Luke 4:1-13
March 10, 2019
Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood
First Congregational UCC of Manhattan, KS
It’s hard to get lost these days. Many of us carry tiny but powerful supercomputers in our pockets that are attached to data from satellites that invisibly fly over our heads day and night, insistently pinging our coordinates as we go about our daily lives. A few years ago now I was talking with someone who was on their way to a conference in a big city. They were a little nervous because they hadn’t spent a lot of time in big cities and were worried about how to navigate public transit or even figure out how to walk from place to place.
I explained to them that you can literally just hold your phone up to your face and say, “Siri, where can I grab dinner?” And your phone will just tell you! You can also get bus times, reload a transit card, or quickly summon a private driver to just drive you right up to the curb wherever you need to go.
Amazing, really.
It’s hard to get lost in other ways, too. I am old enough to remember a time when we scheduled long-distance phone calls.
Every Sunday night, my family would talk on the phone with my grandma, who lived four hours away from us. We would pass the corded phone from family member to family member, each taking our turn. I assume my mom didn’t talk to her mom throughout the week - just on Sunday evenings.
Nowadays, my mom and I talk or text almost daily. And I’m certain if we went more than a couple of days without connecting she would start to wonder why she hadn’t heard from me. We live in a time where many of us pretty much figure we’ll know where our loved ones are or at least be able to reach them quickly if the need arises.
We also live in a time where it’s hard to disconnect from the frantic pace of the world. And by “the world” I mean THE WORLD. News from all over the globe, much of it bad, arrives nonstop. Even if we do our best to unplug from time to time, we may still look up and discover the news is shouting us at us from a TV screen at the gym or the doctor’s office...or even while we’re just trying to put gas in our car!
So, yes, it can be awfully hard to get lost - at least in some ways - these days. But it can also be all too easy to get lost.
Nonstop demands on our time can create a frantic pace and sometimes we fall into bed at the end of the day wondering, “what did I do today?” We can make a series of small, seemingly-insignificant decisions over a long period of time and suddenly look in the mirror one day and realize we hardly recognize ourselves. We can all-too-easily let go of relationships that have value, values that give strength, stories that heal. We sometimes look at the world around us, coming in through that relentless news cycle, and say to ourselves, “How on earth did we wind up here???”
All of this is to say: we are not that different than Jesus or the people who lived in his time. It can be hard to find space….and sometimes we have to go to extremes to cultivate a sense of wilderness wandering. It can also be all-to-easy to lose ourselves in the daily grind of life.
Those of us who gathered this past Wednesday for Ash Wednesday participated in a ritual that reminds us of some of these complex tensions that we humans carry within ourselves. It’s can be challenging to get off the beaten path AND it can be easy to get lost. We are unique creations, not one of us the same AND we are all knit together in our common humanity. We burn brightly, full of vibrant life, imbued with the very image of the Divine AND we are dust and to dust we shall return.
The season of Lent is a time to lean into these complex tensions as we prepare for Easter, that season of impossible possibilities.
Our theme for Lent this year is “cultivating and letting go” and each week we will be talking with the children during worship about that theme as we build our community art installation. You are invited to make some space for art and reflection this season, stopping by the art station during Fellowship Hour or throughout the week to fold origami, using the papers we wrote on this morning during worship. In this way, we will come together to ponder what we can cultivate and let go of during this season.
The story about Jesus in Luke 4 that we heard just a few moments ago is often tied closely with Lent in our minds. Jesus’s time in the wilderness of 40 days correlates with the 40 days of Lent that come before Easter each year. And in case you’re doing the math on that and coming up with more than 40 days, it’s because Lent is technically the 40 days preceding Easter PLUS the Sundays, which are meant to be “little Easters” and don’t count as a part of the 40 days.
Often, when we look at this passage we focus on the temptation aspect of the story. The ways that the devil tempts Jesus to save himself, make himself great, prematurely entering his glory. We often think about the ways Lent can be a season of steadfastly resisting temptations - like chocolate or pizza - and a time of training ourselves to make our “no” our “no” so that our “yes” can be our “yes.” The Luke passage tells us that Jesus ate nothing during his time in the wilderness, and so the tradition of Lent as a time of fasting has ancient, biblical roots.
These are all rich, important ways to engage with this passage.
Earlier this week I had the opportunity to see Jesus’s time in the wilderness from an Indigenous perspective. Kaitlin Curtice is a member of the Potawatomi Citizen Band, an author, and a Christian. She writes about hearing this story of Jesus in the wilderness anew as she notices its connections to the practice of the vision quest that is common in several Indigenous cultures. Each culture has its own name for a similar ritual, whereby a young person goes into the wilderness for a period of several days, typically alone, typically without any food or water. It’s a coming of age ritual and the Lakota call it Hanbleceya, which, in English, could be translated “crying for a vision.” [2]
Crying for a vision. Going to extremes to see anew.
Curtice says that in Indigenous cultures, young people “enter the wilderness because they know that on the other side they will come out a new version of themselves.”
When we go into the wilderness, we intentionally get lost so that we don’t accidentally get lost.
We let go of some of our familiar comforts and push ourselves into new and unfamiliar territory so that we are forced to pay attention and see our lives anew. We intentionally cultivate space and unfamiliarity so that we can remember who we are.
That’s what happens to Jesus when he is in the wilderness. Tempted by a force that the author of Luke calls “the devil,” Jesus could easily lose himself in a hall of mirrors. After all, the version of Jesus that the devil paints isn’t too far off base. There are kernels of truth buried within.
But in this wilderness place, Jesus is awake and aware enough to resist the temptation of taking the easy route. He is grounded firmly in the truth of who he is and he is ready and willing to walk in the strength of that truth.
It’s no accident that Jesus’s baptism and genealogy come just before this wilderness wandering. When Jesus is baptized, he is reminded who he is at a deep, cellular level. As he emerges from the waters, we are told that the Holy Spirit descends upon him like a dove and a voice extends from the heavens, “You are my son, the beloved. With you I am well pleased!”
Immediately after these words, the author of Luke shifts gears into a long genealogy of Jesus, going back some 75 generations. At the very end, the last words we hear just before Jesus goes into the wilderness are these, “son of God.”
“You are my child,” God says. I am within you, a part of your very essence. You are of me and I am of you. We can never be separated.
Armed with that foundational knowledge resounding deep in his body, Jesus walks into the wilderness - alone but never alone - crying for a vision. Ready to be reminded of who he is and what work is his to do. Jesus gets lost on purpose so he can avoid getting lost on accident. In letting go of familiar comforts and safety, he grows in wisdom and strength.
One of my favorite stories to return to is one by the Rev. Robert Fulghum. He writes about how he was at his window one day, watching the neighborhood kids play a game of hide and seek. One child has hidden under a big pile of leaves just under Fulghum’s window. He has hidden too well. No one can find him and the other kids comb the neighborhood, growing frustrated and about to give up. Fulghum ponders how to help, finally shouting “Get found, kid!” at the top of his lungs, probably terrifying the poor child. He says, “It’s real hard to know how to be helpful sometimes.” [3]
When I think about Jesus out there in the wilderness, trying to find the vision...when I think about all of us in our wilderness wanderings, trying to be brave and carve out space when it can be so daunting to feel unmoored….I imagine God shouting at us, in a good-natured way, “Get found, kid!”
And when I think about us sleep-walking through out days on autopilot, bringing very little intentionality to our lives, I imagine God smiling and saying, “Get lost, kid!”
Get lost. Get found. Sometimes they seem to almost be the same thing.
[3] Fulghum, Robert. All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. http://mjglass.ca/metaphor/getfound.htm
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