Looking to Jesus This Lent

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the First Sunday of Lent, February 26, 2023 by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean and Rector.

“We can’t go down into the waters of baptism without stirring up a good deal of mud,” says Rowan Williams in his short little classic Being Christian. I remember speaking with a newly baptized parishioner who was recounting to me how their life went utterly sideways after their baptism–work stress, conflict in the family, health issues–it seemed like everything that could go wrong was going wrong. Maybe the baptism wasn’t working? Maybe this was all a horrible mistake? “Or maybe,” I said, “it’s proceeding exactly as it should, and you are undergoing a spring cleaning of the Spirit, so that love might come to dwell in you more fully!”

The Great Forty Days of Lent, are a precious time in the Church year where we make a little space, go into the desert led, or sometimes driven, by the Spirit to recognize, gently name, and release all that is not God’s love for us that we might–each in our own unrepeatably unique way—manifest and express God’s love for us in and through these very hands, feet, voice, and witness… for others. During Lent, the Church invites us to adopt certain habits of body, mind, spirit in order to see clearly where we’re stuck, open ourselves to the healing presence and action of God in our lives, and then go with Jesus to those left-in-the-ditch others as the very love we’ve received.

One of the things about deserts is that, in the absence of things to distract us, what we are carrying with us–our hurts, our wounds, our prejudices, our projections–begin to burble up. In the absence of a Netflix series to distract us, or of a news story to wind us up into a frenzy, a laptop to browse on, or a cell phone to scroll through, we are suddenly, and unceremoniously left with ourselves. It was Blaise Pascal who, way back in the 1600s wrote, “All of humanity’s problems stem from peoples’ inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” In the words of our Genesis account, we cover our nakedness before God–our easy, cool of the morning, undefended intimacy with God–with self-images and preoccupations. Out of the empty-full space of relying on God and God alone, and knowing ourselves hidden with Christ in God where love and our belovedness are the only true thing we can say about ourselves and others, we fashion a self of our own making–what Thomas Merton, Basil Pennington and Thomas Keating call, “a false self.” Pennington’s pithy thumbnail of the false self is that it is the mistaken belief that my value depends on three things: what I have, what I can do, and what others think of me. Possessions. Power. And prestige.

The desert fathers and mothers, fleeing the excesses of Roman imperial court for a simpler, quieter life devoted to God, discovered the same thing. They left the elaborately ordered hierarchies of court life behind, but found themselves in the middle of the Egyptian desert comparing their basket weaving with the basket weaving of their siblings in Christ: “Nobody weaves better baskets than I do!” or “In the entire history of basket-weaving there has never been a worse, more deplorable basket weaver than I!” Wherever we go, there we are. What we know as the “seven deadly sins,” were originally pointed out by Evagrius of Pontus in the 4th century as places he dispassionately (apatheia) watched his mind go when he tried to go part in silence to be with God. He called them simply “afflictive thoughts,” and developed a kind of contemplative psychology at least as profound as what we know mindfulness-based cognitive therapy 2000 years avant la lettre. What we turned into the Seven Deadlies were originally intended as an innocent and (he thought) helpful list of eight places human minds go, eight habits of heart, mind, and spirit that capture our attention and distract us from the unconditional love of God revealed to us in the person of Jesus through the Holy Spirit.

What Merton, Pennington, and Keating call the “false self,” is the self we construct in an attempt to secure for ourselves the peace, joy, and happiness that comes from God and God alone. Absent an experience of God’s love for us–the well-pleased belovedness that is our true identity in Christ–we look in people, substances, objects, reputation–for some relief from the restlessness of our hearts that know the peace that passes understanding only in union and communion with God. It’s not our fault, and there is a certain logic to it. It’s simply the human condition. And it’s what Lent is meant to heal us of.

Jesus, at His baptism, knows his intimacy with the Father in the Spirit. Well-pleased belovedness is his very nature. And our journey in the Christian life is to come to the very same intimacy with the Father’s love. We participate in and become by grace what Jesus is by nature. And when Jesus goes into the desert, is drawn, led, driven, by the Spirit to those empty spaces, it is to marinate and stabilize in the love of God recognized publicly at his baptism. The whole forty days is a process of seeing all that is not dependence upon God for everything, simply everything, and the gradual, coming-undone-in-love of every project, tactic, and strategy that seeks happiness, fulfillment, peace, justice, mercy apart from God. Having recognized, marinated, and stabilized as the love he is, Jesus goes out as that love. His public ministry begins immediately after this time integration in/as Love.

Jesus’ temptations in the desert are particularly dramatic in their presentation. Our temptations are usually, but not always, of a much more mundane variety. But if we are paying attention and devote ourselves to being with God in silence, simplicity, and stillness, we will inevitably notice the same kinds of things popping into our minds as Jesus did: the temptations to define ourselves, or secure our identity, in what we have, what we can do, what people think of us.

Turn stones into bread! Be a self-made person independent from God. Grab that apple and do-it-yourself. Cover that nakedness. Jesus is tempted towards thinking what he does is who he is in the same way that the Israelites’ core identity as productive brick-makers for Pharaoh was challenged in the desert. Is that really who you are? Your worth dependent on how much you produce? Or is your non-negotiable belovedness as a child of God created in God’s image and likeness deeper than how much you churn out, how full your calendar is? Does not God have a purpose for us, a way for us to manifest love through our life, just-as-it-is, in the midst of this holy ordinary we call daily life? Are not “too young Mary” and “too old Elizabeth” with John and Jesus leaping in loving recognition at the Visitation pointers to us that what we think of as fruitful and productive are merely human constructs imposed on the limitlessly generative fruitfulness of God is who still working?

Throw yourself off the temple! And post the video on Instagram! Get a million likes and a legion of followers! Thanks, but no thanks, says Jesus. I’ll find myself, anchor myself in the love of God, rather than what people think of me. Neither praise, in this case, or blame (increasingly frequent as Jesus sets his face towards Jerusalem and journeys to and through the cross) have the last word on who Jesus is. Neither praise nor blame can ultimately tell us who we really are.

All this will be yours! We’ve looked with Jesus into productivity as a place to secure our identity and found it only hollows us out from the inside. We’ve looked with Jesus into prestige as a place to secure our identity and found it rather fickle and dusty–not the kind of place we want to build our house. And now we look by him and with him and in him at power and possessions as a lasting source for the happiness for which we are created and find it similarly hollow. Something we pursue when we don’t know where to look for love.

And where, then, do we look? To Jesus. Always and everywhere. He is our peace, our rest, our fulfillment and it is in relationship with Jesus that who we really are beyond what we do, what we have, and what people think of us, comes to flower for others as what love looks like when tabernacles here and finds itself going out to others in the ordinary circumstances of our daily life. 

We look to Jesus in prayer–spending time in Jesus’ presence: sharing (sometimes in words and sometimes in silence) with the one whom we know by faith is present at the center of our being. Easy converse between intimates as Teresa of Avila calls it. I look at him and he looks at me until the “at” falls away. 

We look to Jesus in the scriptures–we learn that even when we are contracted in fear, Jesus is coming to us to touch, to heal, to whisper those words, “Get up! Don’t be afraid!” and remind us of who and whose we are. We look to Jesus in the sacraments and like open-handed baby birds receive the pledge of our redemption, the token of our belovedness bestowed by a trustworthy God: be what you see, receive who you are. 

And we look to Jesus in the faces of the poor serving to help them meet material needs, but also serving them with our simple presence: seeing them with the same untimbered eye with which God sees them. Beyond doing or not-doing, beyond having or not-having, beyond praise and blame, the simple, shining, blazing-forth truth of belovedness.

This Lent, dispose yourself to God’s presence and action in your life. Little offerings here, there, and everywhere. Waste time gracefully in God’s presence. Be fed with the bread of angels–in the words of scripture and in the sacraments. Watch for him passing by, mingling with the crowd, in the faces of the poor and needy. But most of all–let yourself be loved this Lent. Let who you really are in Christ come to flower as God’s work in you in your life as God’s field. Not what you produce. Not how little or much you have. Not what people think or don’t think about you. What’s left? Let’s find out as we look to Jesus, journey with Jesus that who we really are might be revealed, that a life that is truly life might be born in us, and love that lays itself down for the other might be our common ground.