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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Taking Up the Cross

March 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment

a sermon on Mark 8:31-38 for the Second Sunday of Lent
preached on March 4, 2012, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

The cross is an incredible mark of the faith of the church. In our worship, we see it all around us – on the wall here at the front of the sanctuary, on the table here in the chancel, on the pulpit and lectern, on the bulletin cover, and even normally on top of our steeple! Today’s children’s bulletin even has an activity for counting crosses – in its four pages, there are forty crosses, one for each day of the season of Lent!

When we see a cross in our world today, I suspect that most of us immediately think of Jesus and the Christian faith. But this simple symbol is not quite as universal as we might think. In some parts of the world, the cross is exclusively a Roman Catholic symbol. When I visited the Czech Republic and Hungary several years ago while in seminary, we learned that most Protestant churches there do not use the cross at all because they do not want to be confused with Catholics. This was quite strange for many of us Americans – one member of our group had cross jewelry of every sort and wore it often, and I can only wonder what the locals thought of this Presbyterian seminary student from America who was so Catholic in her attire!

Even so, in our context at least, the cross has become a clear symbol of Christians and Christianity. However, I suspect that most people of Jesus’ time would be quite surprised by the prevalence of this symbol in these days. In Jesus’ own time, the cross was much more a sign of death than new life. Crucifixion was the most severe and cruel form of capital punishment imaginable. To anyone under Roman rule, then, the cross was a symbol of torture and death, something to be avoided as much as possible, and certainly not something you’d wear around your neck every day!

And yet in the eight verses of our reading from the gospel of Mark this morning, Jesus suggests not only that he will face a cross, but that we should, too. These eight verses mark a major shift in Jesus’ emphasis with the disciples over the course of the whole gospel of Mark. This moment comes immediately after Jesus asked the disciples what other people were saying about him and who they said that he was. While Peter responded that Jesus was the Messiah, Jesus ordered them all to keep quiet about it.

But right after this, Jesus began to teach them a little more about what is required of the Messiah. Jesus said that he would need to “undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.” The disciples were not happy with what Jesus said. Just as Peter had enthusiastically affirmed the emerging picture of Jesus as Messiah, he enthusiastically denied that he could face such things, so he pulled Jesus aside and gave him a stern talking-to.

While Peter thought that Jesus, with the stature and presence of a respected teacher and prophet and the one he believed to be the Messiah, could never suffer and die, Jesus insisted that this was the path ahead for him. He made sure that all the disciples could hear his own rebuke of Peter: “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

But this was not enough for Jesus. He wanted everyone who was listening to him to be aware of what he was facing. So he went to the crowd and spoke again to them, insisting that those who wanted to follow him had to deny themselves and take up a cross instead. He made it clear that no one should follow him for personal gain or with expectations of an immediate transformation of this world or a speedy coming of the next. Instead, everyone who follows him should be ready to give up everything they have and get nothing tangible in return. While this may seem to be a difficult, strange, and paradoxical word coming from one named as the Messiah, Jesus insisted that this was nothing to be ashamed of – those who were not happy with these things would find themselves struggling all the more in the days to come.

Taking up the cross is a difficult challenge. We can’t just put on a piece of jewelry or place a beautiful adornment in our sanctuary to receive its benefits, and we want to avoid the suffering and pain that we know, deep down, that it brings. We don’t want to give up the things of this world, and we want to stay in control at all costs. But taking up the cross requires letting go of all those things. We also have some good theological justifications  developed over the centuries that give us pause, too, as we consider taking up the cross for ourselves. We say that Christ’s suffering was enough for all of us and that no one should have to endure that kind of suffering anymore. We Protestants intentionally have an empty cross rather than a crucifix to remind us that Jesus’ suffering there was not the end of the story. And we say that there is no reason to keep crucifying Christ over and over again in our actions or practices of faith.

So I think we’re incredibly good at avoiding this command to “take up our cross” for practical, personal, and theological reasons, yet Jesus’ words still ring in our ears: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Jesus challenges us to somehow balance our conviction that he suffered enough for all of us with his command to take up our cross and follow him, to walk the way of uncertainty, pain, and death, to give up the things of this world for the sake of something beyond ourselves, and to trust that God will not only make something greater of our pain but has already walked that way before us and walks that way alongside us too.

This suffering is quite likely something more than giving up chocolate or cigarettes or Facebook for forty days. It is quite different from the awful things we have seen in the aftermath of tornadoes in our nation in recent days, for these things are not suffering sent by God to test us or punishment doled out for some sin we have committed. And the suffering Jesus calls us to face as we take up our cross is far less than putting ourselves out there to be killed as he did.

Instead, I think this suffering is much more like reorienting our lives toward the way God wants things to be, shifting everything we say and do into a mode of self-giving love, adjusting our hearts to give up everything we have to make room for all that we can still receive, walking our own road to the cross not for the benefits we will find there but because we and all the world will be better for taking that journey.

All this is the challenge of Lent – to somehow find our way through this difficult path, to remember and respond to Jesus’ challenge to deny ourselves and take up the cross and follow him, to sort out what we must give up so that we can take up this new way, and to always keep in mind that the sufferings of these days are not the end of the journey, for there is even greater glory ahead.

May God give us the strength we need to walk this journey together and with Jesus, so that the suffering we share along the way of the cross with one another and with Jesus will bear joyous fruit with the dawn of Easter Day.

Thanks be to God.
Amen.

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The Wilderness Way

March 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment

a sermon for the First Sunday in Lent on Matthew 4:1-11
preached at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone on March 13, 2011

Jesus didn’t set out seeking the wilderness, but that’s where he ended up. John the Baptist, his cousin, was known for dragging people out into the wilderness, where he called them to repent and be baptized, and Jesus too began his ministry as the Spirit led him too out into the wilderness. This wasn’t just any old Boy Scout weekend camping trip – this was an intense forty-day journey filled with fasting and prayer as the final preparation for his ministry. It had to be a pretty intense experience for Jesus out in the wilderness, with daily worries about finding water to sustain his life, nightly fears of attacks by wild animals, and the constant perils of the extremes of rain and heat and cold.

After those forty days and forty nights, though, Matthew tells us that Jesus’ journey in the wilderness had actually only just begun. The temptations of the wilderness for Jesus came to a head at the end of these forty days, just when Jesus’ hunger was at its greatest and his resolve was at its lowest. The tempter came at him three times, each time seeking to break Jesus’ resolve and faith from a different angle. First the devil suggested that he turn stones to bread and ease his hunger pains, but Jesus would have nothing of it, remembering that he needed no bread to live but rather could be sustained by the faithful word of God. Then the devil took Jesus to the pinnacle of the temple, encouraging him to jump down and test the psalmist’s promise of God’s salvation, but Jesus instead chose to follow another scripture: “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” Finally the tempter showed Jesus all the splendor of the nations from the top of a mountain, promising that all this would be his if he only chose to worship the devil, but Jesus insisted that he would worship only God the Lord. After all this, Jesus’ wilderness way came to an end as angels came to care for him and meet his needs after his long sojourn in the wilderness.

The wilderness way that Jesus himself faced is the inspiration for our season of Lent. The length of these days, the penitential focus of these days, and even the long-standing practice of fasting or giving up something for Lent is rooted in Jesus’ own time in the wilderness. Our journey of Lent too is rooted in a season and attitude of self-examination and self-discovery that were certainly a central part of Jesus’ own journey in the wilderness. And just as the Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness and stayed with him through those forty days, the Spirit also guides us into these days and goes with us along the way so that we do not walk this road alone. But as important as this season is, the wilderness is not somehow magically over for us on Easter morning. The journey of Lent does not bring us immediately out of wilderness and may even leave us in a darker and more uncertain place than we were before. The resurrection dawn on Easter morning does not bring us automatic and immediate relief from all our pain and struggle even though it is the decisive victory over the power of sin and death. And the self-examination and self-discovery we undertake in these days invariably will force us to confront issues in our lives well beyond the things we can sort in these forty days.

Even so, Jesus’ wilderness way that we walk for ourselves in these Lenten days gives us some deeper insights into our own journey through the wilderness that we walk each and every day. The wilderness of our changing world is before us constantly, and the wildernesses of each of our lives confound and confuse us. Things in our world are startlingly different from what we have known in the past, and we face the challenge and difficulty of sorting out how to live in a seemingly new and different time. Obstacles and uncertainties appear in the road before us, and we are forced to sort out how to live amidst these difficulties. Options and possibilities for us abound in this wilderness, and it so often becomes difficult to sort out the temptations from the opportunities.

And so as we wander in the wilderness, we see that Jesus’ journey is the model for our own. Jesus persevered through the uncertainty and difficulty to emerge to a new day, and he came forth from the wilderness strengthened to live very differently than he had ever done before. Jesus looked at the various options that the wilderness offered him and sought a faithful response to temptation, and he emerged from the twists and turns with confidence and hope not in his own ability but in God’s transforming presence. And just as the Spirit had guided him into the wilderness, Jesus trusted the Spirit’s presence throughout his journey there and so was able to walk in new paths of life.

The wilderness of Lent is before us. Turns and twists and curves will inevitably come on our road. Uncertainty will seem to reign, and we will be confused and turned around time and time again. Yet the Spirit still goes with us, standing by our side as we walk the road of penitence and passion, journeying with us no matter what our struggle or joy, facing our sorrow and pain with us, and always embodying the presence of God each and every day. And most of all, even amidst all the twists and turns of our pain and suffering, even in a dark and uncertain path through sorrow and sighing, we know where this road ends – with the deep suffering of Jesus transformed into the glory of the resurrection, with even death no longer having the final word for Jesus and for us. The wilderness way has been conquered already, and we simply must seek his signposts to guide us as we seek to follow his path.

Because Jesus walks this road before us, we can approach this wilderness way without fear, walking whatever road we face in these days with faithfulness and hope, accompanied by that same Spirit who led Jesus into the wilderness and led him out with confidence and hope. So as we journey through these forty days together, may we know the presence of the Spirit in this wilderness and prepare anew for the passion and resurrection of our Lord so that our faith might be strengthened and our life renewed. Amen.

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