Readings:
Genesis 9: 8-17; Psalm 25: 1-10;1 Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1: 9-15

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
We have come to the first Sunday in Lent – a season of special spiritual disciplines for a small minority, and a time for some kind of modest self-denial for a slightly larger minority. ‘Giving something up for Lent’ is still a fairly widespread notion within our culture and even though few people would take this any more seriously than New Year’s resolutions, the tradition still serves to make Lent the best known Christian season, after Christmas and Easter. At its best, Lent provides an opportunity to nurture our spiritual growth. At its worst, it fosters the misconception that God’s love for us is somehow conditional upon what we do.

Properly understood, Christian scripture teaches that God loves each one of us, notwithstanding who we are. There is nothing that you or I could do that would make God love us more. Nothing! We cannot earn the love of God and we certainly cannot purchase it; we can only open our hearts and receive it by grace. This was the great insight of the Reformation, and it is a difficult thing to grasp. But if we do glimpse the immensity of God’s love for us, then we begin to forget any thought of trying to earn it. If we do realize how unworthy of such love is our own behaviour, then we lose interest in passing judgment on anyone else. And if we begin to grasp the concept that God extends this same love to each and every other human being, then we start to recognize the blasphemy inherent in starving or bombing others to death. When we do grasp these things, all we can do is fall on our knees and say: `I am not worthy, but just show me how to be an instrument of your love and grace`. And this is the essence of Lent – in humility seeking to become better instruments of the love and grace of God.

We did not always have Lent. In fact, in the earliest days of the Church, there were no seasons of the Christian year, no Easter Sunday, no Christmas Day. Every Sunday was a day on which to celebrate the entire mystery of God’s love – the birth, death, resurrection and ascension of the Christ. Gradually, these special events came to receive their own emphasis on separate days, beginning with the separate identification of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Eve and Easter Sunday.

Then Lent was conceived with the original purpose of providing a time of intensive preparation for baptism, which used to take place on Easter Sunday. The period set aside for this preparation was forty days, following the tradition that Jesus had spent forty days in the wilderness, preparing for his ministry. Then, during the second century, Lent came to have a further purpose, which today might be referred to as ‘retraining’. The church at that time had a problem: what to do with those who had betrayed the faith during times of horrific persecution. Hard-liners said they should be expelled, but more compassionate hearts prevailed. The church recognized the unconditional nature of God’s grace, and decided that those who had fallen by the wayside should use this forty days as a time of penance, in preparation for full reception back into the fellowship of the Church.

In time it was recognized that all of us fall short, and so Lent became a time for general repentance and reflection upon the quality of our discipleship. The actual period of Lent was also refined, to become what we have to this day. It now begins on Ash Wednesday, forty days before Easter Sunday if you do not count the Sundays. The Sundays have become feast days once more and technically are not part of Lent; they are Sundays in Lent, not of Lent.

So, you see, Lent is a period of forty days, not counting Sundays, in which the Church encourages us to reflect upon our discipleship; that is, our response to the love of God as revealed in Jesus Christ. It is a time to claim anew that love, and to consider how on earth we can become better channels of that grace in a world that is so desperately lost. In this context, surely it becomes clear that ‘giving something up for Lent’ can only ever be a means to an end; that it most certainly is not the end in itself. The proper end to Lenten discipline is a deepened sense of discipleship: further steps in the lifelong journey towards becoming a channel of the reign of God, which according to Jesus has already come near. In other words, for Lent, we are invited to give up nothing so meagre as chocolate, but rather our whole lives.

In this year of the three-year cycle, our lectionary helps us to begin the Lenten journey by taking us back to the prologue of Mark’s gospel. We read this in two separate parts earlier this year. What we have read again today gives us a three-part sequence of Jesus’ transition into ministry. Those three parts are: his baptism, his forty days in the wilderness, and then the commencement of his ministry.

Here is the model for our Lenten discipline: identity, formation and action. At his baptism Jesus received the insight of his true identity: `You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased` – identity. Then he was driven into the desert, for forty days. The desert is a place of reflection, temptation and decision. Then, as now, others went into the desert to prepare to put the world right by violent means. After reflection, Jesus rejected such temptations in favour of peaceful and sacrificial servanthood - formation. But he did not stay in the desert. He took the arrest of John not as a reason to stay away, but rather as a time to go into Galilee. There he proclaimed the good news of God in word and deed – he taught, healed, set free the oppressed, lifted up the broken-hearted, confronted the powerful, and laid down his life rather than betray God’s vision of a world redeemed - action.

So this is our model for Lenten discipline: identity, formation and action. This is what it means that the reign of God has come near. It has defined our identity. We are children of God, we are beloved, and with us God is well pleased. So let us too go, led by the Spirit, into the forty-day formation of Lenten wilderness. Let us be tempted by Satan and be with the wild beasts. Let us allow ourselves to be ministered to by angels, messengers of God. Let us, like Jesus, do all of this and be of good courage. Let us too reject the lies and false promises, just as Jesus did. And then, let us return from these forty days of Lenten wilderness ready for action: proclaiming through our lives the good news of God: hope, healing and liberation!

So let us go now into the journey of Lent!