The SAT test was revamped this week.  That iconic high school college admissions test that has given head aches and heart aches to high school students for years is changing.   Gone is the mandatory essay and the quarter point deduction for answering a question incorrectly.  Gone is the 2400 point scale.  This rite of passage even returns to the 1600 point scale many of us remembered.  Gone are the difficult vocabulary words.  Jimmy Fallon joked this past Friday on his show that he is glad the difficult vocabulary words are going away because he found them so “amphibious.”

Very few of us like tests.   Even when we know the material, unless we are like Hermione from Harry Potter, we usually would rather be doing something other than taking a test.  Yet tests are inevitable through life.  The deadline looms at work and we are tested.  Going to the doctor requires our being tested.  A mistake is made that puts a relationship to the test.  President Obama faces a diplomatic test over Russia and Ukraine.  Even Jesus had to face tests.  As we’ve heard, Satan tested him three times in the wilderness.  

The wilderness can be a metaphor for those times and places when we are out of our comfort zone and are tested.  To get through them often requires faith.   We begin Lent focusing on Jesus’ tests in the wilderness because much as Lent prepares us for Easter, our wilderness tests prepare us to be fully alive.  Let us pray. 

After his baptism Jesus went into the wilderness for forty days where he is tempted by Satan.  Then he left the wilderness and began his public ministry of healing, teaching, reconciling, and saving.

40 day periods in the Bible are important to note.  Noah and his family survived the rain in the ark for 40 days and nights.  The people of Nineveh had 40 days to turn things around.  The Israelites wandered for 40 years in the wilderness before entering the holy land.

I wonder what the 40 day experience was like for Jesus?  It was likely cold, dry, and windy at night.  He was hungry.  Jesus had to have sat there shivering and frightened.  It would have been easy for Jesus to break down.  And near the end, as Jesus was weakened, the devil tempted him three times. First with food, then with protection and then with authority, playing to natural fears of hunger, obscurity and death.

Because of this, we often think that Lent is only about saying, “No,” and giving things up.  That we are called to spend Lent alone fasting from things because Jesus sat alone.  Discipline, repentance and restraint are important.  But that is not the whole story.  When we read the passage closely it helps us realize that Jesus was saying “Yes” to deepening his relationship with God in the wilderness, and that he wasn’t entirely alone.  Matthew explains that the Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness.  Luke tells us that the Holy Spirit led Jesus “in the wilderness” and when he left he was filled with the spirit.  Mark’s recounting of Jesus’s temptations in particular reveals that the angels attended to Jesus.  

He had the Spirit with him throughout the wilderness temptations and he used his time to deepen his connection to God so that he could emerge ready for his public ministry.  We can tell this because each time he is tempted, Jesus defends himself quoting a piece of Old Testament scripture and by referring to respect for God’s word, authority and rule.

As we now begin our 40 day period known as Lent, we can ask ourselves, “How can my actions these next few weeks strengthen my relationship with God?”  So that when we emerge from these 40 days at Easter, we will be strengthened for whatever ministry God has called us to next.  Lent helps us learn to follow Christ into the new life he is offering us through his resurrection. 

What is keeping you from feeling fully alive? A haunting memory?  An inability to live life moving forward?  A need to control life?  A feeling that you are being controlled.  An obsession about a person or situation?   You might already be in the wilderness.  Feeling like Jesus.  Wondering if God has abandoned you?  Sitting alone on the outskirts of life, tempted to be less than your true self.

If we are in it, Lent is the time to embrace and address such a wilderness.  There is a liberty to the wilderness.  When you are in a place between the routines you are used to, you are freed to try new things, explore parts of yourself and the gifts you might have deferred and focus on resetting priorities which are most life giving. 

As Matthew and our Chancel Players suggest, you may feel alone, but the spirit of God is with you in the wilderness:  in the negative journey, in the empty silence, in the space, in the footsteps. 

And if you are not in the wilderness now, you will be at some point.  New Testament scholar N.T. Wright writes, “You are never far from the wilderness when you are in the Promised Land.” The wilderness of unexpected illness or trauma or job challenge.  As we recognized on Ash Wednesday, at some point we lose those things we cling to in life.  So we do well to use this time to develop the practices, priorities and mindset that will help us when we are in the wilderness.

If we take Lent seriously, we will be in the wilderness with Jesus.  The vespers services and activities we have at church now, our devotions, and our service opportunities make this real.  Because what happens in the wilderness is real inner work.  Inner work of practicing prayer and scripture reading and getting our mind set on what is important.

 Theologians talk about the objective and subjective work of Christ.  The objective work of Christ is Jesus’ death and resurrection.  The subjective work is that amazing experience becoming real for us through the Holy Spirit.  Appreciating that requires internal work.  And that is made real at Lent.  Lent is a time to recalibrate, and to find a way to rediscover real meaning.  It could be only when we lose something do we recognize all the other positive alternatives and opportunities before us. 

The perspective of the wilderness helps us realize how dependent we are on things other than God. God wants us to let them go and depend on God as Jesus did.   Because if we don’t, the pain can become our companion in life.  We are tempted to become so dependent on the hurt it we take that with us wherever we go.  And when we start to feel better we get pulled right back to the pain because we don’t think we can go on without it.

Then other temptations will come. Temptations to cut corners. Temptations to return evil for evil.  Temptations to abandon the better angels of our nature for some promise of happiness by society’s standards.  The practice of the wilderness, the promise of Lent, is for us to stay focused on God. 

At a time when Peter and his disciples were abandoning their paths, Jesus was able to say to God, “Not my will but yours be done.”  He remained true to God through all his ministry because he prepared for it in the wilderness. 

The singer Kelly Clarkson put it, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Doesn’t mean I’m lonely when I’m alone.”  Much as the Holy Spirit stayed with Jesus in the wilderness the Spirit goes with us through our journey.  We could be in wilderness of physical pain and the Spirit comes to us.  In the wilderness of illness and grief, our task could be to be the angel who waits on someone. The church is here, friends are here, wanting to reach out to comfort and hold us, as reminders that God is here, that we are held tightly by the One who loves us whether we realize it or not.

That is why Lent prepares us so well for Easter.  Easter is about our trusting the one who loves us, the reality of Jesus’ resurrection and placing our lives in God’s hands.  Resurrection doesn’t happen without loneliness, suffering, and death. 

What is past is past.  Don’t get stuck in it.  What is to come is your future ministry.  Prepare yourself for receiving Easter grace by refocusing on the things that really matter.   And God will take you there.

I love how Lee Weber puts it in his poem, Crossings:

I came to a swift and raging river.  And the roar held the echo of fear. “Oh Lord, give me wings to fly over, if you are as you promised, quite near.” But God said, “Trust the grace I am giving, all pervasive, sufficient for you. Take my hand; we will face this together. For my plan is not over, but through!

In whatever wilderness you find yourself this morning, you are not alone.  Jesus went through it and so can you.

Christians often use the term “testify” or “to give one’s testimony” to mean “the story of how one became a Christian.”  The basis of the word testimony is test.   And while we don’t like tests, the tests we encounter, the trials we face, the wilderness we walk through, all lead somewhere.  They lead to our story.  They shape our lives.  They are the grist of our faith journey.

The Lenten wilderness leads to Easter resurrection.  Our Lenten task is the same as it ever was, to be faithful to the one who is faithful to us.  And then we pass.  We pass through.  May it be so.  Amen.