Well lent is here folks. We are at the beginning of our season of preparation, preparation for Easter. For the next forty days, the church encourages us to keep a Lenten fast by, and I quote from the Ash Wednesday service; “by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy Word”.
The Lenten exhortation is a call on our attention. A big cry out saying look at God. Focus life anew, re-center our living on our encounter with God. It creates a space and time to ask; how do I love the Lord my God with all my heart with all my soul and with all my mind? And how do I love my neighbor as myself? Lent is a call to refocus our attention back on God and God’s call on our life.
As a result, Lent picked up some practices that helped people move their focus away from normal life. Traditionally, for most of human history, we have put the majority of our attention on food. More specifically a focus on how to get enough food. Until the advent of modern farming humans have worked very hard to meet their daily needs. We are very fortunate to live now when modern food insecurity is not a result of failed harvests. For most humans that have ever lived, they have been either subsistence farmers or hunter-gatherers. So for centuries, the effect of fasting was to move the focus from the daily gride of growing food onto what mattered most, back onto God.
Modernity presents a different set of problems for our attention. We don’t need to worry about whether there will be enough to eat in our community. Instead, we have set ourselves up in a rat race, keeping up with the Joneses. And that pressure is only getting worse with time. As we seek to maintain our standard of living in line with the ever-rising boat of our materially successful society, attention has become a commodity. A commodity that is sold to advertisers, so that our great wealth, which even the poorest of us have, can be drawn to them.
Thanks to the arrival of supercomputers in our pockets, yes I’m talking about your smartphone, our focus can be increasingly commodified anywhere. You can look at your phone before you get up in the morning, while eating, when on the train, or in the bathroom, you can even sneak a peek in the pew at the back of the church. The more time we are encouraged to look at our technology the more money someone can make from our attention.
As a result, there is an incentive to make our screens addictive. App designers and advertisers have built technology that hooks our attention and will hold us fast in this world. Every time you refresh your emails or scroll down your YouTube or look through your social media or even Scroll through potential dates on your dating app you are offering your brain a randomized reward incentive. These are the best kinds of incentive plans for getting involvement from participants. Will I win big or lose big? It’s why gambling is so addictive. If the rewards matched the input, a straightforward transaction, we would not keep refreshing, and coming back to our screens. Modern advertising is always trying to draw our attention. The struggle with the world eating our attention is not new, even if technology has made it so much more pervasive. In Jesus’ time, the newfangled Roman empire drew people to the markets or gladiatorial games away from God. Indeed the world is just kind of addictively interesting. Jesus shows us what it takes to seek after God, it takes intentional time and attention.
We always begin Lent with the story of Jesus’s time in the wilderness. After all, we have been charged to read and meditate on scripture. Matthew and Luke give us tales of the Temptations Jesus faced after his baptism, the temptation to use his power for personal gain. But Mark, in classic Mark fashion is very brief. Only two lines to cover the whole Temptation in the Wilderness: “And the Spirit immediately drove him (Jesus) out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts, and the angels waited on him.” It is so short that the lectionary gives us the framing before and after so the deacon has something to read.
What do we make of this? In lent we take this as a model for us disciples of Jesus. We too are baptized and if we want to follow Jesus’ example, we must from time to time step away from the normal world into uninhabited places. In fact, this pattern of withdrawing to meet with God will repeat again and again in Mark’s gospel. The wilderness does not need to be a physical place of emptiness. We live in Maine, so we think we know something about wilderness. Next weekend I’m going to Aroostook, on the way north I will spend hours passing nothing much but trees and wild things. We have those places where there just aren’t people.
But spiritual wildernesses do not need to be empty, they are just places where our focus is removed from our daily wants and needs. Our daily distractions can be stripped away to reveal what is really around us. When daily life is removed it reveals the devils that tempt us, the natural world that accompanies us, and the ministration of angels. It humbling to be out in the north woods, to know that it is bigger, much bigger than we are. It also leaves us relying on our integrity not to sin, I mean who would know if you leave your trash in the woods right? Temptations are real when we think no one is looking. But so is the presence of God around us coming through in all things. So how are we to live in the wilderness this lent?
Every year when facing Lent, I am reminded of the desert fathers and mothers. The first Christian monks and nuns of the fourth century. Their stories are set in the wildernesses of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, and they were the masters at extreme fasting, and all things self-denial. We know about them through a collection of their sayings. The sayings are short phrases, offered by senior monks or nuns, to their disciples. They are varied and include such wonderful treats as “Aresnius said, ‘One hour’s sleep is enough for a monk if he is a fighter.’” Thanks, Aresnius for setting us a low bar. Every Lent I find myself thinking, I’m not very good at this stuff. I don’t like to self-reflect, I hate saying sorry, I’m not good at fasting or refraining from what I enjoy. I’m not even very good at reading the Bible and meditating on it. You have no idea how much I procrastinate writing a sermon!
Yet that’s the point. We are challenged to do the hard work that grows our faith. As the desert mother Syncletica said; ‘Bodily poison is cured by still stronger antidotes; so fasting and prayer drive sordid temptation from us.’ We are called to an annual season of withdrawing so we can once more connect to what really matters. The process by which this happens has looked very different in many times. The desert fathers and mothers look incredibly harsh in their fasting to us, yet not so severe by the standards of their hard time.
There is one story of a group of monks complaining to their Abbot about another brother who is sleeping on a straw mattress in his cell while they sleep on the ground. They expect the abbot to storm off and chastise the terrible monk who has the audacity to sleep on a mattress! But instead, the abbot tells these brothers who the monk on the mattress is. He is the emperor’s former chamberlain, a man who grew up in a palace and chose to become a poor monk. The abbot reminds the complaining monks that they grew up goat herders, who have slept outside on the ground all their lives and have moved up in the world by sleeping indoors on the monastery floor. The exact action of our self-denial is not the point. The aim is to set aside ourselves and bring our attention back to God, so that we are able to live out his commandments in our lives.
So this lent look for your own wilderness, a place or time to step away from your life. A wilderness where we can fast from the things that draw our attention away from God, and in doing so let us learn how to better love God and serve our neighbors. Amen.
