Sermon Notes – Sunday 18th February

Today is the first Sunday of Lent. The time of year when, traditionally, we abstain from the some of the nice things in life. Some people go for the food option, giving up chocolate or cakes or biscuits, maybe alcohol. One year I decided to give up caffeine. That was a difficult Lent, it was a stupid idea never to be repeated. Lent is more than abstinence and more than penance, it is the time of spiritual spring-cleaning. It’s the time when we look at our lives and give up the things that are bad for us and are getting in between us and our relationship with Jesus.

Today, being the first Sunday and 5 days in to Lent, today is also the day where usually I’m starting to regret my Lenten optimism. Some of you, I’m sure, will know this feeling. You look ahead, realise that 40 days actually is a very long time. You wonder what on earth made you think you could last that long without chocolate or biscuits or whatever! And traditionally, if you’ve given up either biscuits or cake, it’s this moment that you’re trying to decide which category a Jaffa cake falls in to – is it biscuit or is it cake? Unless you’ve given up both, in which case it doesn’t matter.

40 days seems like a long time. It is a long time. Psychologists have tested and discovered it is the time it takes for us make or break a habit.

“40 days to change or break a habit, 90 days to confirm a habit, 120 days, the new habit is who you are, 1000 you have mastered the new habit. This means that our brain does not accept ‘new’ data for a change of habit unless it is repeated each day for 40 days”

40 days to make a change in our lives and it also echoes, as we know, that time that Jesus spent in the wilderness between his baptism and the start of his ministry, the change for Jesus from carpentry to ministry – the passage that we’ve heard today.

In Mark’s gospel we are often short of details, it is written at pace with him wanting to get us to the important bit of his story. But today’s 6 verses are particularly action packed. Within those few verses we have Jesus’ baptism, Jesus in the wilderness and then Jesus starting his ministry.

We start with his baptism, that amazing moment when he comes out of the water and you can see the Trinity in full, Father, Son and Spirit all obviously present. The voice from heaven naming him, confirming his identity and how much he is loved…and then immediately afterwards he is in the wilderness.

It’s life as we recognise it, you can have an amazing moment in the presence of God or you can step out in faith with excitement for the future…and suddenly things go wrong and you find yourself in what feels like a wilderness. The wilderness is always a difficult place, it’s not a place we choose to go, it’s a place we find ourselves in. There are struggles and temptations, we constantly look for ways out of it.

It was in the wilderness that Jesus too was tempted. You’ll have noticed, that unlike the other gospel writers, Mark doesn’t give any details of how this happened. In between the story of his baptism and the start of his ministry we simply have these two verses,

“And immediately the spirit driveth him into the wilderness. And there he sat in the wilderness forty days, tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beats and the angels ministered to him.”

All too often we imagine that very literal picture of Jesus sitting there with a hooded creature making suggestions of what he should do and some winged angels hovering around in the background keeping those wild beasts away and mopping his brow if he got too hot. You’ll have seen pictures like this and they often shape the images you put to stories in your minds.

We can say…the wilderness is a frightening place to be. It’s a solitary place and people are created to live in community. There are wild beasts. Whether literally or metaphorically, the emotion they raise are still the same. The wilderness is both scary and lonely.

And Jesus was human…fully divine but also fully human and today we focus on his humanity. He was tempted just as you and I are. He’s there, with too much time on his hands, thinking and thinking and thinking, his mind wandering to the scriptures he’s learnt through his childhood, the stories of God feeding the Israelites in the desert. He looks around and sees all these stones…hmm I could use my power to make life little easier. I could make stones into bread, light a fire, make some toast. And so on, tempted, just as you and I are.

Whilst the wilderness is scary and lonely and temptation surrounds us, remember, the angels were there too. We shouldn’t forget them. God’s messengers, fighters and protectors, that’s the basic roles of angels, they were there too. Jesus wasn’t left alone to battle these thoughts, these temptations and neither are we. It says “the angels ministered to him”. I wonder what that means to you? Did they sit beside him so he didn’t feel alone? Were they practical and providing food and water? What would angels ministering to you look like to you?

And then, two verses later, Mark moves the story on. John is in prison and Jesus goes to Galilee preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God. The transformation is complete. Jesus the carpenter has been baptised, spent 40 days in the wilderness and is now ready to start his ministry.

The rest, as the saying goes, is history. But we shall hear and think more about the continuing story as we journey together through Lent.