One of the things that’s spoken about amongst Christians from time to time is what’s known as a ‘Wilderness Experience’. A Wilderness Experience is the way people often refer to a time when they struggle with their faith. Some people might refer to the same thing as a ‘Crisis of Faith’. It’s a time when people find faith difficult. A time when they perhaps find prayer difficult or think that God isn’t listening to their prayer. It’s a time when people struggle to make sense of their faith, a time perhaps when things about their faith that seemed quite straightforward to them, they suddenly start to question or have doubts about. It’s a time when people can seem lost in a sense, wandering in a wilderness of doubt and uncertainty, a time when they don’t know what to do or how to follow their faith. A time when they feel that God is very far away from them.

These Wilderness Experiences can happen to any of us, at any time, and they do. In fact, I’d be surprised if there are any amongst us who haven’t had a Wilderness Experience of some kind. But if you have had that kind of experience, there’s no need to worry about it too much because they’re simply part and parcel of a life of faith. In fact, these experiences can be seen as an essential part of a life of faith because, for many people, Wilderness Experiences are nothing other than times of trial that God sends in order to test and ultimately, strengthen our faith.

We see examples of Wilderness Experiences in the Scriptures. In the Scriptures, these experiences are God given times of testing. Perhaps the most well-known, or at least most easily recognisable Wilderness Experience in the Scriptures, is the time Israel spent in the wilderness between their Exodus from Egypt and their entry into the Promised Land. This was a time when Israel’s faith in God was tested. It was a test they failed, many times, so it also became a time of punishment for their unfaithfulness. But it was a time of testing and it was, quite literally, a Wilderness Experience.

Another well-known Wilderness Experience we read about in the Scriptures is the story of Job. We read that God deliberately sends all kinds of ill fortune on Job simply to test his faith. And Job’s faith is tested, it’s tested almost to breaking point. But when Job’s faith is restored, he has a deeper faith because he has more wisdom and a new found understanding of God.

So Wilderness Experiences do seem to be part and parcel of a life of faith. They’re not new and they can happen to anyone. And if and when they do happen to us it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with us or with our commitment to our faith, because Jesus himself had a Wilderness Experience and we read about that, about his time of testing, in this morning’s Gospel.

One thing we always need to remember about Jesus is that, whilst we believe that he was the incarnate Son of God, he was also fully human; he was just as human as you and I and anyone and everyone else. So Jesus was susceptible to the same human problems and weaknesses that we’re all susceptible to. And in the story of Jesus’ Temptation in the Wilderness, we get a glimpse of the things that Jesus had to struggle with during his Wilderness Experience, the things that were perhaps a particular temptation to him because these were the aspects of his faith that he found most difficult.

St Mark, whose Gospel we read this morning, doesn’t give us any details of how Jesus was tempted but we know well enough from the other Gospels just what these temptations were. First there was the temptation to turn stones into bread. There are a good number of stories in the Gospels about Jesus dining with friends so that was something he probably enjoyed. On the surface then, this first temptation is a very simple one, Jesus enjoyed his food, and he was hungry. So why not use his divine power to satisfy his hunger? But the underlying temptation is to put our own comfort and convenience before doing God’s will. And we can be tempted to do that in so many ways.

For example, in one parish where I served on the PCC, a decision was made to move a PCC meeting forward from the usual time of 7:30pm to the earlier time of 6:30pm. For those of us who were working, as I was at the time because this was before I was ordained, that made it difficult to get to the meeting, at least in time for the start. And that was a problem because there was an important issue to discuss and a vote had to be taken on it that night. Nevertheless, the meeting went ahead at 6:30pm but, as the discussion went on, and so did the time, one person started looking at his watch and becoming more and more agitated. Eventually, he couldn’t take any more. He stood up and shouted,

‘Come on, come on. Get on with it. I want to be away by half past seven, United are on the tele!’

Then the reason for the early start then became quite apparent. Watching Manchester United play football on the TV was obviously more important to some people on the PCC than an issue that affected the future of the parish church they’d been called to represent and were responsible for.

But we can all, so easily, put our own comfort and convenience before God, our faith and the Church, and this was one temptation and test Jesus had to face and overcome.

The second temptation Jesus had to face was to throw himself from the top of the temple and allow God to save him, thereby proving that he was indeed the Son of God. The surface temptation here is that of turning the Wilderness Experience on its head and instead of Jesus using it to test his own faith, of using it to test God’s faithfulness. The underlying temptation though, is to try to use God for our own purposes. And again this is something that we can do in so many ways. I spoke about this problem in my sermon on Ash Wednesday, that of people who leave the Church because they’re not getting what they want out of it when usually what they want out of it is nothing more than a good feeling about themselves. We see people who’ve succumbed to this temptation too in the ‘empire builders’ we sometimes find in the Church, people who want and take over multiple jobs and roles in the Church and then make a great fuss about just how much they do for the Church. We’ve all met them. They say things like,

‘No one does as much for the church as I do.’ And ‘That church would be lost, or finished, without me.’ But the only person who could ever truly have said something like that is Jesus himself because without him there would be no Church, and only without him could there be no Church.

We all have more than our fair share of pride and it’s so easy for us to let that pride pump us up into thinking that we’re more important than others, even that we’re more important than God and the Church: which is really what’s happened when going to Church becomes all about us and what we want. This is another test Jesus had to face and overcome.

The third temptation Jesus was faced with was that of renouncing God and worshipping Satan in return for earthly power and riches. This is a really a straightforward choice that we all have to face and wrestle with on a daily basis because it’s a choice between choosing God and rejecting God; it’s a choice, for us as Christians, between being a disciple of Christ, or being a disciple of the world.

It’s a difficult choice to make at times too, especially if we’re going through a Wilderness Experience, because the rewards of following the way of the world can be very attractive and very tempting, whereas the rewards of following Christ are far less tangible. The reward for following Christ faithfully will far outlast any worldly rewards because the rewards for following Christ are eternal rewards. But we can’t see or touch those rewards now. And there’s no guarantee that we’ll ever have any tangible reward in this life for following Christ rather than the world.  But it was the same for Jesus. His reward for choosing God over the world would be the Resurrection, but in order to get that reward, he would first have to undergo the pain of rejection and betrayal, he’d have to undergo the pain of abuse and scourging, and he’d have to undergo the agony of the Cross. Jesus knew that and yet he chose God and God’s ways over the ways of the world. He chose the far more difficult to obtain eternal reward God offered over the easier to achieve but short-lived rewards the world offered.

I don’t think there are very many people who, having once come to faith in Jesus, really reject God completely but I think what we all do to some extent is fall into a grey area between God and the world. We try to find a compromise between God and the world. We follow God as long as it’s not too hard and as long as we don’t have to give up all hope of worldly rewards, and then we hope that will be good enough to gain our eternal reward from God. But that was not what Jesus did. As he struggled with his doubts, and fears, during his Wilderness Experience, he chose to persevere in faith, no matter what he had to give up in personal and worldly terms to do that and regardless of how long, hard and painful those choices made the road ahead for him.

At the end of this story of Jesus’ Wilderness Experience, we’re told that God sent angels to look after him, and then he went out to start his public ministry. So we can look on Jesus’ Temptation in the Wilderness, his Wilderness Experience, as something that was very necessary for him to go through in preparation for carrying out the task God had given him. And so when they come, we should try to treat our own Wilderness Experiences in the same way. They’re not easy times to go through but, rather than fear them, we should try to look at them as something we need to go through in readiness for what God has planned for us. And because that’s what they are, we need to have faith that God will help us to get through them and to emerge on the other side of the wilderness with a stronger faith in him and a clearer sense of his purpose for our lives, and in his grace to help us achieve it. 

Amen.

---

The Propers for the First Sunday of Lent can be found here.

One of the sad realities of life in the Church is that, from time to time, we lose people from the Church. It is always sad when that happens, but it does happen, and when it does, it usually happens in one of three ways. We can lose people from the Church for unavoidable reasons, such as when people die. That’s always sad of course, but what’s even more sad, in a sense, is when we lose people for avoidable reasons. We know that happens too because we all know that we lose people from the Church because of disagreements and arguments between members of the Church. And the reason losing people for that reason is so sad is that, in effect, we’ve lost those people because we Christians have failed to do the very thing we’re called to do above all else; we’ve failed to love one another as we should. And the third way we tend to lose people from the Church is when they freely choose to be lost.

That happens when people decide that they simply don’t want to come to Church or be part of the Church any longer and, in one sense, people leaving the Church for this reason is perhaps the saddest reason of all to lose them. That’s because people usually decide to leave the Church in this way for one of two reasons, but whichever reason it is, it’s a freely taken decision that has eternal consequences for them.

People leave the Church in this way because they’ve lost or renounced their faith; they no longer believe in God or believe that Jesus is their Lord and Saviour. And people also make the decision to leave the Church simply because they’ve not really understood what being a member of the Church and being a Christian means or involves. People don’t actually say that’s why they’ve left the Church, I’ve never heard anyone say that, in fact, but what they do say is, and what tells us why they’ve really left the Church, is usually something along the lines of, ‘I just wasn’t getting anything out of it anymore.’ And I’m sure we’ve all heard people say that and give that as a reason for leaving the Church.

The obvious answer to that statement of course is to say that you get out what you put in and to ask, or wonder, what they were putting in, either to the Church, or their Christian discipleship, or either.

But I think we have to take a step back from that question before we ask it, and ask what people actually expect to get out of coming to Church and being a Christian.

The statement itself, that people aren’t getting anything out of it anymore, tells us that, whatever it is people expected to get from coming to Church and being a Christian is something they felt that they were getting at some time. And in my experience of talking to people about this issue, that’s true, they did. But what they were getting really amounts to not much more than a nice feeling.

However they’ve got these feelings, and there are lots of things about Church life and being a Christian that can and do give people these feelings, they’re usually about pleasure and enjoyment. People have told me that they like going to Church because their friends go or because they’ve made new friends there. They’ve told me going to Church is a nice way to spend Sunday morning. People have told me that going to Church has made them feel that the world isn’t such a bad place and life isn’t so bad after all. People have told me that they’ve gone to Church so that they can feel good about themselves, because going to Church made them feel that they were nice people. In fact, one person whom I knew once told me that he didn’t like my sermons because they asked too much of people.  He told me that that people didn’t go to Church to be taught that they needed to be better, but to be told that they were good enough already. That they wanted to go home feeling good about themselves, they didn’t want to have their consciences pricked and go home feeling that they’ve not been very good. But, as I pointed out to that chap, one of the main reasons we come to Church is to learn; to learn about Jesus and from Jesus so that we can be better Christians, so that we can be more like Jesus. We’re not going to do that if we try to hide our faults and failings, if we turn a deaf ear to what Jesus said, simply so that we can feel good about ourselves and about the way we are, regardless of the way we are.

In my experience, it’s people who have gone to Church to get these nice, warm, fuzzy feelings about themselves and to have those feelings in their lives, who are the same people who are likely to stop going to Church when those feelings stop, and who then say that they weren’t getting anything out of it anymore.

Now, I’m not saying by any means that going to Church shouldn’t be a nice experience, of course it should. Going to Church shouldn’t be all misery and doom and gloom; we’re a Resurrection people, and we should be joyful. But neither should going to Church, nor can going to Church, be all about having nice feelings about ourselves.

We come to Church to worship God and to praise the Lord for all that he’s done for us, and that is joyful, and should be joyful. But we also come to ask his forgiveness for our sins, for the times when we know that we’ve done wrong and been less than we know we should be as disciples of Christ. And we come to learn too, to learn about Jesus and from Jesus so that we can be better. So that we can be more like the people we’re called to be as his disciples. And in the Christian life, as in any other area of life, one of the very best ways to learn is through our mistakes; by looking at what we’ve done wrong and then learning how not to make those mistakes again in the future. But we can’t do that unless we’re open and honest about our mistakes. We can’t learn if we won’t or can’t accept that we need to learn. But we also have to accept that being open and honest about our mistakes, about our sins, means that, sometimes, we’re not going to be able to have those nice, warm, fuzzy feelings about ourselves. We have to accept that, in order to learn, we’re going to have to see ourselves as we really are, ‘warts and all’, and that isn’t going to be a particularly nice feeling. But, if we’re serious about coming to Church and about our Christian discipleship, that’s what we have to do. And so we have to accept that coming to Church isn’t simply about having nice feelings and that we shouldn’t expect it to be simply about that either.

Today, as we know, is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, and Lent is that time of the Church’s year when we’re called at more than any other time to be honest about our faults and failings and about our sins. It’s the time of the Church’s year when we’re called at more than any other time to look at ourselves honestly, not as we’d like to be or as we’d like to think we are, but as we really are, as wayward people who are need of teaching, and as sinners in need of forgiveness. It might not be nice, it won’t give us good or nice feelings about ourselves, but it’s very necessary if we’re going to grow in faith and discipleship. And it’s very important that we grow in faith and discipleship if we’re ever going to get anything worthwhile out of coming to Church and being Christians. 

We could well ask those who leave the Church because they’re not getting anything out of it anymore, what it is, or was, they put in. But what about us? What are we prepared to put in?

One thing that we all hope to get out of coming to Church and being a Christian is to share in Christ’s resurrection and when we have to leave the Church on earth when our earthly lives come to an end, to be raised to eternal life. But are we prepared to put in what Jesus tells us it takes to achieve that? Are we prepared to accept our faults and failings and learn from Jesus to achieve that? Are we prepared to see ourselves as sinners in need of forgiveness to achieve that? Are we prepared to go through the discomfort of doing those things for the sake of an eternal reward, or would we rather feel nice and good about ourselves now, at the risk of losing that eternal reward? Let’s think about these things as we go through this season of Lent, and make sure that we make the right choice, the one that will lead us to eternal happiness.

Amen.

One of our central beliefs as Christians, and one that we share with Jews and some Moslems, is that we, human beings, are created in the image and likeness of God. We believe that because we read it in the Scriptures, in the first Chapter of the book of Genesis. But what does it mean to be made in the image and likeness of God?

Over the years, there have been lots of ideas put forward about how we might understand what the image and likeness of God means. Quite obviously, I think, these ideas don’t suggest that we share some kind of physical characteristics with God, we don’t look like God in a physical sense. So what people have suggested is that we share some other type of characteristics with God. One of the most well-known, and popular in a sense, of these ideas is that, like God, human beings have the ability to love.

If we think about it, that does make sense because we say that God is love and so, if we are made in God’s image and likeness, we should be able to see at least something of God’s love in ourselves and in others. But, of course, whilst we know we can and do see that, at times, we also know that we don’t always see the image of a loving god in human beings. And that’s usually attributed to another characteristic we believe we share with God, free will; our ability to choose.

That’s seen as an essential part of our creation in the image and likeness of God because without free will, we can’t love. I’m sure we all know that from our own experience. We don’t always choose whom we love; as the song says, sometimes we can’t help falling in love. But we can’t make anyone else love us. Regardless of how much we love someone else, whether they love us in return is up to them. It’s their choice because they have the freedom of will, to choose.

We see all this played out in the life of Jesus. It was out of love that God freely chose to send his Son to earth to save us and show us the way to live in loving relationship with God and one another. It was out of love that Jesus freely chose to undertake the ministry that God had entrusted to him.

And it was out of love that Jesus freely chose to suffer and die in accordance with God’s will.

But none of that forced others into believing Jesus or loving him in return. Jesus loved them, but they were free to choose whether to return Jesus’ love or not. And we know that a lot of people chose not to return his love. Instead, they rejected his love and crucified him. But even that didn’t stop Jesus from loving them.

So if we want to know what it means to be a human being created, and living, in the image and likeness of God, we simply need to look at Jesus. And if we want to be true to our creation in the image and likeness of God, and be what we were created to be, we have to try to be like Jesus.

I’m sure we all know that. Being a Christian means to be Christ-like, it’s all about trying our best to be like Jesus, to live according to his teachings and to follow his example, and if we’re not prepared to try our best to do that, there’s really no point in being a Christian. If we’re not prepared to try our best to be like Jesus, we’ll never be any more than a Christian in name only. But even if we do try our best to be like Jesus, we know that we often fail. And the reason we fail is usually because we don’t love as we should do. We don’t love as God loves us and that’s most often shown in our failure to love our neighbour as Jesus said we should and as he did. That’s not to say that we don’t love, but how many of us love, really love, those who don’t love us, let alone those whom we know don’t like us or even hate us? How many of us could really follow Jesus’ example of love from the Cross:

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

It’s easy to love those who love us, and it’s easy to love those we like. It’s not so easy to love people when we know that they don’t love us or don’t like us, it’s even harder to love them when those people do things that we don’t like, especially if those things are done at our expense. But, as Jesus also said,

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”  

Jesus’ teaching there is clear enough and if we’re going to be Christians, people who are like Christ, people who are not only created in the image and likeness of God but who show God’s image and likeness in their lives, we need to act in that way. And yet how many times, in the course of some argument or disagreement between Church members, have we heard someone in the Church say about another member of the Church, ‘We don’t want their sort here.’? It shouldn’t happen, especially amongst Christians, but it does. I could give you example of parishes in which entire groups of people have not been wanted in a church, and been clearly shown that they weren’t welcome when they have been in church, for no other reason than the part of town, the ‘rough’ part of the parish, they happen to live in. How can that kind of behaviour possibly be squared with Jesus’ teaching and example? What kind of image of humanity does that kind of behaviour show to the world?

Sometimes, of course, people in the Church do act in ways that aren’t acceptable and they can and do cause a great deal of hurt and damage both to other members of the Church and to the image of the Church and the Christian faith. And when that happens, something should and must be done to deal with the problem. But the answer isn’t to take the easy way out and resolve the immediate problem by simply throwing people out of the Church. The answer is to show people the right path and to try to bring them back to the right path, and to bring them back into the fold. And that applies equally when these things happen outside the Church too, in whatever area of life they happen. Again, as Jesus said, he didn’t come into the world to condemn, but to save; to seek out and save those who were lost. And we in the Church are called to follow his example.

And that is Jesus’ example. We know that he went looking for those whom other people wanted nothing to do with; tax-collectors, prostitutes and sinners of all kinds, the poor and the sick, those possessed by demons, lepers, those who were considered unacceptable in the community. He even loved such hated people as Samaritans and Romans.

Jesus sought these people out. He associated with them and befriended them. He even called some of them to be his disciples. He was criticised for it, but he did it anyway because he loved them as God loved them. And so Jesus showed what it is to live as a human being made in the image and likeness of God.

We’re called to be like Jesus, to live by his teaching and to follow his example. And the closer we can follow him, the more like him we’ll become. It’s not easy and we won’t suddenly be turned into the kind of dazzling figure that Jesus displayed at his Transfiguration. But we will be changed and become more like him. We’ll be changed in the way St Paul describes in his Second Letter to the Corinthians, a case of

“…reflecting the glory of the Lord, …being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” 

So if we can follow Jesus more closely and love as he loved, we will be changed and become more like him. And the more like Jesus we become, the closer we’ll be to the people we were intended to be, people who were created in the image and likeness of God and who show that image in their lives. 

Amen.

---

The Propers for the 6th Sunday of Ordinary Time (Next Before Lent) can be found here.