Readings for the First Sunday in Lent
This sermon was preached at Christ Episcopal Church Eureka on Sunday February 22, 2025.
There’s a scene in C. S. Lewis’s science fiction book Perelandra in which the hero of the space novel named Ransom travels from Earth to a Paradise-like planet named Perelandra. There we watch him walking through a grove and plucking, from an unknown tree, a large yellow fruit about the size of a balloon. Through Ransom’s eyes we see the ripe fruit’s glow and fresh flush; we feel its smooth skin, its plump shape heavy in his hand; with Ransom we smell its fragrance, taste its tart flesh as if it first resists his teeth and then melts on his tongue – a deliciously sensuous experience. Lewis says, “It was like the discovery of a totally new genus of pleasures.”[1] Ransom licks the juice from his chin and his fingers and—like most Earthlings—typically looks for more. Just as he reaches out, wanting to clutch the next fruit, something surprising happens: he hears—not with his ears, but nevertheless hears—this second fruit saying a loud and clear, “No. One was enough!”[2] He realized that “the experience had been so complete that repetition would be a vulgarity—like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day.”[3]
Benedictine monk Br. David Steindl-Rast uses this scene to illustrate what he calls “sensual asceticism.” Now the term asceticism is an important term for us to know and reflect upon during this season of Lent, when we’re all called to be ascetics. It originates from the Greek word askeo which means to exercise and to train as an athlete. Stoics and philosophers later adopted it to describe the training of the mind and then Christians used it to refer to spiritual practice and discipline. Today we often associate asceticism with extreme forms of self-denial and mortification, but Br. David Steindl-Rast uses this story from C. S. Lewis to help correct the “tendency to give first place to renunciation when we think of asceticism.” He says, “No. Delight must come first. Had Ransom not opened all his senses to the ‘yes’ of delight, he would not have heard the ‘no’ of renunciation. And yet, too often ascetic practice is presented not as learning wholehearted attention, but as fitting into some mold of abstinence; not as joyful attunement of all our senses, but as their rejection. Thus, asceticism becomes ‘mortification’ – literally ‘killing’ –instead of life-affirming listening with a grateful heart.”[4] And gratefulness is the key word for Br. David Steindl-Rast when it comes to asceticism and to all spiritual practice for that matter; gratefulness for the gift of this life, this body, which is the sacred shrine of our treasured soul, and gratefulness for the joy of all our senses. Poet e.e. cummings asks, “How should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing…doubt unimaginable YOU?”
In our reading from Genesis this morning, we hear the classic story of the temptation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Notice all the references to the senses: to touching the forbidden fruit, which was a delight to the eyes, to tasting the fruit which stimulates the olfactory system, and, of course, to hearing and listening or failing to listen to the voice that longs to guide us into true joy and gladness, as the Psalm describes. The references to the senses in this passage about the Fall of Man and what we Christians often call “Original Sin” leads many commentators to think we ought to distrust our senses, which are often perceived as instruments of sin and tools of Satan. But Steindl-Rast and Lewis help us see that is not the case. God longs for us to delight in our senses. When God urges Adam to eat freely of every tree of the garden, God actually says in Hebrew, “Of every tree in the garden, you shall eat and be eating” (akol tokel) which is a way of saying you will delight in eating to your heart’s content. And the verse that immediately follows our passage today reveals how much God Himself delights in His own creation. Adam and Eve heard the sound of God walking in the garden in the ruach hayom, in the cool of the day, in the early evening. God was enjoying a sacred saunter in the garden. God was walking in the ruach, the wind, the breath, the spirit of the day.
The ruach is also the one who leads Jesus into the wilderness, where the devil tempts him, urging him to miraculously make bread, to overcome death, and to become the ruler of all nations. Here we see that the devil’s goal is not to liberate us from the killjoy clutches of an uptight and puritanical deity, which is certainly not the case in Genesis either. Rather the devil uses his cunning craftiness to prevent us from fully basking in the ten thousand blessings that God pours upon us each day and the devil seeks to distort the sensual pleasures God longs for us to enjoy. Notice that Jesus himself accomplishes all the magnificent feats that the devil tempts him to perform, but he does so in God’s way and in God’s time, with patience, mindfulness, and integrity. The timing was right for Jesus to miraculously make bread when he could share the bread with thousands of hungry people. The timing was right for Jesus to overcome death only after revealing his self-giving love on the Cross. And it becomes appropriate indeed for us to praise Jesus as the ruler of all nations, the rule of the entire world since Jesus revealed himself as the perfect embodiment of love so that our world is ruled not by love of power (which tempts us to sell our souls and our integrity), but rather ruled by the power of love.[5]
I invite you this Lent to practice patience, mindfulness, and integrity so that you too can more fully enjoy delicious feasts with others, thrilling adventures, and even positions of trust and authority that allow you to more effectively serve others. I invite you this Lent to take time to delight in your five senses, each of which will be explicitly referenced in the Gospel passages this Lenten season for those who have ears to hear. And I invite you to also delight in your heart sense which helps us understand our physical senses as a necessary runway from which we can take off into the presence of God, where, according to the psalmist, there is fullness of joy and pleasures for evermore. Amen.
[1] C. S. Lewis, Perelandra (New York: Macmillan, 1975), 42.
[2] Brother David Steindl-Rast, A Listening Heart: The Spirituality of Sacred Sensuousness (New York: Crossroad, 1999), 52.
[3] C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, 42.
[4] Steindl-Rast, Listening Heart, 52 – 53.
[5] Or as MLK Jr. said, “We need leaders not in love with money, but in love with justice.”
DANIEL DeFOREST LONDON 