March 10, 2019: May God’s words alone be spoken, may God’s words alone be heard. Amen.
Does anyone else think there must be some synchronicity here with the gospel account of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness being on the same Sunday we enter into Lent with a change to Daylight Savings Time – that rude smack in the face of our body clocks that happens every Spring making us all want to throw the alarm clock out the window and curl back under the covers? Yup – that was mighty tempting to each of us, to be sure. I am glad that you’all managed to battle through it to be here today (even in this miserable weather) – but should you need it, there’s a coffee machine right over there (for those of you who are NOT regretting giving up caffeine for Lent).
And yeah, even if you only happen to be half awake today, then you know it is Lent, because the church is stripped of gold and silver, and in its place are things made of simple materials like wood and clay – not to mention the very long Great Litany that opens our service. Lent for you may mean a whole host of things – a time to give something up, or take something on, or a time to return home to church if you haven’t been here in awhile, or perhaps for some, to seek reconciliation through the sacrament of confession. All of this is a part of making us mindful…but, of what?
Well, that is what we hear about in the gospel of Luke today. Jesus is baptized, and “filled with the Holy Spirit” is led into the wilderness for 40 days and nights. At the end of his stay in the desert, after fasting for all that time, he ended up having a dialog with the devil. Now, if all that sounds a bit far removed from our reality today, then we need to pay better attention, so let’s step back a moment to better understand what is happening here.
Just before this desert excursion, when Jesus was rising up from the waters of baptism, he heard the voice of God say that “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Cool! So Jesus gets the big reveal of his identity, then God takes him for a desert retreat where the devil would be waiting. Now, why would God do that?
One of the things that can trip us up when we read scripture is assuming that English offers us a good translation of the text. It is most of the time, but in the case of this particular passage in Luke, we lose something important that the author was trying to make clear. Luke was written in the highest form of Greek of any of the gospel accounts, and one of the interesting things about the temptations is that pesky thing the devil character keeps saying to Jesus:
“If you are the son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.”
If you worship me, I will grant you authority over all of the kingdoms of the earth.
If you are the son of God, throw yourself down from this pinnacle ‘cause you know those angels will just spread those wings to catch you Jesus – why you won’t even get a little tiny scratch on that beautiful face.
Okay, that’s a paraphrase, but what is correct is that there is a whole lot of “if” statements in there:
If you are the son of God,
If you worship me,
If you are the son of God.
Sounds like the devil is asking Jesus to prove who he is. If you do this Jesus, then you will prove to me that you are the son of God. And that is why the translation is critical, because that is not at all what is happening. Only two of the if statements refer to his identity – “if you are the son of God.” The other asks Jesus to do something – “if you worship me, then…” Let’s set that one, the second temptation about worshiping the devil, aside for now. It’s important, but let’s look more at the other two. And this is where knowing a little of the Greek makes that old adage right – the devil is in the details, because neither of these are saying “If you are the son of God, then prove it by doing such and such.” The word translated as “If” in “If you are the son of God,” is actually a better understood as “since,” or “as much as.”[1]The devil is acknowledging, not testing, the identity of Jesus, saying “Since you are the son of God, command this stone to be bread, or throw yourself down from this high point.” “Since you are the son of God.”
Was the devil lurking around the Jordan earlier and eavesdropping on God’s proclamation to Jesus? I don’t think so. In fact, I don’t think there was a “devil”there at all– or at least not one flying around pestering Jesus from the outside.
You see, Jesus heard that proclamation, and then the Holy Spirit purposely led him out into the wilderness, and not directly into his ministry. Why would God do that?
God did this, because Jesus needed to face the greatest demon of all if he was to face what lay ahead of him. And that demon isn’t some pitchfork wielding, tail and wing adorned, creature lurking around desert rocks. No. The devil Jesus needed to face was much more cunning, more insidious, more deceiving – it was within his fully human self. It was the enemy within.
Remember, we proclaim that Jesus is fully divine, and fully human. He had just been told he was the son of God. The power within him must have been palatable, and Jesus had to face his own desire to use that power the way he wanted, rather than the way God intended.
And as I have said before, one can even imagine how even Jesus would be tempted – and how we might be as well, right? No? You can’t imagine that? Well, let’s think about it.
Imagine – you’re Jesus, and with just one command, you could change that stone into bread… in fact, you could do that with a whole lot of stones and give the world food – eliminating hunger. Just like that! Would you do it? Imagine that with just one command – you could unite all the world under a single peaceable kingdom that you could ensure stays that way– how…well, you are the son of the most high, that’s how. Would you do it? Imagine that you could, with a single instantprove God’s existence- with an almighty (and totally news catching) act of saving grace – the whole world would know Godexisted! How awesome would that be, right? Would you do it?
You see, Jesus had to walk this desert jouney because he needed to prepare for what lay ahead. He was called to feed God’s peoplespiritually, not physically. He was called to bring people to the Kingdom of God, not unite the human political kingdoms of the world. He was called to be a living example of God’s all abiding love in the world, that others may have faith in God’s grace – not take faith away and replace it with cheap certainty of a God that can do some mighty neat parlor tricks.
Jesus had to walk this journey to battle his own demons, so that he could emerge on the other side strong and ready to face all that would await him – including the temptation to avoid the final walk to Jerusalem, and to the cross.
And here’s the thing, this little trip to the desert is a journey we all take. Every day, we are bombarded with advertisements telling us that we aren’t good enough without makeup, weight loss, a new car, a bigger house. Every day there are people in the world spewing fear into our ears – fear of what we don’t have, fear of what we don’t understand, fear of those who look, think, speak, worship, or love, differently than we do. This is the wilderness in which we live, these are the demons we battle.
Yet, when we were baptized, we also heard that we are God’s beloved child. Jesus was able to face his own demons because he understood what it meant to be a beloved child of God. Do we?
His identity, and ours, arerooted in the same thing – a God that loves us beyond measure and works through usto bring about the beloved community here on earth. The “devil,” which is really a part of each of us, is constantly working to erode our sense ofthatidentity –ofGod’sdeep, abiding, and unconditional love for every one of us– and replace it with fear and insecurity or more often than not, the arrogance of thinking we can do it all on our own, that wealth will satisfy us, that we need to hold to as much as we can as a way of defining how valuable we are. And this enemy within is more powerful than any external to us, because it knows us too well…because it is us.
So what are we to do?
We follow the Holy Spirit as Jesus did…and the first place She will lead you is here, becauseGod knows that unlike Jesus, wewill need a reminder of who we are, and we will find that here in the Eucharist, as a community in one another, and in the sacred space of this place. This is where we are renewed in our knowledge of who we are, who God is, and what that means for us. It is where we can name the demons within, and lay them here at Christ’s feet, before dealing with the ones that lay ahead in the world. This is where we are given the fuel for our fire that will burn in our hearts as we follow the Holy Spirit out into the wilderness of our lives – the fuel is God’s love, the fire our identity as children of God.
And we will need to be deeply rooted in that identity, and filled with the knowledge of God’s unconditional love, if we are to combat the devil in our earthly wilderness. Some are easy to see, but it is the ones, who like this one in Luke, use scripture quite well, that are the most dangerous, because they use the very texts of our faith as a weapon. How do we know them? We pay close attention to what they say, because we need only consider one thing to know their real intent. When they quote scripture, does it spread love, or spread fear? If you listen to some of them, it would seem that,
God hates some people, wants us to judge others that aren’t like us, and is going to condemn some others. The God they preach is angry, vengeful, something to be feared, and calling us to respond in kind.
Does that sound like love to you?
Because as our Presiding Bishop is always saying, “If it’s not about love, it’s not about God!” And that folks, is not about love.
It’s like I saw on a meme the other day, where Jesus is staring at a bunch of these bible toting types and says “The difference between me and you is you use scripture to determine what love means, and I use love to determine what scripture means.”
Indeed.
And let us not forget the government leaders who have tried to use scripture to justify the separation of children from their mothers and fathers at our southern border, or those church leaders who use scripture to deny all the sacraments to all the baptized, or to justify the subjugation of women and the exclusion of them from leadership roles in the church.
The thing is, these folks have fallen victim to their own demons, and are calling out to the demons within each of us – playing to our very human side that is susceptible to insecurity rooted in fear – and asking us to abandon who we are, to turn from God’s unconditional love, and follow them instead – to eat stone, not bread, worship power and not God, and throw ourselves and others blindly into spiritual death.
This is why Lent is so very important, because it is a time for us to be reminded of who we are, what that means, and how important our lives really are to God. It is a time when we slow down, reset, renew, and grow stronger for our journey. It is a time when we acknowledge the demons within, and seek God’s forgiveness and grace when we have given ourselves over to them. All that we might then stand firmly rooted in the knowledge of God’s unconditional love, when the demons of the wilderness of this human existence try to shake us loose from spreading that love to those who are starved and lay weak with spiritual hunger.
On Ash Wednesday you were invited into a Holy Lent. I pray you accept this invitation, and embrace this opportunity – for your sake, and that of the world.
Amen.
For the audio from the 10:30am service, click below, or subscribe to our iTunes Sermon Podcast by clicking here:
[1]Strong’s does not advocate for the use of the English word “since,” but does indicate that it is not a conditional “if” but a statement of fact: “1487 ei (a conditional conjunction) – if. 1487 /ei (followed by any verb) expresses “a condition, thought of as real, or to denote assumptions” (i.e. viewed as factual. for the sake of argument) (BAGD). Accordingly, 1487 (ei) should not be translated “since,” but rather always “if” – since the assumption may only be portrayed as valid (true, factual).” Still, for the purpose of composition of the sentence to reveal the meaning of the author, it can be reasonably argued that “since” will work. See also, http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=3984.
The Rev. Diana L. Wilcox
Christ Church in Bloomfield & Glen Ridge
March 10, 2019
Lent 1 – Year C
1st Reading – Deuteronomy 26:1-11
Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16
2nd Reading – Romans 10:8b-13
Gospel – Luke 4:1-13
