Every time I stand up to preach, I do so assuming that at least one person sitting in the congregation is someone who not only has hit the wall, so to speak, whose life has suffered injury or loss that has knocked them off track, out of relationship with God. More importantly I preach anticipating that this is someone who has brought their injury and pain to the church before, only to be told how bad they are, and to be threatened with what God will do to them if they don’t quit being who they are. I stand up to preach assuming there is someone here in worship who has taken the chance to cross the threshold through our doors willing to give the church just one more chance to make a difference in their lives, after the church messed up so badly with them the last time. And so whatever the liturgical season, I preach with the burden of wanting to make sure they don’t leave without knowing the Good News of every season – that God is already waiting with compassion and forgiveness and love to say to us, “welcome home”, no matter what.

The Good News of Lent that we celebrate from Matthew’s gospel today is that when God chose to come into the world, God did so as Jesus, who shared not just our joys and celebrations, but who shares in the desert-times of our lives. This is why in Matthew’s telling of the gospel, immediately after Jesus rises from the waters of baptism, he’s led by the Spirit into the wilderness—challenged by three distinct temptations—essentially struggling with choices about his own future now that he has said “yes” to his own calling to be who God has made him to be.

Jesus’ 40 days in the desert, that we recall each day by our 40 days of Lent, taught Jesus the full pain of despair, fear, isolation, temptation – but also of God’s angels of mercy tending to him! In these 40 days, Jesus is responding to his call to ministry. And just as we respond to God’s calling to each of us to take part in Christ’s ministry of reconciliation, Jesus himself discovered in these 40 days that ministry involves not just a journey, yet also a journey into the wilderness. There are times when our suffering as human beings is not just because we’ve wandered astray—it’s also because we‘ve tried faithfully to follow Jesus – and the way itself has been a path into the desert. Just as Jesus faced a demon in this wilderness, so do we face our own demons in times of turmoil and decision-making.

The Good News of Lent is not just that the path towards God is always open to us-- this path itself leads us into a world that is at times difficult to negotiate. Being on the path with God doesn’t wall us off from the sufferings of the world--it says to us that in following Jesus, we will make our way in life with God at our side in ever deepening relationship – we will make our way in life, too, as did Jesus, with an ever deepening capacity ourselves to love and to forgive.

It’s essential to the Lenten story that “Jesus is led up by the Spirit into the wilderness”! Each temptation that Jesus responds to is an appeal for him to try to do things on his own, to rely on his own abilities, as if it’s all really just about him. And in responding to each wilderness temptation, Jesus points to God as a higher focus for the journey of discernment.