It was eighteen years ago that watching the nightly news became almost unbearably painful for me. 

I am sure of the timing, because it was 18 years ago that I became a mother for the first time.  And I think it is true that once you have a child, you see the world differently.  Once you become a parent, you can feel the pain of every other parent when something happens to their child.

 

It seems that every day there is another story about a young person dying.  Just in the last few weeks, we have heard about a Sudbury teen being stabbed to death by a classmate while at school; a Topsfield youth being killed in an avalanche while skiing in Utah, two BU students dying in an apartment fire, and a brave and gifted Marine pilot from Swampscott being killed in a helicopter crash while transporting injured Marines to safety.

 

When events like these happen, the question that comes to mind is “Where is God?”  This question has been asked throughout the generations, but perhaps never more so than during the Holocaust.

 

In his book Night, Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel, a survivor of Auschwitz, gives a vivid account of his time in the concentration camp.  He tells the story of three prisoners of the Auschwitz death camp – two men and a boy – who were accused by the SS, the Nazi police, of blowing up the electric power station in town.  The three were sentenced to death, and all the prisoners at Auschwitz were ordered out on the parade grounds to witness the hangings. 

 

There was a hushed silence as the boy and two men were led to the gallows; no one moved or said a word.  When the trap door opened beneath their feet, the two men died almost instantly.  But the boy, because he lacked the body weight of the men, struggled for his life for nearly half an hour.  The SS made all of the prisoners stay and watch the boy’s struggle.  Wiesel said that, as they watched, someone in the back of the crowd cried out, “Where is God?  Where is God now?” 

 

And Wiesel writes in his book that at that moment, “I heard a voice within me answer him, ‘Where is God?  He is hanging there on the gallows.’”

 

On this first Sunday of Lent, we go with Jesus into the wilderness, the biblical image for feeling lost and abandoned by God.  Jesus spends 40 days in the place that God has seemed to have forsaken, and on our Lenten journey, we spend 40 days following Jesus through the last days of his earthly life.  In the Bible, the number forty is code for a period of time that is theologically and spiritually significant.  Forty represents a period of trial, introspection, and preparation for something new to be born – a new attitude, a new hope, a new relationship with God.  The term “Lent,” which comes from the old English word for spring, is an apt description for this season before Easter, for it is a holy springtime of the soul in which we nurture and grow our faith in God. 

 

But today, we are with Jesus in the wilderness.  The wilderness in Jesus’ day was the desert; it was rocky, harsh, exposed territory with scrubby, stunted plants clinging for life in the cracks and crevices of the barren terrain.  Sweltering hot by day, the temperature went below freezing at night.  It was a place of danger and hardship where water and food were scarce. 

 

During his wilderness experience, Jesus is driven from a life of relative comfort and predictability into a time of testing and temptation, a time in which God seems far away.  We are not sure how Jesus may be feeling during this uncertain period in his life.  Perhaps he grieves the loss of comfort and security he has known in his hometown of Nazareth.  Perhaps he is pained at the prospect of being uprooted from family and friends.  He may be unsettled by the challenges that are ahead in his ministry of teaching, preaching and healing.

 

But this is the nature of a wilderness experience – to be driven into the unknown, far beyond one’s comfort zone into a place of loneliness, uncertainty and change.  The driving force can be any number of circumstances which leave us feeling estranged and separated from God.

 

Jesus finds temptation and testing in his wilderness.  What do you find in yours?  A broken relationship?  An addiction?  Illness?  Hopelessness?  Many of us sitting here today feel like we are out in our own bleak, barren, and desolate landscape, thirsting for a God who seems far away.  And each week, as we bring to this sacred space our burdens of the past, our problems of the present, and our anxieties for the future, we may feel that life is testing or tempting us in one way or another, and we clutch on to the scrubby, stunted plants in that desert as we touch these pews, hold our hymnals, and turn the pages of our worship bulletin. 

 

“Where is God?” we ask.  Where is God in the wilderness of all that transpires in our lives and in our world?  Today it may not be Auschwitz, but instead Iraq or Darfur.  It may be a landscape that has been ravaged by a tornado or hurricane or a flood that leaves destruction and death in its wake.  Our wilderness place may be our very home.

 

And when bad things happen, people on the other side of the earth or as close as in these pews – maybe even we ourselves – ask “Where is God?”  Perhaps we ask because we are looking in the wrong places.

 

Where is God?  We find the answer in Scripture, which assures us that God is with us, feeling our pain.  In Exodus, God says, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters.  Indeed, I know their suffering.” [Ex 3:7].

 

Where is God?  We find the answer in Jesus, who came to pitch his tent among us that he might know and experience life as we do. 

 

Where is God?  We find the answer in the cross.  

 

During this season of Lent, we are reminded that God has entered into our suffering and has experienced it all before us.  God enters into our sorrows, our failure, our tears, our struggles.  God, through Jesus, knows sadness, rejection, pain, and death as we do. 

 

Where is God?  The cross shows us -- God is with us in our suffering.

The God we seek in our distress is God with a human face.  The God who bids us to come to him has his arms outstretched, and his hands bear the marks of the nail prints.  He opens his heart of love and grace to us, even in the wilderness times of our lives.  No matter what sorrows or sadness we experience, the cross casts its shadow, reminding us that God has been there before us.

For all of us who are feeling forgotten by God out there in the wilderness, there is hope and encouragement in this morning’s gospel lesson.  Luke tells us that after 40 days and nights, Jesus is filled with the power of God’s Holy Spirit [v. 14a] and his time in the desert ends, just as ours will.

 

After his time in the wilderness, Jesus withdraws to Galilee, and from that time on, he begins to teach, heal and preach, proclaiming the Good News of God.  In other words, Jesus is transformed by his time in the desert, and he shows us that when the unsettling, painful, seemingly God-forsaken times in life come, we too can grow through them, being changed and transformed into something new.

 

Where is God?  Where God has always been and always will be.  Walking beside us, guiding us, uplifting us, and loving us infinitely and eternally.  Amen.

 

---