Pleasant Hill Community Church, UCC

Lent

Stephanie Yeh was a student of brilliant proportions. She aced her course work in electrical engineering and computer science. She would graduate on the honor role of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was ready to enter the working world as a Wall Street analyst. The world would be her oyster ready to be claimed. But before she could claim that oyster she had to pass just one more test to graduate. She would have to swim one hundred yards.

It is true. MIT is one of the few top schools in the United States requiring students to pass a swim test before they graduate. Stephanie, who never did learn how to swim, wondered about the rationale for the test. When asked about it her response was, “Who cares if you can swim?!” In other words, is this test really necessary?

The season of Lent, the forty days from Ash Wednesday to Easter, is a time not only for confession and repentance and reconciliation with God and neighbor; it is also a time of testing. Lent is a time when we read and struggle with the testing of Jesus in the wilderness. While the wilderness story has been around from the beginning, the season of Lent has not been. We might ask along with Stephanie Yeh, “Is this really necessary? Is this Lenten season of testing necessary?”

In her book Home By Another Way , Barbra Brown Taylor writes about the evolution of the Lenten season and why, in fact, it is necessary. She writes:

“Many years after Jesus had not returned as quickly as expected church folks decided there was no contradiction between being comfortable and being Christian. Before long it was hard to pick them out from the population at large. They no longer distinguished themselves by their bold love for one another. They did not get arrested for championing the poor. They blended in. They avoided extremes. They decided to be nice instead of Holy. God moaned out loud. So the church dug into its faith story and it recalled the time --always associated with the number forty -- that Israel, Elijah, and Jesus had spent in the wilderness. These forty year and forty day periods were times of wandering and suffering, times of longing and learning. They were, in fact, times of hunger. So the church announced the Season of Lent. Forty days to cleanse the system, to open our eyes to life without comforts. Forty days to learn what it is like to live by the grace of God alone. Forty days to once again become hungry for life.”

So my sense is that season of Lent is needed now more than ever because the temptations before the church and the near silence within the church indicates by and large the church today continues to be nice rather than holy. Let us look at these temptations before us today and think of ways to perhaps break the silence so that we might once again become the holy people we were meant to be.

In the wilderness narrative in Matthew, we find the devil tempting Jesus with three specific challenges. The first is this: “If you are the son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” The devil is tempting Jesus to display God’s power in order to satisfy his (Jesus’) hunger. Thus the temptation here exists not in doubting God’s son or that Jesus can perform miracles, but the temptation resides in trying to cause Jesus to act at the devil’s behest, to control God through Jesus and through the desire to have Jesus worship him.

Jesus resists the devil out of his own tradition. He quotes Deuteronomy 8:3, but it is part of this text 8:1-3. Look where Jesus is going to dig up his resistance. It says in Deuteronomy 8:

“This entire commandment that I command you today you must diligently observe so that you might live and increase, and go in and occupy the land that I have promised on oath to your ancestors. Remember the long way that the Lord your God has led you in the wilderness, in order to humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commandments. He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes by the mouth of the Lord.”

Jesus’ response from Deuteronomy is not one that ignores human hunger, but it does point to the critical necessity of intertwining both physical and spiritual needs of human beings. God supplied manna to hungry people in a situation that had challenged their trust in their God. It is in the end, the life giving word that insured their long term survival. Jesus cites the verse from Deuteronomy to express his trust in, his dependence on, and obedience to God.

Our temptation in the church is to offer the bread, to do the charity, to be nice and do all of this without at the same time offering the word, to invite people into the faith, to share our holiness, to tell people about Jesus. Think for a moment, when was the last time you told someone of the love of Jesus? The last time that you spoke one on one with a human being in pain and said Jesus loves you?

But that is not all we are saying. It is not just about telling people about the love of Jesus. It is about telling people that Jesus loves all people. That no one is excluded from God’s love. It is about telling people about the Jesus who lives in great tension with the powerful because the powerful do not love all people. It is about telling them about the Jesus who came to turn the world upside down. We must give bread but we must also offer the word.

The second challenge that comes at Jesus from the devil is this. He is taken to the Holy City Jerusalem, the center of all the business and power and politics going on in Jesus’ world. He is placed on top of the temple. The devil says to him, “Jump!, If you are really the son of God, jump! Take the plunge!” The devil quotes Psalm 91:11a, which means half of verse 11. Verse 12 says, “He will command his angels concerning you, and on their hands they will bear you up so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.”

The first thing we learn about this quote from the devil is the devil is a proof texter. He is using the scripture to make his own point. But my question is, what happened to 91:11b? What happened to that half of the verse? 11b says, “to guard you in all your ways.” Psalm 91 is a psalm that celebrates God’s protection of the faithful. The devil perverts the psalm saying that it guarantees God’s protection regardless of human faithfulness. Jesus resists the devil by going back to Deuteronomy again. This time in the sixth chapter where it is written, “Do not put the lord God to the test.”

Now this little piece of scripture is a reference back to Exodus where the Israelites where in their wilderness. They get free from Egypt. They get free from Pharaoh. They are out in the wilderness for about a week until they start complaining. “We are thirsty God! You must have brought us out here to die.” They complain and they moan. Moses, I am sure, is annoyed with them. You brought them out and they are parched. God says, “Go to the rock, whack the rock, and water will come out.” It is interesting that at that place where water comes out from a rock Moses names the place Massa, which means, Is God here with us or not?

It was there where they were testing their God. The devil has misused the scripture by confusing trust in God with a presumption that God is a servant of human requests. Jesus in his resistance says this is not how God works. We cannot ask and beg God for anything we want and expect it to be delivered. Our temptation in the church, what Dietrich Bonheoffer taught us all many years ago, is to offer cheap grace. In our appropriate desire to grow our church we say, come to our church. Ours is a God of love. All is well here and we do not really care how you live the rest of the week. Just make sure your tithe is paid.

The church is always tempted to witness the good news without the cost of discipleship. Jesus says, “Do not put God to the test, because sometimes he is in a bad mood.”

The third challenge to Jesus from the devil is perhaps the most painful for us to hear because it is about kingdoms and nations and their splendors. The devil says if you worship me all of this is going to be yours. Look at that building out there…That pentagon will be yours. That street down there, Wall Street, with its wealth and its gold will be yours. All of this will be yours if you worship me.

What we tend to over look in this scripture is that what the Bible claims is the kingdoms of the world are ruled by the demonic. The world is the realm of everyday political, social, economic, and religious life. The world is created by God and by the objects of God’s purposes but it is claimed by the devil and in need of redemption.

Jesus says, “Away with you Satan. Worship the lord your God and serve only him.” Jesus’ response to the devil in this case is about allegiance. Where do you pledge your allegiance? The temptation of the church is to keep telling people again and again that they can indeed continue to worship God and Caesar, and Jesus says no you can not. Then the scene ends with the five simple words. “Then the devil left him.” Jesus has resisted these challenges, but what has been exposed in the process is the devil has been at work in the world.

Evil is a reality. The devil is at work, often, and in barely noticeable ways at work and subverting the attention of God. Evil is hidden within the structures of the world we inhabit; which means we, like Jesus, are constantly being tested. Lent is our time to prepare again for those tests.

When the students of MIT learn of the swimming test they must pass their reactions vary. Some jump in and pass the test during the first few weeks of life on campus. Others procrastinate, waiting until their final term. Still others in good academic fashion take Swimming 101 and they over think the whole process, trying to get their stroke just perfect.

We, of course, are like those students. Some of us meet the challenges, some of us think too much. We analyze things to the tenth degree and it leaves us immobilized. But Jesus simply waits and prepares. He fasts and he prays. He does not procrastinate. He confronts the tempter when the time is right. He does not over analyze. He uses the right amount of reason and faith to refute the devil.

Intentional preparation and courageous confrontation are the choices which Jesus makes when he is tested. During this Lenten season, as we walk together, as we confront the demons of our lives, as we confront the demons of our world, may these disciplines of faith, the discipline of preparation and the courage of confrontation be close at hand as we walk together. Let us go forward now unto Jerusalem in Jesus name. Amen

 

 

 

2-10-08

Pastor Tom Warren