A colleague who, in retirement, has become a collage artist, creating art from pieces of fabric, wood, glass, and found objects, has reflected a good deal on her process of creation.  People who have seen her works have remarked on their simplicity and clarity – and are surprised to discover just how long each piece has taken her to create.  Not hours, but days and weeks.  When people express surprise at how long these seemingly random works of art take to create, she says, “well, the evidence lies on my drafting table, in the pile of discarded scraps and objects that grows larger each time I work on a collage.  The challenge of creating a piece of art lies not just in deciding what to include but also in discerning what to leave out.  Every piece of art involves a process of choosing” she says, “not this, not this, not this.  I can only find what belongs by clearing away everything that doesn’t.”

This… is no speedy endeavour.  In fact, it could at times take 40 days to work through!

The paradox Jesus wrestles with in our reading for this first week of Lent is one we all encounter.  At his baptism, Jesus hears the essential truth about himself, his identity.  He is precious and beloved, a child of God.  But when the Spirit leads him into the wilderness, he faces powerful assaults on that truth.  He has to learn how to experience being beloved in a bleak and lonely wasteland.  He has to trust that he can be loved and famished, precious and insignificant, valued and vulnerable at the same time.

Holding on to and having confidence in the truth that is yourself is a full-time job in a world of polarization, disinformation, conformity, and confusion.  There is so much that pulls you away from knowing and trusting in who you are.

The African-American theologian and author, Howard Thurman, speaking in a commencement address to graduates a number of years ago said:  “There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself.  It is the only true guide you will ever have.  And if you cannot hear it, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that someone else pulls.”

In the wilderness, the Tester offers Jesus three opportunities to walk away from the truth of his essential self, while dwelling in a very barren, wilderness place.  A place of silence, where voices within rise up and cast doubt.  The 3 a.m. voices of shadow and insecurity.

The first temptation targets Jesus’ hunger.  The second temptation targets Jesus’s ego.  The third temptation targets Jesus’s vulnerability.  If those forty days in the wilderness were a time of self-creation, a time for Jesus to decide who he was and how he would live out his calling, then here is what he chose:  emptiness over fullness; obscurity over honour; vulnerability over rescue.  Given the opportunity to reach for the glorious, and the safe, he reached instead for the mundane, and the risky.

In 1989 the Dutch-born Catholic priest, professor, psychologist, and writer Henri Nouwen wrote a little meditation on the temptations of Jesus called In the Name of Jesus.

Nouwen had taught for years at the University of Notre Dame, and then at the divinity schools of Yale and Harvard, and he eventually published forty-two books that today have sold over 8.5 million copies and been translated into thirty-five languages.  But after twenty-five years in the priesthood, Nouwen describes a spiritual crisis that came with turning fifty.  “I woke up one day,” he writes in that little book, In the Name of Jesus, “with the realization that I was living in a very dark place and that the term ‘burnout’ was a convenient psychological translation for spiritual death.”

So, provoked by the same gospel text that Isabel has read for us, Nouwen made the most important decision of his life.  He left Harvard and moved to Toronto, where for the last eleven years of his life he served as the residential priest at Daybreak, a home for adults with severe physical and mental disabilities.

Living among the weak, and “suddenly faced with my naked self,” was the starting point for Nouwen to discover his “true identity” as a child loved by God: “These broken, wounded, and completely unpretentious people forced me to let go of my relevant self — the self that can do things, prove things, build things — and forced me to claim that unadorned self in which I am completely vulnerable, open to receive and give love regardless of any accomplishments.”

Nouwen writes that “Jesus’s first temptation was to be relevant:  to turn stones into bread.”  To be useful and productive.  Nouwen proposes that we should instead “claim our irrelevance” and enter into solidarity with the suffering majority.

Jesus’s second temptation was to do something spectacular, something worthy of hits, likes, tweets, and more followers.  “Since you are God’s Son, jump… The angels will catch you.”  Rather than become an “influencer,” Nouwen writes, “Jesus didn’t come to be a stunt man,” but to be a servant.

Jesus’ last temptation is the temptation of power, which church leaders through history have found hard to resist – because, Nouwen writes, “it seems easier to be God than to love God, easier to control people than to love people, easier to own life than to love life.”

This invitation to vulnerability and downward mobility, Nouwen writes, provided “the words that made it possible for me to move from Harvard to L’Arche.  They touch the core of Christian leadership and are spoken to offer us ever and again new ways to let go of power and follow the humble way of Jesus.”

Jesus didn’t choose to enter the wilderness.  The Spirit led him there.  But he chose to stay until the work of the wilderness was over.  We don’t always choose to enter wildernesses, either.  We don’t volunteer for pain, loss, danger, or terror. But the wilderness happens.  Whether it comes to us in the guise of a hospital waiting room, a thorny relationship, a troubled child, a sudden death, or a crippling panic attack, the wilderness appears, unbidden and unwelcome, at our doorsteps.  It insists on itself.  And sometimes — if we can bear to say it — it is God’s own Spirit who drives us into the parched landscape.  Does this mean that God wills bad things to happen to us?  That God wants us to suffer?  I don’t think so.  Does it mean that God can redeem even the most barren periods of our lives, if we choose to stay and pay attention?  Yes – our deserts can become holy even as they remain dangerous.

Jesus knew nothing of Lent, of course.  Nevertheless, there are times when something like following Jesus into the desert, to stay for a time and look evil in the face, to hear its voice, recognize its allure, and confess its appeal is what we too need to make room for in life.  If Lent is a time to embrace all that it means to be human – human and hungry, human and vulnerable, human and beloved – then this may be that time.

One parallel between Jesus’ experience and ours is that the identity test — who you truly are, who you have chosen to be, who God has called you to be – is a truth that will be tested often.  In fact, every, single, day.  Because others will always seem to have a better perspective on who you are, or are eager to comment on who you need to be.  Others seem to have answers for or advice about who you should be.  And we have a tendency to listen to those voices – rather than ourselves, rather than God.

Holding on to and having confidence in the truth that is yourself is a full-time job.  There is so much that pulls you away from trusting in yourself – that pulls us toward those voices that speak only about conformity, fear of missing out, following the crowd.

When Jesus emerges from the wild and barren space, when he has completed this liminal time of fasting and praying and wrestling and waiting, Jesus has a clarity that could not have come otherwise.  It has taken a long time, this emptying, this clearing out, this letting go of what doesn’t belong in order to find what does.  But in taking the time, in venturing into that place, Jesus has found what he needs.  As he enters his public ministry, he possesses a picture that is more complete, more whole.  From discerning not this, not this, not this, he can now say… this!

Sometimes in life we have to say “not this” to what we have most treasured, in order to make way for what truly belongs – what is truly us.  We’re wrestling with this too as Bloor Street United Church, and (I can’t say this for sure, but maybe) as St. Matthew’s United Church.  Going forward, not this, not this… this.

The letting go, the testing, is painful.  There is a sense of loss, of yearning.  And yet what comes is a clarity of purpose and direction that is essential to Jesus, and that will be absolutely central to us going forward in ministry, new buildings, and much else.

What did that long, famishing stretch in the wilderness do to Jesus?  It freed him – from all devilish attempts to distract him from his true purpose, from hungry cravings for things with no power to give him life, from any illusion he might have had that God would make his choices for him.  After forty days in the wilderness, Jesus had not only learned to manage his appetites and desires – he had also learned to trust the Spirit that had led him there to lead him out again, with the kind of clarity and grit he could not have found anywhere else.

May it be so.  For us.