Wrestling with God as a Lenten Discipline Lent 1 Holy Communion, Lakeview February 14, 2016

       Today, as we settle into the first full week of Lent we have a great opportunity to spend some time considering that all time favorite Lenten topic: Sin.
I am prone to insomnia and nine times out of ten my insomnia isn’t because I drank too much coffee, it’s because I’m doing my best impersonation of Jacob by wrestling God. I toss and turn all night running some problem over and over in my head. When in the grips of insomnia I am in the grip of sin because I am holding onto a problem, a concern, a worry that, frankly I need to turn over to God. My insomnia doesn’t leave God any room. There’s only one explanation for me boxing out God, for holding onto a problem throughout a long sleepless night: I’m not trusting God to handle it. I convince myself that I have to come up with the solution myself, that it isn’t worth God’s time and concern….that God couldn’t be bothered.
In other words, I SHUT GOD OUT. And right there, in those three little words, is a perfect definition of sin: shutting God out. 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 harm 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.
Therefore, the heart of our Lenten journey is to do whatever we can to LET GOD IN. It’s about entering into an active and trusting relationship with God.
     Faith is all about relationship…. our relationships with each other, our relationship to all those whom we encounter outside these doors, but above all else, faith is about the relationship we have with God and the relationship we allow God to have with us.
 Let me explain:
      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 Satan, 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?
        In today’s Gospel Jesus trusted God. And boy, 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 in the wilderness. And guess who wins?
Remember, Jesus has just been baptized, anointed as “God’s beloved,”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 don’t 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 the light of Christ that shines 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 (or in the case of this year, deep winter)-cleaning of our souls. In Lent we change the rhythm of our lives… not just 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. Being vulnerable is a frightening prospect---look at how vulnerable Jesus was during those 40 days in the wilderness. He had two choices as the devil led him around: stay in fear and trepidation, holding on for dear life, or move into trust and faith, letting Go and letting God.
Guess what? We are faced with this same choice each and every day….we can give into darkness or we can trust the light. We can hold on to our fear or we can let Go and let God.
Lent is about turning our hungers, our fears, our doubts and our worry over to God because this is what Lent’s all about; it’s learning how to trust that God 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 welcome to Lent, where we learn that the sin of our wrestling matches with God is not something to be ashamed of, it’s something to embrace, because it’s 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. And for that, we say Thanks be to God. Amen+