, He will command his angels concerning you to protect you, and on their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.
SPEAKER_02: And Jesus answered, It is said, Do not put the Lord your God to the test.
SPEAKER_02: When the devil had finished every test, he departed from Jesus until an opportune time.
SPEAKER_02: The gospel, the good news of the Lord.
SPEAKER_02: In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.
SPEAKER_02: Have a seat if you would.
SPEAKER_02: Unless you want to stand up for the next 45 minutes while I preach.
SPEAKER_02: No, there's a clock up there.
SPEAKER_02: This is good.
SPEAKER_02: In our first reading today from Deuteronomy, uh, it comes toward the end of the book of Deuteronomy, and Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy is the last book of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_02: And it ends typically capturing the experience of the Exodus.
SPEAKER_02: And the book itself, Deuteronomy, ends with the death of Moses before the entry into the kingdom, the promised land.
SPEAKER_02: And so what we get in this short pericope that we read this morning is this kind of a capsule encapsulation of the history of Israel.
SPEAKER_02: And so it reflects, as we read through it, what the Hebrew community were had gone through, and their experience of being in the desert for 40 years, and most especially their experience of what happened to them in the desert, their longing for God, and their experience of God's mercy.
SPEAKER_02: And so the emphasis, the focus in the reading is God's mercy.
SPEAKER_02: And it is God's mercy, then, at the end of this short reading today, that is celebrated in a very simple liturgical ceremony where the first fruits are gathered, presented to the priest, and offered to God in thanksgiving for the mercy of God over those forty years.
SPEAKER_02: And it was during, we know, those 40 years, that the Hebrew community, as they struggled and as they suffered, and as they were challenged by all kinds of powers and authorities and wind and rain and all those kinds of things, that God continued to feed them, to clothe them, to give them whatever they needed for that journey, so that they would one day enter into the promise.
SPEAKER_02: In the gospel, something of the same thing happens.
SPEAKER_02: It's a kind of an experience of purgation when Jesus comes up out of the waters of the Jordan River and He dashes, as it were, from the experience, if you read the verses before this reading, from the experience of having the cloud open and God pronounced, This is my beloved, in him I am well pleased, he dashes from that into the wilderness.
SPEAKER_02: The wilderness where he spends 40 days.
SPEAKER_02: And it is during that 40 days that he himself continues to ground himself in what his baptism means and what his call means to build up the kingdom of his father.
SPEAKER_02: And it's during that experience that St.
SPEAKER_02: Luke's relates to us his experience of being drawn into sin.
SPEAKER_02: When we use the word devil, most of us flash these Dante sort of images into our brain about what the devil is.
SPEAKER_02: But really, what the devil is in this experience, because we know that he didn't drag him out of the, you know, out of the woods to take him all the way a long trip from up there to Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_02: What he did was tempt Jesus.
SPEAKER_02: Jesus is talking, Luke is talking about Jesus' temptation to sin.
SPEAKER_02: And sin for Jesus would have been giving up his call, his baptismal call, that call that he had to build the kingdom of God right here and right now.
SPEAKER_02: And it had nothing to do with the kingdoms that the devil could offer.
SPEAKER_02: It had nothing to do with the power of those kingdoms.
SPEAKER_02: It had nothing to do with the money and the authority and the kinds of stuff that we so often consider to be important in our almost universally accepted worldview.
SPEAKER_02: What matters is that, you know, that in that worldview, in that temptation, is that we have everything that we want and need.
SPEAKER_02: And Jesus is tempted by that, but does not sin, the gospel says.
SPEAKER_02: And so I have to believe that the church offers us these two readings, one about 40 years in the desert, one about 40 days in the wilderness, to talk about our 40 days of Lent that we just began on Ash Wednesday.
SPEAKER_02: And you guys had a big old Tuesday night experience too, right?
SPEAKER_02: But on Ash Wednesday, we actually began the Lenten season.
SPEAKER_02: When we, you know, receive those ashes on our forehead, and we are called to experience what it means to somehow be away during this season, to somehow change something that's going on in our lives during these 40 days, to somehow let these 40 days of purgation, of longing, of kind of experiencing our own temptation to sin, but most especially of connecting to God, so that when Easter comes, in a new way, in a more profound way, hopefully, we can know what it means, that St.
SPEAKER_02: Paul's talking about in the second reading, to believe with our heart.
SPEAKER_02: To believe with our heart, we don't usually talk about believing with our heart, we usually talk about believing with our head, right?
SPEAKER_02: It's an act of the will.
SPEAKER_02: To believe with our heart, to somehow profoundly experience in the depths of our whole being what it means to be joined to the Father, what it means to be connected to the Father through the life and the death and the resurrection of Jesus.
SPEAKER_02: And not what it means esoterically or the stuff we can think about, but what does it mean in our heart, in our whole being, in our guts to know, as the Hebrew community articulated, the mercy of God.
SPEAKER_02: Many years ago, back when I was quite a bit younger, um, I was the rector of a seminary in Cincinnati and one of the things Franciscans, and one of the things that uh I did was teach uh Franciscan spirituality.
SPEAKER_02: I still do actually, in certain circles.
SPEAKER_02: Um one of the things that we did that year was gather up the novices.
SPEAKER_02: There were about 15 of them at that time, uh, and take them out to um the northern Cheyenne Native American Indian Reservation.
SPEAKER_02: It's uh just north of the southern Montana border.
SPEAKER_02: So it's in Montana, just north of the border.
SPEAKER_02: It's a small reservation, the Northern Cheyenne.
SPEAKER_02: The Franciscans had been there for many years.
SPEAKER_02: And one of the things that I thought was important, would be important for them, was to get a sense of the congruence uh of a Franciscan spirituality, that being being connected in a physical, in a in a visceral way to creation, to experience the Native American spirituality.
SPEAKER_02: And so one of the things we ended up doing, which I had not planned, is the elders offered us an experience to do a sweat lodge, or an Indian sweat.
SPEAKER_02: And so it was really a profound experience.
SPEAKER_02: I thought it would be like sort of like a sauna.
SPEAKER_02: You know, you go in, you dump some water on the rocks, and you just sweat to death, you know, for about 20 minutes and you're done.
SPEAKER_02: Not exactly.
SPEAKER_02: Um so it took days.
SPEAKER_02: It took days for them to gather the saplings and to array them around in a in a very large uh circle around a small uh hole that they had dug into the ground.
SPEAKER_02: They selected the area very explicitly, it was near the river, the door of the lodge faced west so that the setting sun made uh somehow a connection to the experience.
SPEAKER_02: They gathered stones from around the reservation, and the stones had to be a certain kind of stone, and they prayed over the stones, and if the stones had, you know, were too porous or had too much air in them or were river stones and had too much water in them, that if you pour water on it in a sweat lodge, they'll explode.
SPEAKER_02: So you had to be very careful about the kinds of stones, but it wasn't just about the science of it, it was about the stones themselves.
SPEAKER_02: It was about these stones somehow reflecting the experience of God's creation.
SPEAKER_02: And there was a little hole dug outside the sweat lodge, right outside the door.
SPEAKER_02: So the the saplings had been created a frame and hides and and and blankets were put on top of it, and the little hole outside the door was filled with these stones.
SPEAKER_02: And then we were invited, probably about eight of us at a time, to go into the sweat lodge and sit around on the ground, around the hole in the center.
SPEAKER_02: And it was completely dark, completely dark.
SPEAKER_02: And one by one, uh they would bring in these very hot stones that were heated up in the hole outside the sweat lodge, put them in the hole in the middle of the sweat lodge, and after a point, they would take river water and pour it on the stone, so we all know what happens.
SPEAKER_02: It gets hot, right?
SPEAKER_02: But not hot like Asana, but hot enough clearly to know that it's hot in there.
SPEAKER_02: And you begin to sweat, and it's silent, and it's dark, and it's getting hotter and hotter, and you don't know how long you'd have to be silent and dark and sweating.
SPEAKER_02: And the elder might say something about the earth, or about the spirits, or about the sun that is setting in the west.
SPEAKER_02: And it's silent again and quiet, and all you could feel was the heat of your body and the sweat coming out, and the cold earth on which you were sitting.
SPEAKER_02: And there was somehow a profound and interesting that I had not expected, experience of being literally connected one with that earth in a way that I had never felt before.
SPEAKER_02: And it became for me a kind of a metaphor, that experience of what Lent might be about.
SPEAKER_02: What Jesus was invited to in the wilderness to learn how to be connected to the experience of creation in the world around him, and most profoundly to the men and women whose lives he was called into to heal, to forgive, to show mercy, to draw into union with each other, to do justice, to build peace, to somehow recreate that experience of that Hebrew community after Deuteronomy, who desired nothing more than to celebrate in Thanksgiving the mercy of their God.
SPEAKER_02: And I think that's the core of Lent.
SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah, we might give up our chocolate, but in the end, we might lose a little weight, you know?
SPEAKER_02: Or we might give a little some, you know, slightly used clothing to Lord of the streets, you know.
SPEAKER_02: But in the end, uh our closet has some space and we can fill it up again.
SPEAKER_02: And I don't mean to demean those kinds of things, because they can be very thoughtful.
SPEAKER_02: But we can also then miss, I believe, what Lent is calling us into.
SPEAKER_02: What St.
SPEAKER_02: Paul says in the reading today, how profoundly important it is, he says, the word is near you.
SPEAKER_02: The word, and he's not talking about some you know hallucination.
SPEAKER_02: He's talking about the experience of Jesus Himself, the Logos, become man in Jesus, is near you.
SPEAKER_02: The word is near you, and so often we don't we don't spend time sort of grounding ourselves and feeling the that earth that we are so connected to.
SPEAKER_02: The word is near you on your lips and in your heart.
SPEAKER_02: And then he says, for the one who believes with the heart and is so justified, and the one who confesses with the mouth and is so saved.
SPEAKER_02: And that's the promise.
SPEAKER_02: That's the promise that those people celebrated when they entered the promised land of Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_02: And that's the promise that each of us, I assume, in this church, celebrated as we came under the waters of baptism.
SPEAKER_02: And that's the promise that every Sunday morning, as we tell our stories around this table, and we remember in anamnesis and in epiclisis at liturgy, we remember God and He is here in Jesus' own body and blood.
SPEAKER_02: That's the promise that we are called to literally connect ourselves during the Lent season too.
SPEAKER_02: That's the promise.
SPEAKER_02: And so, whatever it takes, it's going to be different for each and every one of us, but whatever it takes during this season of Lent to just do a little more, to just be a little more, to just experience a little more, to just reflect on a little more, to contemplate a little more that presence of God, in whatever way, I believe is what Lent is about.
SPEAKER_02: And to be open, not to the work that we do in transformation, but to be open to whatever it is that God will do to you when you connect yourself through Jesus to the Spirit of God and to this Holy Spirit given.
SPEAKER_02: And in a literal way, we do that each and every Sunday morning as we come to this rail, as we receive the body and blood of Jesus.
SPEAKER_02: And what Lent is saying very clearly, I believe, is that connecting yourself to that body and blood of Jesus is for us the way and the truth and the life that we have been offered and that we have said yes to at this font by Jesus' own life and death and resurrection among us.
SPEAKER_02: Amen.