The Rev. Sara Warfield
Scripture: Luke 4:1-13
To become a priest in The Episcopal Church, I was required to participate in something called Clinical Pastoral Education. A lot of denominations require it for their aspiring ministers. Clinical Pastoral Education, or CPE, is basically an intensive training program for pastoral care. The most common setting for this training is a hospital. And the method is, well, trial by fire. That was my CPE experience anyways. The first day may have been orientation and making sure my vaccinations were up to date, but I’m pretty sure that second day my supervisors were like, “This is your floor! Make sure to visit each patient within two days of being admitted! Good luck!”
Of course, my cohort of four other student chaplains and I did do a lot of learning in our year’s residency. The actual method of teaching is called action/reflection. Go and do, and then come back and reflect on it. Go and meet with patients, whether they’re on the med/surg floor recovering from routine surgery or in the ICU relying on a machine cleaning their blood to stay alive.
It was often intense. Especially during on-call shifts. Five times a month, I stayed overnight in a sleep room in the hospital to respond to emergency calls. It was never very restful because I was always waiting for the beeper to go off. Whenever there was a code blue or a stroke alert or a code gray—distressed and/or unruly patient—I got a call. I kept more than a few ER patients calm in the midst of their psychotic breaks. I heard rib bones snap under the weight of chest compressions and smelled smells I did not know existed. I cried and prayed with doctors and nurses when they lost a 39 year-old man after a very long, violent, and exhausting code blue. And then I escorted that man’s mother in to see her son before he was taken to the morgue.
There was a lot to learn.
—
I told the Membership Gathering on Thursday that I think the Holy Spirit tricked me into becoming an Episcopal priest. And part of that trick was leading me into the wilderness of CPE.
Our gospel says today:
After his baptism, Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil.
What is this wilderness? What is the point of this wilderness? Why would the Holy Spirit lead Jesus directly into test and temptation?
As the scripture says, Jesus was sent into the wilderness right after his baptism, right after the world has learned who he is, right after his formal call to ministry, which is no less than changing the world. But stepping into one’s ministry, one’s call, requires training. Changing the world requires preparation.
And so Jesus chooses to go into the wilderness to prepare, to face hardships, to let his trust in God be questioned. Because that really is the point of the wilderness: to let your trust in God be questioned. It’s what happens to the Israelites in Deuteronomy when they wander the wilderness for 40 years. Do they trust that God will keep them fed, keep them safe, and eventually bring them to the Promised Land? Does Jesus trust that God will eventually feed him after his 40 days of fasting? Does Jesus trust that God’s abundance is more life-giving than the world’s abundance? That’s what the devil is asking. And finally, the devil says, throw yourself off this temple and prove that God’s got your back. And Jesus says, “This world will test me without your help.I don’t need to go out of my way to test God to know that God’s there for me.”
The wilderness is a place to examine our trust:
Whom do you trust for your nourishment?
Whose power do you trust?
Whom do you trust to love you, to care for you, to protect you?
—
Now we’ve created a kind of low-key wilderness here in the church for Lent with our new chair situation. No, it’s not fasting for 40 days and seeing if you break, but it is a fasting of sorts: a fasting from the comfort of familiarity. A fasting from relative anonymity. And a way for you to question your trust, if even in a small way.
By now, you know that I believe and teach, as the apostle Paul taught, that today Jesus manifests on this earth through the Body of Christ, which is us, joined together, each of us living out the unique gifts God gave us. And my limitations, your limitations, show us where we need to connect with others to get our needs met and to help others meet needs that only our gifts can meet. We need all of us to paint the full picture of the Kingdom of God.
So if we claim to trust God for our nourishment, our power, our security, that means we need to have a deep and abiding trust in community, in each other, to provide those things.
Which means, when we try to go it alone, when we prioritize self-sufficiency and independence above all else, we’re not fully trusting in God. When we put our own interests and needs first to the detriment of others, we are not fully trusting in God. And, when we covet other people’s gifts while diminishing our own gifts, we’re not fully trusting in God.
That’s why we’re facing each other, why we’re looking at one other’s faces, why we’re hearing one another’s voices singing during this season of Lent, this season in the wilderness. You’re going to be tempted, as I saw during the Ash Wednesday service, to turn your body to the front, like you’re used to. And I get that for when I’m preaching. I know some of you don’t pick up my words as well when you can’t see my mouth.
But for the most part, you don’t need to look at me or Kathy to fully worship. Most of the words are written down, and as the season goes on, the chants and prayers seep into our bones. Now it may make you feel more comfortable to not look at the other people across from you or to not have other people looking at you, but that is the invitation of Lent: to give up comfort or familiarity or immediate gratification for the sake of learning how to trust in God.
That’s the biggest lesson I learned in CPE. As I said, I was in a group of five chaplains, and we all had very different personalities and very different gifts. So, yes, while we did learn assessment tools and models for grief and some basic psychology, our most important lesson was that we all care for people differently, according to the gifts God has given us.
One of my colleagues was just a natural, heart-anchored, instinctively caring person. She walked into a patient’s room, and everyone melted—even the doctors, and doctors don’t melt easily. Another had an uncanny sense of humor that could defuse any intense situation. Another could remember every person’s name, which ingratiated him to the nurses immediately—and being ingratiated to nurses is a great help to chaplains.
So when the devil came to me in that wilderness, it’s wasn’t about bread, it was, “Stephanie is a lot better at this than you, maybe you should try what she does.” Or “The nurses LOVE Br. Tai Sihn, why aren’t you learning everyone’s names like he is?”
My temptation was to believe that my gifts weren’t enough, that how God made me wasn’t enough. It turned out that was the main temptation for most of my chaplain cohort. It took the full year for us to recognize that we were each admiring one another’s gifts and not trusting in our own. And we had to learn that TOGETHER. We had to face one another and be willing to tell each other what beautiful gifts we see in one another, and also the ways we each fell short in stepping into our unique gifts. We built each other up, and we told each other hard truths. And in a very different way, the patients also built us up, and they also told us hard truths.
I wouldn’t be here today, more joyful and confident in the way God made me than I ever have been, without wandering that wilderness with that community for what at the time felt like 40 years.
That is our invitation this Lenten season: to choose to go into the wilderness, to be tempted, and to build up our trust in God, our trust in the Body of Christ, our trust in each other.
That’s how we train to step into our ministries. That’s how we prepare to change the world. Amen.
Comments