1st Sunday of Lent - Feb 21-22, 2015

I have a cabin out in Wayne County right on Lake Ontario where I try to go each Thursday for a little R&R. It’s a beautiful spot – in the summer. This past Thursday I almost lost my life getting to the place tracking through considerable drifts of snow.

This is where I prepare the Sunday homily and enjoy God’s sense of humor. As I looked out on Lake Ontario that was pretty much frozen, as I listened to the howling wind, as I viewed mounds of snow everywhere, I prayed over the Gospel: “The Spirit drove Jesus out into the desert, and he remained in the desert for forty days, tempted by Satan.”

From where I was sitting surrounded by the brutal elements of winter, the desert that Jesus was in seemed like a desirable vacation spot to be – surrounded by warmth and sunshine.

Be that as it is, trusting that the desert is meant to be a place of wilderness and struggle, “The Spirit drove Jesus out into the desert, and he remained in the desert for 40 days, tempted by Satan.”

We see in the Gospel that the Holy Spirit is now the energy of Jesus’ life. Jesus is filled with the Spirit, and the Spirit leads him into the desert to be tempted by the devil. This seems to be a strange activity for the Holy Spirit.

In this passage the Spirit seems to be arranging for Jesus to have an introduction with the devil. What can be made of this? One would think that the Holy Spirit would protect Jesus from the temptations of the devil.

How about for yourself? Do you see the Holy Spirit as the source of the temptations of your life and, as in the Lord’s Prayer, we pray “that we not be led into temptation but deliver us from evil.”

As we reflect on the movement of the Spirit in the life of Jesus, it is important to remember that the temptation of Jesus in the desert takes place immediately after he was baptized by John the Baptist in the River Jordan. There was a voice from heaven which declared: “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” This was a profound moment of faith.

Life, as we know, is not always filled with mountaintop experiences. We all need to play the hand we have been dealt. This means over the years we need to deal with the dark valleys as well as the green pastures. None of us get a free pass on dealing with the challenges of life. Who of us has not dealt with illness for our self or someone we love, with death, with brokenness in relationships?

The grace of Jesus’ Baptism, as well as our own, restructures our identity, reshapes our desires, and redirects our emotions and actions. As did Jesus, we need to test our Baptismal identity as God’s beloved sons and daughters.

The reason for the Lord’s meeting with the devil in the desert was to clarify the identity of Jesus as God’s beloved Son. We become clearer about who we are when we refuse certain actions and endorse others. The identity of Jesus is more clearly witnessed to when Jesus refuses to be seduced by the devil and He re-affirms his relationship to His Father.

We too need desert experiences in life; the Spirit of God, the energy of our lives as well, leads us into the desert to make us more aware of the deepest truth of our life. We stand in need of the grace of God to be our best selves, to be the people we are called to be, to put us in touch with our baptismal identity that we are God’s beloved sons and daughters.

Yes, without spiritual testing that comes from dealing with the struggles of life as people of faith, we can too easily live with the illusion that our will power, that our talents and giftedness can sustain on our spiritual journey. We are in the grips of Satan when too much emphasis is placed on how well we manage our spiritual journey. This is a recipe for disaster.

Strange as it may seem, the Spirit of God leads us into the desert to know that it is only with God’s grace that we can turn and be faithful to God. It is only with God’s grace that we experience conversion in our lives.

The Baptism of Jesus did not lead Him into a permanent state of peaceful contemplation; rather Jesus experienced spiritual testing and a lifelong self-sacrificing ministry. As we journey to our Easter Baptism as is true of our RCIA catechumens or to the renewal of our Baptismal promises on Easter, we are called to journey with Jesus to a time of spiritual testing and ultimately to a life of self-sacrificing giving of self.

In the Lenten fast that we choose as well as the struggles of life that are not of our choosing – such as illness or job loss or a relationship that has gone south – the Spirit of God goes with us to enable us to see ourselves as God’s beloved even in the midst of our deepest fears and anxieties. The Lenten journey is a place of struggle – both the spiritual disciplines and the struggles of life that are not of our choosing. The conversion we seek is the awareness that our places of struggles are also the places of conversion, our places of encountering God whose love for us is unending.