The Church of the Redeemer

March 9, 2003

The First Sunday in Lent

As I stand here this morning, I am wondering how many of us have been able to give our full attention to this morning’s service.  My sense is, if I took a poll and received honest answers, not the, “I don’t want to hurt the minister’s feelings” answers, I suspect about seventy per cent of us would answer no.  Let’s be honest, it is hard to give up an hour to an hour and a half each Sunday to worship with so much else going on in our lives.  Right now I know some of us are putting together grocery lists as you prepare to do your weekly shopping soon after the service.  Others are using this time to figure out what they need to get done this afternoon in order to be ready for the start of the work week, and there is yet another group trying to remember whose turn it is to car pool and in what direction for their children’s activities this week.  Then there is a group who in about another minute will look at their watches and wonder how long this sermon is going to take, because how long I go on for, will determine if they will be on time for their twelve o’clock activity.  If anything I have said so far describes what has been going through your mind during the passive moments of this service or prior to the start of the service, take a moment and exhale.  I’m serious, take a moment and let out all the air in your lungs.   This is what we are doing right now, exhaling, and this is what most of life outside these walls demands us to do, exhale by exerting ourselves.   The only problem is, as much as we push ourselves to exhale; eventually we have to inhale by taking time to rest.

            Life begins and is restored through the process of inhaling. The first rule of sports conditioning is that you exhale when exerting energy and you inhale when resting to prepare for the next act of exertion. At birth, as the baby is pushed out of the womb, the pressure surrounding the chest cavity decreases causing the lungs to expand, and the baby is able to take in his first breath of air and new life begins.  Ancient cultures equated breathing with life.  In Native American language, the same word is used for soul and breath.  It is their belief one dies because the breath leaves the body.  In Hebrew, the word for breath is “ruah”, this term is also used when referring to the spirit of God, the source of all life. 

            Breathing, life and God through out the ages have been mysteriously interwoven, reminding us of our dependency and need for contact with God.  Martin Smith, a former member and superior for the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Cambridge used the following words when describing our dependence and need for contact with God. “One way of imagining the question of image and likeness is to think of a lock and the key made to fit it.  A key and its lock do not look like each other; one is not a big version of the other.  But a key is made after the image and likeness of the lock, it fits and meshes with it, it belongs in it and its purpose and destiny is to move in it.  We are not miniatures of God (we are in fact a strange kind of ape!) but our mysterious evolution influenced by the Spirit working in creation has made us able to “fit” the being of God, our beings match and mesh with God’s. Our deepest needs as persons are met and fulfilled by who God actually is.  Every aspect of ourselves as persons-in-relationship is blessed and completed by contact and union with all that God is.” (Smith p.34)

            The contact with God that Martin Smith refers to is the contact we make through conversation with God that is in the form of prayer or meditation.  When we let go and completely focus on conversation with God, we allow ourselves the time to breathe in, we allow our spirit to rest and our lives to be renewed by God, the source of all life. 

Jesus understood this reality.  The Gospel writers tell us that throughout his life, Jesus spent many hours in prayer.  One statistic I read a while back stated that the Gospels record Jesus in prayer over forty times.  In this morning’s Gospel, our passage began with Jesus being baptized by John the Baptist and then concludes with the spirit driving him out into the wilderness for forty days.  This is the beginning of Jesus’ ministry and as is common throughout most of the Gospels this portion of his ministry began with prayer, contact with God. “The spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness for forty days.”  Into the wilderness, the desert, a place where there was nothing to distract Jesus’, because as we heard in last week’s reading from the First Book of Kings, God only speaks in the stillness.  For forty days, Jesus retreated from the world fasting and resting in the presence of God so, at the end, he would be prepared and spiritually strong enough to face the temptations or should I say, the distractions of the Devil and not loose his focus on God. 

            This is what made Jesus different than us.  He was so focused on God, that he was not swayed by the Devil, despite being distracted; with food, when he was hungry, temporal power, without the need for the crucifixion and the opportunity to allay any insecurity he may have had in God.  Jesus saw what few of us can see, all that the tools the Devil has to distract us with, are but dead ends, dead ends that keep us from breathing in the source of life. 

            All of us have fallen prey to the Devil; our palm pilots bear testimony to how easily he distracts us.  As our date books and pda’s become overloaded with appointments and carpools, board meetings and soccer practices we play into the hands of the Devil.  Carl Jung once wrote, “Busyness is the Devil’s handmaid.  Because if the Devil can keep us busy, and distract our focus on God, he can separate us from God.” Think about how often our busyness has kept us from worshipping on a Sunday morning, from developing or maintaining a regular prayer life or from participating in Bible study, in essence Satan is succeeding in cutting us off from the source of life and rest.

            Christ said, “Come to me all who are heavy laden and I will give you rest.”  These words sound so wonderful; yet feel so foreign to us because we are so physically and spiritually exhausted.  We desire contact with God, we want regular time for prayer but the thought of adding yet another item to our day not only seems impossible, it is impossible.  And, the answer to our problem is not as simple working harder at prioritizing or becoming more skillful at time-management.  The answer is only found when we accept the fact that we do not have to fill up every moment of every day with activity; that our children do not have to be involved in every after school and weekend activity that comes their way; and we don’t need to say yes to every opportunity to serve.  But in order to do this, we must first confront what drives to over extend ourselves.   What causes us to need to be so busy?  To some degree it is our own pride.  It is our pride that tells each of us that only I can do the job right or that our children need multiple activities to get into a good school.  We need to let go of our pride, give it over to God. We need to trust in God and allow God to help us hold onto what is essential to our lives and get rid of that, which is unnecessary.  It is only when we are willing to rid ourselves of the unessential and not take on more activity that we find the time to rest and breathe in God.

I invite you this Lenten Season to breathe in the Spirit, which renews and deepens our connection with God.  Breathe in; breathe in God, the source of all life and rest.  Amen.     

Craig R. Swan

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