Temptation for Today

February 17, 2013 By Leave a Comment

a sermon on Luke 4:1-13 for the First Sunday in Lent
preached on February 17, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

It’s time again for Lent—that forty-day period when we are supposed to eat fish on Fridays, give up chocolate, alcohol, or Facebook, and generally reflect on how we are sinful and miserable human beings. As with so many things, we can blame it all on Jesus—he was the first, after all, to take a forty-day journey in the wilderness, and his story of temptation is clearly what Lent is all about, right? Since he suffered for forty days, we should too!

But I think our text from Luke this morning suggests that our Lenten journey should look a little different from Jesus’ sojourn in the wilderness. Jesus had just been baptized in the Jordan River, and he went to the wilderness led by the Spirit and yet to be tempted by the devil. His vision of temptation along the way was not of beef or chicken on Fridays, rich candy bars, wine and beer, or social networking sites—no, these temptations rattled at the core of his humanity.

First, after forty days without food, the devil suggested to the famished Jesus, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” Jesus had spent his entire time in the wilderness fasting completely, eating nothing—far more than just giving up chocolate or limiting ourselves to fish on Fridays during Lent! Giving up things that aren’t all that good for us to begin with for the 40 days of Lent isn’t really what this is all about! Although the devil tried to take advantage of Jesus’ hunger, Jesus didn’t take the bait. “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’”

But for Jesus, this was about more than food, and so it should be for us. We are not what we eat—no, we can be better measured by what we consume from the world around us, by the people who influence us, by the natural resources we use and abuse, by the relationships that enrich our lives, and by the faith that sustains us as we go along the journey together. Jesus knew this, and so he somehow battled through his hunger to avoid this real temptation upon him to fill himself with something that would not truly satisfy him.

But the devil was not done with Jesus. He next took Jesus on a quick but complete tour of the kingdoms of the world and offered them to him: “I will give their glory and all this authority to you, for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.” Now Jesus had to be outraged right away—he surely knew that all the world belongs to God, and the devil had no authority whatsoever to give these kingdoms to anyone, especially Jesus, who already had such authority! But this temptation was about more than the power itself—this was about how to use and abuse that power, about shifting allegiance to a different way of thinking and working in the world and misusing the gifts of power in our lives. Jesus didn’t fall for the devil’s tricks, though. Again, he responded with words from scripture: “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’” Jesus would not give in so easily to the powers of evil in the world in order to gain some temporary power and glory, for his call was to challenge this evil and make it clear that the greatest power comes in weakness and the greatest glory from giving it all away.

While this temptation may not seem to be something of our world—surely the devil doesn’t dangle power and honor and glory before us all the time!—all too often we do look to take the easy way to power and glory. We look for the quickest path to achieve our goals, even if it means cutting some corners or hurting some people along the way. We are constantly tempted to bow to powers other than God to get what we want. And we even seek to build up honor and glory for ourselves, focusing on establishing ourselves and our ways and ideas with power and privilege rather than seeking to join in what God is doing around us.

But Jesus’ third temptation takes all this testing to a new level for Jesus and for us. The devil suggested that Jesus should throw himself down off the pinnacle of the temple and see what would happen. He even quoted a bit of the psalm that preceded our gospel reading this morning:

He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you…
On their hands they will bear you up,
so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.

As the devil saw it, if these promises are so real and good and important, if God really is present, Jesus should have checked out it just to be sure, and all would be well. But Jesus knew otherwise. He too could quote the words of Psalm 91, but he didn’t need to test them at that moment in order to trust them. As Bruce Benson puts it in a brief reflection on this temptation (from the February 21, 2010, edition of Sing for Joy), Jesus was tempted more than anything “to forget that trusting God with one’s life is not the same thing as being reckless with one’s life, that throwing himself off a high wall would be an act of foolishness and not of faith.” And so Jesus responded to this temptation to misuse scripture with another quote from scripture: “It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’”

Now we surely don’t put God to the test! We surely don’t make little deals with God that if only such-and-so will happen, we will be more faithful or stop doing something we shouldn’t be doing anyway. We surely don’t ask God to prove God’s goodness before trusting God in our lives. We surely don’t get frustrated and angry when God doesn’t answer our prayers as we wish and so fails our test. But you know it is true—so often we do exactly this. We expect God to respond to our prayers on our timetable. We suggest that the bad things that happen in our world or in our lives are simply part of “God’s plan” and so will just be okay if we can only suffer through the immediate pain and move on in life. And we even try to “prove” what we believe by twisting around events around us instead of trusting that God is really at work beyond our knowledge and comprehension.

The level of faith and confidence in God’s presence that Jesus demonstrated in response to this temptation—and all these temptations—is something that will constantly evade us. Unlike Jesus, we will always fall short in responding to the real temptations around us. We will never be sustained completely by the right things, and we will always be hungry for something more. We will never be able to completely give up our thirst for power and trust that God’s power is enough for us. And we will always be looking for better proof that God is at work in our lives and our world.

Yet Jesus struggled with these same things. These temptations during those forty days in the wilderness and countless other times during Jesus’ life remind us that God knows the depth of the trials and temptations that we face. And just as he overcame those temptations, we can find a new and different way through them, slowly but surely, day by day, not because we become better people but because God’s new life in Jesus Christ takes deeper and fuller root in us and in our world each and every day. Lent is the gift of time to do just that—to clean out our closets of the dusty old things that get in the way of all that can be new, to cultivate new practices that help us to set aside faith in our own ways and instead trust God’s grace, to make our way through the temptations of our world trusting the presence of God all along the way.

So may we find God amidst all that we give up and all that we take up in these Lenten days so that we can walk the road of uncertainty and temptation with confidence as we seek the way to new life along the road of the cross and look for the hope of the resurrection in our midst through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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Where’s Jesus?

December 24, 2012 By Leave a Comment

a sermon on Luke 2:1-20 and John 1:1-14
preached on December 24, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

One of my most memorable Christmas gifts growing up was the wonderful series of Where’s Waldo? books. They featured a tall, lanky, strange, bespectacled man named Waldo who popped up in a variety of very interesting scenes. The goal of the books was to find him amidst these very busy scenes. He was best distinguished by his bright red striped shirt, but sometimes when he hid behind a tree or something he was a little more difficult to spot. For several years, each Christmas brought a new book in the series, and I remember spending many hours looking carefully for Waldo and the many other things hidden in these scenes. It was a fun game and a great way to spend those lazy Christmas days with family and friends—and even a welcome break from all the toys that seemed to get a lot of attention too!

Sometimes, I feel like we are playing a bit of a game of “Where’s Jesus?” in our world at Christmas nowadays. Signs of the holidays are everywhere, but Jesus is a bit more hidden. Our streets and homes are decorated with trees, garland, Santas, and even nativity scenes, but too often for me at least it just feels obligatory and not all that real and meaningful. Religious celebrations that talk about Jesus take a back seat to family gatherings that focus on gift-giving and eating. Many people are now even saying “Merry Christmas,” but do they even know what that means? Even one of our own parents in the church told me the other day that her child had never made the connection between Jesus and Christmas—to this youngster, Christmas was all about Santa Claus and giving and receiving presents, and, based on our celebrations, I for one am not really all that surprised. Some in the church go on and on about the “War on Christmas”—all the supposed places in our civic culture where the seemingly more generic “holidays” have replaced a proper celebration of Christmas—but I think we have to answer for our own actions and reclaim Christmas for ourselves before we can point to anyone or anything else.

You see, regardless of how we might act or behave in the church or elsewhere, Christmas is not about Santa Claus, giving or receiving gifts, or even the glorious music that shapes these days. When we focus on these things, the world can so easily close in around us. The very shallow joy of this view of Christmas becomes insincere when things get hard or tragedy strikes as it has so often in recent months and years. Between the destruction of Superstorm Sandy and the highly-visible gun violence around us that culminated in Newtown and continued even earlier today, we need something more than the traditional holidays has to offer, a deeper, more real, more transformative joy that brings us new life.

At its core, Christmas should be exactly that. This is the day when we celebrate God’s presence in our world, Immanuel, God-with-us, God’s coming to us in human form, in the birth of Jesus. This is the day when we remember that God doesn’t ever give up on us but shows the greatest possible love for us: love in a simple babe in a manger, love in a wise and challenging teacher, love in a miraculous and astounding healer, love in a life-giving death, love in an astounding resurrection. This is the day when we see that God can’t be pinned only to the powerful, only to the religious, only to Christians, only to the church, for on this day we celebrate how God in Christ was born to Mary, a poor, unmarried girl, in a dark, dank, messy manger, with only strange shepherds to greet him.

So when we look around in these days and wonder, “Where’s Jesus?” the answer may surprise us. We might like to try to get Jesus more fully into our holiday celebrations. We might want to confine the religious element of this season to life in the church or to something that we can do when there is time. And we might even recognize that Jesus is the reason for the season. But when we ask “Where’s Jesus?” the answer may be more like those Waldo books than we could ever imagine, for he is dwelling in our world, not so much hiding as hanging out. He is very much present with us, even when we don’t know it, even when we least expect it. He is ready for us to watch and look and search for him, waiting for us to discover him when and where we least expect it. Our reading tonight from John puts it beautifully:

The light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness did not overcome it.

The Word became flesh and lived among us,
and we have seen his glory,
the glory as of a father’s only son,
full of grace and truth.

And so our call this Christmas and every day is simple. Live like this all this has actually happened. Act like Christmas is not about giving gifts or gathering with family and friends but about celebrating God’s life in our midst in Christ. Make Christ’s presence real in our world. And keep asking “Where’s Jesus?” as we look for him to be at work in the expected and unexpected places in our world, for we will certainly encounter this baby boy, this radical teacher and preacher, this astonishing healer, this self-giving servant, this resurrected Christ, in our world.

Sometimes it will be easy, with joyful music and easy signs to point the way. And sometimes it will be hard, when we are lonely, when the walls seem to be closing in around us, when violence and war seem to have the last word. Yet in joy and in sorrow, when we ask “Where’s Jesus?” we know that he is among us. In our songs, in our words, in our celebrations, in our sacrament, we trust that Jesus is among us. In our sorrow, in our sighing, in our living, in our dying, Christ walks with us all the way to show us God’s love each and every day.

So may we seek Jesus and find him this Christmas and throughout the year to come so that our joy might be complete, our hope restored, and our world renewed for these days and always.

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to all, this night, this Christmas, and always. Amen.

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Shiny Happy Jesus People

February 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment

a sermon for Transfiguration of the Lord on Mark 9:2-9 
preached on February 19, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

What do we say about the transfiguration of Jesus? This is one of those days that is clearly important in our life together as the church, but figuring out the exact reasons for that and meaning of it is not quite so easy.

What do you say about a story that seems so otherworldly, so seemingly unreal? It’s not like we go around climbing mountains and seeing people’s clothes turn dazzling white every day. And visitations from the great ancestors of our past just aren’t part of our experience. If I were choosing stories for the gospels on the basis of what makes sense, I would probably leave this one out – I’d want things to be believable, to be unquestionable and accessible for everyone.

The transfiguration of Jesus has so much speaking against its reality by these standards. There is only a small pool of sympathetic, highly biased witnesses. Supernatural appearances of ancestral figures stand at the center of the story. Strange voices speak out of nowhere. A sudden ending leaves the whole thing hanging. And those who saw it receive stern instructions not to tell anyone what they had seen.

Yet this story is such an integral part of the gospel witness. Three of the four gospels tell this story, and each of them uses it as a pivot point in its narrative, helping to turn our focus from a humble teacher wandering around the villages of Galilee to the clearly marked Son of God willing to risk even his life to show that God’s power is greater than any human designs.

At the core, this is a simple story. Jesus gathers his three most-trusted disciples – three of those fishermen whom he called on that first day as he was walking by the Sea of Galilee – and he takes them with him up the mountain. Atop the mountain, something happened to Jesus. There, he looked entirely different from the man who had hiked up with the disciples. His appearance changed, and “his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them.” Then two others appeared and started talking with Jesus. Somehow, maybe based on the conversation they had with Jesus, the disciples recognized these guests as Moses and Elijah.

It was an incredible experience. The disciples were mesmerized and terrified by it all. Peter clearly didn’t want it to end, so he stupidly suggested a plan to preserve the moment, to build three shrines atop the mountain for the three great leaders so that they could enjoy this time of teaching and learning for all eternity. But even before Jesus could respond to Peter, a voice spoke out of the cloud, just as had happened a few years earlier at Jesus’ baptism: “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” Suddenly Jesus and the disciples were all alone again, and it was time to head back down the mountain. Along the way Jesus instructed them to keep quiet about what they had seen until the time was right.

There are plenty of possible ramifications of this story for Jesus. Biblical scholars have debated the meaning and consequences of this text for centuries. Theologians have suggested that this might be the moment when the divine nature of Jesus started to become clear. And storytellers and literary critics have noted how this transfiguration is a turning point for Jesus in much the same way as the later story of his triumphal entry into Jerusalem transitions us so well into the last week of Jesus’ life.

Yet I think all those impacts of this story are a little too theoretical for us. I for one want to know what this transfiguration business has to do with me. Why should this strange story of a shiny happy Jesus matter to me two thousand years after it theoretically happened? What is the point of following someone who one day suddenly lit up brighter than a Christmas tree? And can we even get anywhere close to this shining Jesus ourselves?

Well, first of all, I think this story helps us to think more clearly about the idea of the mountaintop experience. The human life always seems to have its ups and downs, and one of the great challenges seems to be how to carry what we learn in our highs into our lower moments. Jesus’ brief moment of bright glory on the mountaintop is a good reminder for us that we can be energized by our glimpses of glory. As our last hymn put it so well,

How good, Lord, to be here,
yet we may not remain,
but since you bid us leave the mount,
come with us to the plain.

– Joseph Armitage Robinson, 1888

When we carry the memory and power of our mountaintop moments into our daily lives, we have wisdom and energy to be more faithful and to listen more closely to what God is calling us to be and to do.

Yet the brightness we witness on top of the mountain is also important, too. In the Transfiguration, we get a nearly-complete glimpse of God’s glory as revealed in Jesus Christ. We still see him as a teacher, but we also finally see him exalted and glorified, receiving the honor and appreciation that we know he deserves, getting a little preview of the greater glory that will come on Easter. By the power of this witness to God’s glory, by our glimpse of this shiny happy Jesus, we too can bear a bit of that glory into the world. Like good mirrors that reflect light into more visible brightness, like the orbs of our night sky that shine brightly yet often only cast back the light that they receive, we can be reflections of God’s glory into this world that so desperately needs God’s light.

And so we can and should and must be shiny happy Jesus people because of this light that we witness on the mountaintop. We can embody a new and different way of life and living that points to something beyond ourselves so that others might join us on this journey. We can reflect even a little glimpse of God’s glory into our broken and fearful world so that all might have courage to be the people whom God has called them to be. And we can shine with the wonder of Jesus himself because of this encounter so that we can have the light we need to follow in his path.

So today as we prepare to begin the season of Lent, we can be shiny happy Jesus people. We sing songs of God’s glory and wonder and praise. We rejoice with “alleluias” loud and strong as we prepare to set them aside for the season ahead. We gather at this table, hoping to catch a glimpse of our bright, shining savior meeting us here. And we go forth to continue reflecting the light of Christ that we find in this place into our lives and our world.

May we shine with happiness, peace, joy, hope, and love, today and always, living and walking as the shiny happy Jesus people that we are, unafraid to reflect his glory and new life into every place until he comes again to make all things shine with his glory forever and ever.

Lord, come quickly! Alleluia! Amen.

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