Surely we are entitled to know what God is up to, to see the plans, to judge all things for ourselves and give them our stamp of approval. There is always a serpent waiting to slither into such a moment of opportunity.

"You can be like God," the serpent hisses, it sounds so good - the fruit looks delicious - so on that day in the garden we overreached, and then we fell.

In doing so, Adam and Eve discovered that they were naked. And we have been trying to cover up ever since. We hide from God and from each other. We are subject to fear, guilt, and shame. We do not want people to see us as we are because we are convinced that we are unacceptable. We know that we have done things we ought not to have done and left undone those things that need to be addressed. The burden of them is indeed intolerable but we hide our pain, even from ourselves. We say that we are fine even when we are dying inside. We cannot seek healing if we cannot admit that we are ill unto death from the damage of the garden, from the missteps in our own lives.

Blame and anger are the flaming swords we unsheathe if anyone gets too close to the shadows of our fiercely protected patch of thorny ground.

The story of the garden shows us that there are very deep roots to the troubles we encounter - to the troubles we create, in our misapprehension. We peer through a lens that once looked out on a landscape that was very good, but the lens itself has become distorted and we can no longer see the garden from here. This is our part of our inheritance. Is there no help for us?

We cannot see straight, and in our near-sightedness we mistake stones for bread. We dine on dirt and turn our back on the banquet God has prepared. In the face of God's ongoing invitation, we keep busy and claim we have no time - but the reality is that we do not know the way to our own salvation anymore than we understood the peril inherent in the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. Only God knows.

Barry Robinson, the author of "Keeping the Faith in Babylon" puts it this way: " There are boundaries before which we must bow. The God announced in this unpretentious story is neither a petty God who sets rules just for the sake of setting them nor a jealous God who wants to keep certain things to himself. It is the story of an anguished God who knows something about life that cannot be altered and whose truth cannot be ignored without consequence."

We can not re-enter the garden but we also attempt to avoid the desert that is always very near us. Why -because it is another place of truth and consequences. The air is clear in the desert. There are few distractions and not many places to hide. There are no crowds. There is time enough to encounter and confront all manners of things.

We avoid the desert because in it we will hear the groaning from that ancient garden and it will be the sound of our own voice. We avoid the desert because we will encounter yesterday's pain before we discover tomorrow's healing. We will be challenged before we will be comforted. If we stop more than a moment to look deeply into our own hearts we will not like everything we see. And yet the desert is where Jesus went immediately after his baptism and his passage through that place means the world to us.

Jesus was faced by Satan and tempted, as we are. "If you are the Son of God, you can take matters into your own hands. Do not wait on Him but provide sustenance for yourself, right now," the Father of Lies hissed. But Jesus was not fooled and did not fall.

Surely there was some way to sever the relationship between Jesus and His Father. "Throw yourself down," the devil whispered in the wind from the pinnacle of the temple. But Jesus was not fooled and did not jump.

So the scene changed to encompass the splendor of the world and the power of its kingdoms.

And then the mask came off and the real request stood naked:
"All these will I give you, if you will fall down and worship me."

But Jesus, unlike Adam, did not fall.

And in this lies the seeds of our redemption. In this desert time, God in Christ began reworking the cosmos. And the devil left, and angels did indeed come and wait on Jesus.

Lent is a time in the desert - a time of preparation. It is time set aside to confront evil and to embrace the good. In the ancient church Lent was a time in which new converts prepared for baptism at the Easter Vigil. Their first communion would take place at dawn on Easter day -new light for new people who had passed through darkness and a ritual death to rise to new life in Christ.

Lent remains a time of journeying to new life. Forty days have been set aside for us to enter into an atmosphere of lessened distraction and heightened encounter. Jesus' footsteps moved through the hot sand and the dry air before us. There is a path prepared for us to walk in. There is the promise that God will be with us in the time of trail. But we must be willing to walk into the desert and face what awaits us. Do we want to lay down the burdens we are carrying? God can shoulder them, but only if we are willing to grasp them, see them for what they are and then hand them over. There are boundaries before which we must bow.

There is strength given for the journey - the rite of reconciliation to wash the dust from our eyes; weekly communion to give us spiritual food; and daily prayer to help us uncover and face the obstacles that stand between us and a clearer vision of God.

There is a Lenten teaching series, a men's retreat, a women's retreat, and a special self guided program in the meditation chapel that will progress through the five weeks in Lent. All these things stand as support for those pilgrims who would enter the desert. But the will to move forward must come from inside each of us.

Sin leads to death. Life comes from right relationship with God. Either way there is a cost. Either way it is we who choose where we will walk. Let us make good use of this time of self-examination and repentance. Hiding will not heal us. Let us journey into the desert willing to see ourselves in the clear light of Christ. In Him lies our salvation.
AMEN