Wrestling with God

+Now you all don’t hear me talk much about sin. Sin is one of those church words that’s been so hijacked, been so misinterpreted that it’s hard to use in conversation without being misunderstood. But today I’m diving in. After all, it’s the first Sunday in Lent, what better time to talk about sin?
Last Sunday night I had a long wrestling match with sin. I had insomnia. I tossed and turned all night, worrying about something. My brain just wouldn’t stop---it just kept running the problem over and over in my head…finally around 4 am, exhausted and no closer to a solution than I had been at 11 pm it hit me----I wasn’t giving God any room . I wasn’t turning the problem over to God…and the only explanation for this, the only explanation for holding onto this problem throughout the long sleepless night was this: I didn’t trust God to handle it. I really thought that I had to come up with the solution myself, that somehow it wasn’t worth God’s time and concern….that God couldn’t be bothered.
In other words, I failed to trust God. I failed to let God in. I SHUT GOD OUT. And right there, in those three little words is a perfect definition of sin: shutting out God.
Remember, sin means missing the mark, sin means we’ve allowed ourselves to be ruled by fear, sin suggests we’ve forgotten about God. You see sin isn’t just some laundry list of misdeeds that we need to atone for before being in God’s favor. We are ALWAYS in God’s favor, we’re always God’s beloved. But when we close the door on our relationship with God, when we shut God out, we are harming ourselves. And us being hurt? That’s what hurts God.  Closing the door on our relationship with God hurts us so in turn, God is hurt. That’s sin.
So, the heart of our Lenten journey is to do whatever we can to LET GOD IN. To let God into the whole of our lives, completely thoroughly. It’s about entering into an active and trusting relationship with God.

Faith is about relationship….it’s about our relationships with each other, it’s about our relationship to all those whom we encounter outside these doors, but above all else, it’s about the relationship we have with God and the relationship we allow God to have with us.
I’ve mentioned before my somewhat pedestrian interpretation of the German priest and author Karl Rahner’s theology. With apologies to Fr. Rahner it boils down to this:
Our life is on a continuum….every decision we make, every action moves us on this continuum. At one end is God at the other end is what some people might call the Devil, others might call darkness, still others call evil and what I call Not God.  What we do—all day, every day either moves us closer to or farther away, from God.
Are you moving toward God or away? Are your choices fueled by light and grace or by darkness and despair? Do you trust God? I mean really trust God?
Jesus in today’s Gospel trusted God. And man oh man did that tick off the forces of darkness, the evil one, the Not God in our world. Jesus and Satan have a wrestling match of their own. And guess who wins?
Remember, Jesus has just emerged from the baptismal waters of the Jordan, he’s just been anointed as God’s beloved, the chosen one, when he’s thrust into 40 days of blistering heat, endless hunger, heart wrenching loneliness and 40 nights of bitter cold, desperate sleeplessness, and terrifying visions. The Devil is throwing everything but the kitchen sink at our Lord but because Jesus refuses to shut God out, because Jesus trusts in God no matter what, the temptations of the darkness, the evil forces of this world, the pull of His humanity do not win. In today’s Gospel, light defeats dark, hope overwhelms despair, Love beats hate and the march of God’s goodness continues on its way.
Today’s Gospel gives us hope; hope that as we begin our Lenten journey, the steady drumbeat of the light of Christ given to us at Christmas and  Epiphany will fuel us.
And that’s good news because to really do up Lent right, we need that light. For it’s that light which we use to shine in all the dark corners of our lives. You know those parts of us that we hide from, those things we left undone, or those things we’ve done that we wish we could undo.
The work of Lent is opening up space for God to come in and help us with the spring cleaning of our souls. In Lent we change the rhythm of our lives not so we can say that we successfully avoided chocolate or red meat or swearing or smoking for these 40 days, no we change the rhythm of our lives so that God can slip in and show up in the most unexpected places.
And this is where it can get a little tricky… changing the rhythm of our lives makes us vulnerable. Anytime we make a change, anytime we enter uncharted waters, we are vulnerable. And when we’re vulnerable we have two choices: stay in fear and trepidation, holding on for dear life or move into trust and faith, letting Go and letting God.
In case you didn’t know already, this is way easier said than done.
At 4 am last Sunday—well Monday morning---I realized I wasn’t trusting God. But that doesn’t mean I fell into blissful sleep and awoke to a settled mind and a soothed soul. Nope my wrestling match continued….I knew that I wasn’t trusting God, but it still took another day or so before I was able to drop all my defenses and open my arms wide to let God in…..and that’s ok. You see that’s what Lent is all about, learning how to trust that God, in the end, is always the one we can turn too, that God is always the one who can feed our hungers like no one or no thing else.
So the sin of my Sunday a week ago is not something to be ashamed of, it’s something to embrace, it was something to dive into because it is only in experiencing some dark nights of Not God that we can gain the courage and the trust to move fully and wholly into the bright days of Only God. +