I always liked the harmonies of the vocal group: The Temptations. Who could forget songs like “My Girl”. But of course, today we are not talking about a singing group.

We are beginning Lent. Much of the music may be more of a dirge, or at least contemplative music of Lent. We always begin Lent with the temptations of Jesus, 40 days in the wilderness. That is why sometimes we give something up for 40 days during this season. Lent is 40 days, plus 6. In other words, Sundays are not part of Lent. Lent is 46 days. Why? Because Sundays are considered a little Easter even during the Lenten season. We acknowledge and claim the resurrected Christ every Sunday. That is why we worship on Sunday instead of the last day of the week which is the original Sabbath. We worship on the day Jesus was resurrected.

Jesus was baptized then immediately sent into the wilderness. And who sent him into the wilderness? Satan? No, the Holy Spirit sent him into the wilderness. There must be a reason for this. It is not accident that we pray every Sunday, “Lead us not into temptation.” We often fail the test do we not? Maybe I should speak for myself. If tested by God, I would fall short.

So, Jesus is sent into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit. Wilderness. I remember when I was a child, my brother had a little Davy Crockett hat, complete with a racoon’s tail. He wore it when playing outside pretending to be in the wild, wild west. When I think of the wilderness, I think of forest and lots of it. I grew up in the big thicket in Texas. A title apply named because it was thick with brush and pine trees and many kinds of vegetation. If you have never been to Texas you may think of cactus and desert and wide-open spaces. That is West Texas, not the Eastern part. We know enough about the terrain where Jesus walked the earth and it was not a forest. It was not the Davy Crockett kind of frontier. When Jesus was in the wilderness, he was in the desert. Deserts lack shade in the heat and protection in the cold of the night. I try to remember whether to spell desert with one s or 2, by remembering desserts have sugar and spice and deserts only have sand.

Jesus is in the desert wilderness. Jesus fasted for 40 days in the wilderness. This brought much temptation. So, what does one learn from fasting? There is a simply sentence in verse 2. Someone said to me, you have a firm grip on the obvious. It says of that 40 day fast, “He was famished.” It doesn’t say, he learned so much. It doesn’t say, he found himself. It doesn’t say he saw visions. It simply says he was famished. While famished, just as we would be, just as we are if we fast for any length of time.

And yet, look at how he was able to answer with such clarity. Jesus learned something deeper than the hunger pains in this deprivation of food.

Three temptations Jesus faced which are ours as well, might be put in 3 categories.

1. Safety and security. We may want to be safe. We circle our wagons, we find our tribe and close ourselves off. There is a very old adage, “A ship is safe in the harbor, but that’s not what it was build for.” Many of you read the children’s book series by C.S. Lewis, “Chronicles of Narnia”. When asked about Aslan, the lion, an allegory of Jesus, “Is he save.” “No, he’s not safe, but he’s good.” We often try to domesticate God. We may want to be safe and secure to the detriment of adventure with an aversion to risk. Faith = risk. If we were already there, walking by sight, then it would not be about faith. It would be about risk. The fast Jesus experience gave him, not certainty, but clarity. I noticed last week, God was in the cloud. In the cloud, not clear and obvious, but murky and mysterious. Jesus gained not safe and certainty, but clarity. A resolve, to move toward his mission, without having to have proof. Many years ago a book was published titled “How your church family works.” It is an honest look at systems theory. Edwin Friedman, a Rabbi and therapist died in 1996. Before he died he saw where I culture was heading. He wrote this in the forward of the book called How your church family works.

The late Dr. Murray Bowen had a theory he called societal regression. It was his view that from time to time the chronic, free-floating anxiety that was, to some extent, always around spiked. Such periods are marked by a rise in terrorism, fundamentalism, cults, and a general shifting in the individuality/togetherness scale towards the stuck-togetherness end of the continuum. In such climate the focus shifts toward pathology rather than strength, safety becomes more important than adventure, adaptation is towards the dependent, and empathy becomes more important than responsibility. The resulting atmosphere is toxic to well-defined leaders.

2. Affection and esteem – Jesus resisted the desire for glory, for credit. For fame and esteem. We need to feel we are contributing. We want to be liked. When this becomes over focused, we no longer serve or sacrifice. We adjust so we will get likes, or be liked. We crave approval and affection and esteem. We have enough of our ego fed, to function. Yet, if we pursue this in lieu of our desire to please God, we will find it far thinner fare than the love and acceptance we already have from God. We have not as a culture in anyway outgrown our desire for affection and esteem. Counting the likes on Facebook, counting the attendance in worship, seeking fame and notoriety.

3. Power and Control – We want to control our lives and our situations. We want to be empowered. Someone defined power as the means to act. We want the powerless, to have a sense of courage and strength. When we rely too much on our desire for power and control, we find all sorts of perversions of the gospel. This temptation of power and control today in our country has run amok. As though might is right and greed is a status symbol. Domination is a temptation many refuse to release. Adoration of God is the best antidote to pride and lust for power. Service, not domination of others is the call of God.

The temptation of Christ gives me pause for they are our temptations as well. When we find ourselves in the wilderness, aware that our insatiable pursuit of happiness (as our declaration of independence declares), will not lead to happiness only to more insecurity, and misery. We can pause, reflect, fast, pray, serve, give alms.

During Lent we may want to fast and when find ourselves hungry, pray and read scripture or as Jesus said, “the Word of God.” We long for happiness through 1.safety/ security, 2.affection/ esteem, 3.power/ control. These pursuits will never satisfy us. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were right, we can’t get no satisfaction, though we will try , and try and try.

Lent is a time to go into the wilderness and find the true self, the God who already loves us, who longs for us. And has put a holy longing within us as well. Sometimes, often we do not go into the wilderness willingly.

I am not simply talking about a geographical place. The wilderness occurs in us as well. In referring to our wilderness Barbara Brown Taylor said it this way:
Maybe it just looked like a hospital waiting room to you, or the sheets on a cheap motel bed after you got kicked out of your house, or maybe it looked like the parking lot where you couldn’t find your car on the day you lost your job. It may even have been a kind of desert in the middle of your own chest, where you begged for a word from God and heard nothing but the wheezing bellows of your own breath.
Wildernesses come in so many shapes and sizes that the only way you can really tell you are in one is to look around for what you normally count on to save your life and come up empty. No food. No earthly power. No special protection–just a Bible-quoting devil and a whole bunch of sand.
I look at Jesus’ temptation and it seems like it happened this week. The pursuit of power, the desire to be liked, the claim that excluding makes one safe. Nothing new under the sun.

So we read it again this lent. We pray again this year. We seek God’s help again this year.

May your Lenten journey begin, and remember you are not alone. In life, in trauma, in dire situations, in illness, in boredom, in loneliness, in all that we face, even in death, in life beyond death, we are not alone, God and the holy angels are with us. AMEN.