First Sunday of Lent
February 17, 2013
Deuteronomy 26:1-11 (CEB)
(1) Once you have entered the land the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, and you take possession of it and are settled there,
(2) take some of the early produce of the fertile ground that you have harvested from the land the Lord your God is giving you, and put it in a basket. Then go to the location the Lord your God selects for his name to reside.
(3) Go to the priest who is in office at that time and say to him: “I am declaring right now before the Lord my God that I have indeed arrived in the land swore to our ancestors to give us.”
(4) The priest will then take the basket from you and place it before the Lord your God’s altar.
(5) Then you should solemnly state before the Lord your God: “My father was a starving Aramean. He went down to Egypt, living as an immigrant there with few family members, but that is where he became a great nation, mighty and numerous.
(6) The Egyptians treated us terribly; oppressing us and forcing hard labor on us.
(7) So we cried out for help to the Lord, our ancestor’s God. The Lord heard our call. God saw our misery, our trouble, and our oppression.
(8) The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a strong hand and an outstretched arm, with awesome power, and with signs and wonders.
(9) He brought us to this place and gave us this land - a land full of milk and honey.
(10) So now I am bringing the early produce of the fertile ground that you, Lord, have given me.” Set the produce before the Lord your God, bowing down before the Lord your God.
(11) Then celebrate all the good things the Lord your God has done for you and your family - each one of you along with the Levites and the immigrants who are among you.
Romans 10:8b-13 (CEB)
(8b) The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart.
(9) Because if you confess with your mouth “Jesus is Lord” and in your heart you have faith that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
(10) Trusting with the heart leads to righteousness, and confessing with the mouth leads to salvation.
(11) The scripture says, All who have faith in him won’t be put to shame.
(12) There is no distinction between Jew and Greek, because the same Lord is Lord of all, who gives richly to all who call on him.
(13) All who call on the Lord’s name will be saved.
Luke 4:1-13 (CEB)
(1) Jesus returned from the Jordan River full of the Holy Spirit, and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness.
(2) There he was tempted for forty days by the devil. He ate nothing during those forty days and afterward Jesus was starving.
(3) The devil said to him, “Since you are God’s Son, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.”
(4) Jesus replied, “It’s written, People won’t live only by bread.”
(5) Next the devil led him to a high place and showed him in a single instant all the kingdoms of the world.
(6) The devil said, “I will give you this whole domain and the glory of all these kingdoms. It’s been entrusted to me and I can give it to anyone I want.
(7) Therefore, if you will worship me, it will all be yours.
(8) Jesus answered, “It’s written, You will worship the Lord your God and serve only him.”
(9) The devil brought him into Jerusalem and stood him at the highest point of the temple. He said to him, “Since you are God’s Son, throw yourself down from here;
(10) for it’s written: He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you
(11) and they will take you up in their hands so that you won’t hit your foot on a stone.”
(12) Jesus answered, “It’s been said, Don’t test the Lord your God.”
(13) After finishing every temptation, the devil departed from him until the next opportunity.
So, today is the first Sunday of lent. I have to admit, it doesn’t seem quite normal to me as this is the first year in quite some time that I was unable to attend an Ash Wednesday service. Yet, here we find ourselves gathered as we collectively take that first step into that yearly reminder of how our sin, the sin that we are unable to overcome, was finally overcome for us by our messiah, Christ Jesus.
Traditionally, lent is a time when we do some major soul searching. Many traditionally sacrifice a part of their routine in order to remember the ultimate sacrifice Christ made for us. Sometimes we go without chocolate, coffee, soda or some other favorite snack.
The sacrifices are one of the focal point of the lenten season, as they help us to remember the ultimate sacrifice Christ makes on Good Friday. Yet, today, on this first Sunday in Lent, we focus not on the sacrifices, per se, but rather on temptation. Not just any ordinary, run of the mill, temptation; but, rather, the temptation Jesus himself faces in the wilderness with no less than the devil, himself.
Now, it is important to set the scene. Jesus has just been baptized. It is at this point, after this baptism, that Jesus goes off into the wilderness. It is at this point that Jesus is confronted by the devil and is tempted in the three ways the scriptures tell us. Jesus is tempted first with food, with sustenance after his body was weakened by fasting for so long. Then comes the temptation of power, power over all people and things. Finally, comes the temptation of testing God. This may be the most interesting. It is also the one I think I want to focus on a bit. It is easy to see ourselves in the first two temptations. We all have our baser instincts that can have an immense amount of control over us. Think of hunger. How many people in the world are hungry or thirsty? How many times have we heard of parents who steal to feed their family. How many are tempted by physical needs in one way or another. This temptation might be the one that is easiest for us to relate to, as it involves those biological functions which are common to us all and we each know to some extent what it is to be hungry, thirsty, tired, sick, or hurt.
Next comes the temptation of power. We can all relate to this as well. It is symbolic, at least in my mind, to our psychological needs. It is our need to be with people, our need to be successful, our need to be wealthy. It is our need to be worthy to our friends and family. It is our need to know that we can affect people’s lives.
Finally, the temptation of testing God. This one can be either easily related to, or very difficult to relate to, depending on how we think of it. If we think of this temptation as testing God’s word, it can be easy to relate to. We know that God has said that he loves us, so when we act in a way that puts that promise to a test, we are testing God to keep that promise. Yet, if we think of this temptation in another way, it becomes difficult to get our minds around. When the devil tempts Jesus to jump from the pinnacle of the temple, he is in essence, testing Jesus belief and understanding that he was the Son of God. While we are all children of God, what the devil was asking was a bit different. It is easy in retrospect to say that Jesus was the Son of God. That is something that we, as Christians, hold as fundamental to our faith. Yet, this is also one of those times when it becomes helpful to remember the very human side of Christ. Jesus Christ was a human being, in every way that we are human. Which we can take to mean that he dealt with things like doubt. It is this doubt that could make it very difficult to entertain the idea that he was the Son of God. Jesus is just about to begin his public ministry. Shortly, he will be going out into the world and sharing the good news of the gospel. He will bring this news as the Son of God, he needs to be sure he is. He needs to believe with every fiber of his being that he has understood his call correctly. Anything less would be insufficient and would weaken his message. When the devil asks him to jump off the pinnacle of the temple, he is playing to that belief. He is putting the entire ministry of Christ, that which is about to begin, on the table. He is saying, if you are so sure, then jump. Jesus had to be sure he was who he said he was, but the devil is saying, if you honestly believe that, then prove it. In essence, the devil is playing mind games.
These temptations both remind us that at the very outset of his ministry, Jesus knew the road would be rough. They also remind us that, very much like us, Jesus dealt with all of this as a human. He existed in a world that was full of temptation and he had to struggle with that temptation in many of the same ways that we continue to struggle with temptation. It is worth noting that even in Luke’s account this morning that in verse 6 that, “And the devil said to him, “To you I will give their (kingdoms) glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please.” The devil was given the authority of the world. This is not to suggest that God has no authority in the world, but rather that temptation is the way that the devil works in the world. It is in that temptation, that we are each put into situations wherein we are called to make a choice that either brings us closer to God or further away from the source of all-encompassing love.
Temptation is that thing that we, as humans, have dealt with since the very beginning. In so many of the early writing of Christianity we see how our forefathers in the faith dealt with temptation. It is one of those stories I want to bring up this morning.
The year is around 386. The man who would come to be known as Saint Augustine is around 32 years old. The past few years of his life has been a constant inner struggle. He sees himself as a philosopher and has struggled with coming to terms with the faith he has learned from his mother, Monica. Over the past few years, he has joined a group that was seen as heretical by the church. He spent time talking with friends about astrology and other pagan-associated ideologies. He wants to come to faith yet struggles with the idea of how evil exists and where it comes from. If you read the Confessions of St. Augustine, you get a front row seat into this internal struggle. Yet, he finally comes to a faith that is so strong it led many others to a life in the service of Christ as well. I want to just mention how Augustine comes to understand evil, because it ties into the temptation we all deal with daily.
Augustine couldn’t understand how evil could exist in a world that was created by God. He understood God to be totally good and that everything that exists was created by God. So the problem was how evil could exist if God didn’t create that evil. It made no sense. But then, he has a realization. He comes to define evil in a very particular way. For Augustine, evil becomes something that has no substance but it does have a formal existence. In other words, it does exist, but is is not a thing. It is a state of mind, or a frame of thought. What causes this evil to come into being is the disorder of priorities. The priorities that we have in how we choose to love. Augustine understands man to have two wills. One will is of God and one will is of Man. These two wills are in constant struggle for control over behavior. Augustine explains it in this way.
“The enemy had control of my will, and from that had made a chain to bind me fast. From a perverted act of will, desire had grown, and when desire is given satisfaction, habit is forged; and when habit passes unresisted, a compulsive urge sets in: by these close-knit links I was held”...”To set out and arrive at my goal was only a matter of having a will to go: but it meant a wholehearted and undivided act of will, not this stumbling to and fro with a maimed will, wrestling with it as one part rose while the other slipped to the ground.”
Augustine has what we would call a conversion moment in a garden and all of these ideas are swimming around in his head. He had understood his actions to be his will, but when he began to look upon the problem as this struggle between two wills, things start to make more sense. In this struggle, he could see that part of the issue he was having was with control and that depending on God meant losing that control or at least accepting that he didn’t have all the control. He eventually comes to emphasize the experience of the force of habit because he now thought that the experience proved conclusively that change could only happen through processes entirely outside of his control. He writes, “That was all, just not to wish what I wanted, and to want what You (God) wished. but where was my free-will in the gruelling time: from what deep recess was it called-up, at that turning point, in which I bent my neck to Your light yoke.
Augustine sees this struggle of wills to be the heart of his faith because it is in this struggle that the free-willl which God gives man plays out its role. It is in this struggle that the temptation attacks. When we choose the wrong thing, we are in essence, putting our priorities in an order that is different than what God would want. Therefore, the temptation wins and we take a step further away from God. The story of the temptation of Jesus reminds us of this struggle between these two wills that struggle within each of us.
It is here that our faith brings us today. And it is here that we yearn to hear God and to draw closer to him, firm in our belief in his promise that Easter is coming. Frederich Beuchner wrote an arcticle called Whistling in the Dark. I would like to close this morning with a passage from that article.
Buechner writes: In many cultures there is an ancient custom of giving a tenth of each year’s income to some holy use. For Christians, to observe the forty days of Lent is to do the same thing with roughly a tenth of each year’s days. After being baptized by John in the river Jordan, Jesus went off alone into the wilderness where he spent forty days asking himself the question what it meant to be Jesus. During Lent, Christians are supposed to ask one way or another what it means to be themselves. Se we ask, If you had to bet everything you have on whether there is a God or whether there isn’t, which side would get your money and why? When you look at your face in the mirror, what do you see in it that you most like and what do you see in it that you most deplore? If you had only one last message to leave to the handful of people who are most important to you, what would it be? Of all the things you have done in your life, which is the one you would most like to undo? Which is the one that makes you happiest to remember? Is there any person in the world, or any cause, that, if circumstances called for it, you would be willing to die for? If this were the last day of your life, what would you do with it?
To hear yourself try to answer questions like these is to begin to hear something not only of who you are but of both what you are becoming and what you are failing to become. It can be a pretty depressing business all in all, but if sackcloth and ashes are at the start of it, something like Easter may be at the end.
