The season of Lent has begun (on Ash Wednesday).
Wednesday Bible Study – Ash Wednesday Service. Put a cross of ash on each other’s forehead and recited: “Remember that you are dust and to dust you will return.”
We talked about what we are giving up for Lent: Chocolate. TV in the evening.
I was like, I am thinking of meat, but only for 2 days a week, ie 12 days, not for 40 days. I am full of admiration for vegetarians. About 10 years ago, I gave up pork for Lent: pork dumplings and bacon. As a Chinese Malaysian, that’s the ultimate fast.
This idea of fasting comes the first gospel reading for the Lent season: Jesus, in the wilderness, fasting forty days and forty nights. It’s a story of temptation and ministry.
Before being led into the wilderness by the Spirit, Jesus was baptised by his cousin, John the Baptist.
Emily delved into this story as part of the baptism of Daniel.
After the baptism, with the water of the Jordan River still clinging on Jesus’ skin, the Spirit of God descended on him like a dove and a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
With the voice of the Spirit ringing in his ears, affirming his belovedness, Jesus was led into the wilderness by the Spirit.
Wilderness
The wilderness theme is a common theme in the Bible.
Many of us will be familiar with the wilderness stories in the Old Testament. Hagar was driven into the wilderness twice by Sarah. The Israelites wandered in the wilderness for 40 years before entering into the promised land. Elijah fled into the wilderness to escape the wrath of Ahab and Jezebel.
When Elijah was in the wilderness, after being fed by an angel, Elijah went without food for forty days and forty nights. Moses similarly didn’t eat and drink for forty days and forty nights as he went up Mt Sinai to receive the stone tablets on which God will give the law and commandments.
Some of you would have watched the SBS TV Series, Alone, in which contestants are dropped into the Tasmanian wilderness. Whoever endure the wilderness the longest, being able to combat hunger, cold and loneliness, will have a prize of $250,000.
However, most of us, will not go into the wilderness voluntarily. I know that Bear Grylls has made wilderness wandering fun but the wilderness speaks of an inhospitable and hostile environment. Where we will be stripped of all comforts and companionship. A place of barrenness, danger and loneliness. In Central Australia, wandering in the wilderness, it can result in death.
Jesus did not go the wilderness voluntarily. He was led into the wilderness by the Spirit. I grappled with this text: Did the Spirit orchestrate this time of testing? And if he did, what does it say about the Spirit’s role in leading Jesus into a time of testing, hunger and suffering?
I don’t know what the answer is. The question of suffering and God’s role in that suffering is a question that I will likely grapple with for the rest of my life.
However, it doesn’t mean that we cannot draw comfort from this text. The wilderness will happen whether we want it to happen. None of us, by the sole virtue of being human, is immune from periods of wilderness in our lives. We all face dark nights of the soul where we have to confront deep sadness, pain and where unimaginable tragedies strike. There is, most times, no rhyme or reason for tragedies.
As an homage to Emily, I am going to quote Debie Thomas here.
“Sometimes our journeys with God include dark places. Not because God takes pleasure in our pain, but because we live in a fragile, broken world that includes deserts. God’s modus operandi is to take the things of death and sadness, and wring from them resurrection and life.”
I believe that God can redeem even the most desolate periods of our lives. That our deserts can become holy even as they remain painful.
Belovedness
At his baptism and before he began his public ministry God already declared Jesus as his beloved and one with whom he was well pleased. There was nothing that Jesus has done in the public arena to warrant this declaration.
After forty days and forty nights in the wilderness, as Jesus was hungry and thirsty, the first thing that Satan attack was his identity. If you are the Son of God.
In the middle of the Jordan River, with the sun shining down on him and the clouds parting and a voice declaring from heaven, it would have been easy for Jesus to believe in his identity as God’s beloved.
After forty days and forty nights in the wilderness, hungry, thirsty, tired and alone, as the memory pf his Father’s voice from heaven fades, it would have been harder on Jesus to cling on the truth of his belovedness.
As Nadia Bolz-Weber said:
“Identity. It’s always God’s first move. Before we do anything wrong and before we do anything right, God has named and claimed us as God’s own. Almost immediately, the world tries to tell us who we are. “
And maybe, just moments after Jesus’ baptism, when the devil says to him, “If you are the Son of God…” he does so because he knows that Jesus is vulnerable to temptation precisely to the degree that he is insecure about his identity and mistrusts his relationship with God.
Like so many Western countries around the world, we are having a fierce debate, and at times, ugly debate, about immigration.
I moved to this country in 1994, two years before Pauline Hanson was elected to Parliament. In Pauline Hanson’s maiden speech, she talked about the danger of the country being swamped by an Asians.
As a 16 year old, I was asked by two boys to leave the country and go back to where I come from.
In my desperation to fit in, I inhaled Australian culture, which means sports. In round 21 1996, I watched a game between Fremantle Dockers and Brisbane Lions and thought that purple team had potential. I became an avid Dockers fan. Brisbane has gone on to win 5 premierships, Dockers is still chasing the dream.
I learned cricket but rugby league is a stretch too far. Union, on the other hand…. Music, books….I was called a banana by my Asian peers, a moniker that I took pride in, yellow on the outside, white on the inside.
The language used in this immigration debate angers me. Because I feel that no matter what I do, I will be first and foremost seen as an immigrant who needs to make sure that I do all I can to fit in and be accepted into Australian society . There is limited recognition, of the richness and the benefits that we immigrants bring to Australia, to its economy.
There are many voices now that choose to narrow each of us, shorten all of us until we are diminished and not seen in our fullness. There are so many voices which want to negate our shared humanity.
To quote Nadia Bolz-Weber, “All these voices try to tell us who we are and to whom we belong. But only God can do that. Everything else is a temptation.”
We are vulnerable to temptation to the degree that we are insecure in our identity and our relationship to Gd.
All of us are deeply beloved. All of us are loved by God so deeply and so fully in our humanity.
The Bible is also clear: When a stranger lives with you in your land, do not mistreat them. The stranger living with you must be treated as one of your native- born. Love them as yourself for you were once strangers in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God. Most of us, our parents, our grandparents, our great-grandparents, and our foreparents, were once strangers in this land.
Bread
“Men shall not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”
There is nothing easy in this Lenten season to sit with longing and wrestle with hunger. There is nothing easy about trusting God to meet our deepest hunger and to satisfy our deepest longing.
To live by every word that comes from the mouth of God.
And of course, the ultimate word that proceeds from the mouth of God is Jesus Christ.
“In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God and the Word was God. In him was life and the life was the light of men.”
That’s our call this Lenten season, to live by Jesus, for him and through him. And of course, to know our identity in Christ.
As Paul said in Galatians 2:20: “It is no longer I who live but it s Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.”
This Lenten season, may you live as one who knows your identity as a child who is beloved by Christ. May you rest in Christ in all your hunger and longing. May you live by faith in the Son of God. May you come to know, and live by the Word, who is ultimately the light for all of us. Amen.
