We are beginning a new season of Lent worship series called, “Wilderness Challenges” based on the forty days when Jesus began his ministry in the wilderness. While Jesus was in the wilderness, he faced several challenges related to his identity and his mission.
The forty-day season of Lent is meant to remind us of those forty days that Jesus spent in the wilderness. If we want to grow in our faith and be faithful in following Jesus to the cross and the empty tomb of Easter, we need to be willing to face these challenges as well. By facing them, we will learn more about the areas of our spiritual lives that are in need of growth and renewal.
Over these next several weeks of Lent, we will be looking at several different wilderness challenges. These include our identity, our trust, our passion, our healing, our focus, our humility, and our belief. We will be using the appointed scripture readings for each of these Sundays in Lent as well as Easter Sunday to explore these themes.
As we begin this season of Lent series, let’s think about why Jesus spent forty days in the wilderness. What is the significance of the wilderness and why is it important for us to spend time there with Jesus as well?
When we see that Jesus began his ministry by living in the wilderness for forty days, we immediately make the connection with the people of Israel, who centuries before were in the wilderness for forty years.
The people of Israel had been slaves in Egypt for four hundred years and God called Moses to lead them from slavery and into the promised land. To do this, they needed to travel through the wilderness. It was while they were in the wilderness that God was forming and shaping them to be his people.
By first going to the wilderness to begin his ministry, Jesus is mimicking what happened to the Israelites centuries before him. Here is the parallel with the wilderness story of the Israelites and the wilderness story of Jesus.
Both of these wilderness stories begin with water. For the Israelites, it was the Red Sea when Moses parted it allowing them to escape from Pharaoh. For Jesus, it was the Jordan River where he was baptized.
These wilderness stories also were a passageway to their ultimate destination. For the Israelites, the destination was the Promised Land where they would be able to live as free people under God’s gracious rule. For Jesus, the destination was the city of Jerusalem where he would die on a cross and rise again which would lead to the freedom of God’s people from sin and death.
But to go from slavery to the Promised Land, the Israelites and Jesus first needed to face the challenges of living in the wilderness. The church has designated this season of Lent as a time to live out this wilderness journey. It’s not an easy journey. It will test us along the way, but it can be a time of tremendous spiritual growth.
For this first Sunday in the wilderness, the appointed scriptures for today offer us our very first challenge and it’s related to our identity.
Knowing who we are is critical in living out our faith.
Our Gospel reading this morning begins with Jesus in the wilderness, but just before he was driven into the wilderness, we have the story of Jesus being baptized in the River Jordan. And I think this connection is a very important one because Jesus’ baptism centers around his identity.
So even before Jesus entered the challenge of the wilderness, he knew his identity. What do we learn about Jesus’ identity from his baptism?
Well, the first thing we learn is that as Jesus was coming out of the water from his baptism, the Spirit descended upon him like a dove. And then we get this voice from heaven saying, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
These two aspects of Jesus’ baptism, the Spirit descending upon him and the voice from heaven calling him “beloved” are also important dimensions whenever we celebrate a baptism. Baptism reminds us that we have been claimed by God and that we are given the name, “beloved.” And so, when Jesus went into the wilderness, he already knew who he was and that the Spirit was with him.
Five years ago, in the church I was serving, I was trying to think of ways that we as a congregation would be able to let people know that all are welcome to our church. We realized that there were many people in our community who felt that churches were overly judgmental and not welcoming.
And this really bothered me because I believe that we are called to be welcoming to all people and to leave the judging to God. And as I was praying about what we could do to convey that we welcome all people in our church regardless of their gender, race, national origin, physical or mental abilities, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status and economic condition, that’s when it dawned on me to rethink how we use an often neglected part of every Sunday worship service – the benediction.
I wanted the wording of the weekly benediction to remind every person in worship, members and worship guests alike, to hear that God loves them for who they are.
Here was the benediction that I wrote and is still being used in that church. “You are a blessed, beloved, and beautiful child of God. There are no exceptions, asterisks, or loopholes. As we leave from this place today, may we continue to bear witness to the love of God in this world, so that those to whom love is a stranger, will find in us generous friends. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, be with you all. Amen.”
For the first few Sundays when I started using this benediction, I was the only one speaking it because that is what typically happens. The pastor offers the benediction and the congregation listens. And then I went on vacation for a few Sundays and the person who was leading the service for those Sundays invited the entire congregation to say it in unison with him.
When I got back from vacation, somebody told me about it, and they said how powerful it was that everybody was saying it together. What I loved about that benediction is that on any given Sunday when we worshipped together, every single person was invited to say those words and know that they truly are a blessed, beloved, and beautiful child of God.
Friends, never forget who God says you are, and this includes the people outside of the church. “We are God’s blessed, beloved, and beautiful children of God.”
One of the leading worship scholars of our denomination has been Laurence Hull Stookey who passed away back in 2016. Stookey wrote a book about baptism in which he says,
“Each of us stuffers from spiritual amnesia. We forget what God has done for us and promised to us. We also conveniently forget what God wants from us as disciples. In short, we are oblivious to the identity we have been given by our creator. God, aware of our malady and of our inability to effect a cure, acts to reveal our true identity to us. One means by which God counteracts this amnesia is baptism.”
Our first wilderness challenge is related to having spiritual amnesia and this is all rooted in our identity. To overcome this challenge, we need to find ways to remember who we are.
Martin Luther, who started the Protestant Reformation back in the 1500’s would remember his baptism and who he was by placing his hand on his head and repeating the words, “I am baptized. I am baptized.”
He would do this especially whenever he was feeling anxiety or distress. “I am baptized.”
What a great way to remember our baptism, to cure our spiritual amnesia and to remember our true identity, that we are loved by God.
In one of the churches I served, a member of the congregation told me that she doesn’t know what she would have done without our church. I asked her what she meant.
And she said how throughout her life, she had always struggled with self-worth and feeling accepted. She then told me that sometimes when she is really struggling and feeling down, she’ll simply pull her car into our church parking lot and sit there in her car looking at our church building. She said that it has a way of reminding her that she is somebody, that God loves her, and that this is a safe space for her.
One of my favorite things to do is to focus on the symbols in our church building that are there to remind us that we are loved and claimed by God.
Those symbols are in our stained-glass windows, church banners, and especially on the altar, the cross that reminds us that God loves us so much that he gave his only Son that whosever believes in him, should not perish, but have everlasting life.
And so, on this first Sunday in the wilderness, never forget who you are. You are a blessed, beloved, and beautiful child of God! That is who you are!
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