VICAR'S LETTER
17
Sundon Road
Streatley
March, 2009
Dear
All
The season of Lent is upon us. A pointer to what it is all about is supplied by three men. Each of them withdrew to the wilderness because he was lost. Each of them found what he needed to move on. Each of them then emerged with a new sense of purpose and direction to their lives.
Moses was lost. On God's instructions he had led the people out of Egypt, but he now found himself struggling to retain a sense of direction as he tried to hold together an increasingly fractious people wandering, apparently aimlessly, in the desert. God called him away from the people to Mount Sinai. There, in the course of a forty-day fast, Moses received and inscribed the Ten Commandments. He returned to his people, his face shining, and with a new sense of purpose - to unite his people in the worship of Yahweh and to lead them forward to the Promised Land.
Elijah was lost. He had fled to the wilderness in fear of his life. Jezabel, the Queen, had sworn vengeance on him after he exposed the powerlessness of the priests of Baal and had them killed. In the wilderness, he met with God, speaking not in the wind, nor in the earthquake, nor in fire, but in the "still, small voice" that followed the fire. Inspired by this voice and by the words of encouragement that it speaks, Elijah returns to his people to confront and to overcome the rule of Ahab and Jezabel.
Jesus was lost. At his baptism he had received the power to do anything on earth for good. (He felt himself filled with the Holy Spirit.) He had received his calling: "This is my beloved Son." What he didn't know was how exactly he was to use such power and to be faithful to such a calling. To work it out, he retired to the wilderness. He decided that the power was not to be used to feed the hungry and was not to be used to enforce peace in the world. He also decided it was not to be used to stage the sort of demonstration that would compel people's obedience. He emerged from the wilderness with his perplexities resolved. The task that God had laid upon him was to so change people that the hungry would be fed and that they would live together in peace. His way was to be the way of love and service, not the way of force and compulsion.
Lent assumes that we are lost. We may simply have strayed from the way and need to get back onto it. We may have completely lost the way and need to find it again. We may have come up against some obstacle in the way that we can't see how to surmount. Or we may just not be clear where the way is taking us next. Whatever our perplexities, Lent invites us to take time out. It invites us to take stock of where we've got to and where we go from here. Hopefully we shall emerge from it, as Moses, Elijah, and Jesus himself emerged from the wilderness, with a new sense of direction and purpose for our lives.
All best wishes,
Roger.