Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri

The Worship of God · February 21, 2010

The First Sunday of Lent

Litany and Confession

From Psalm 91

You who live and abide in the shelter of the Holy One will say to the Lord,

            Our refuge and fortress, our God in whom we trust.

For he will deliver you and give you rest under the shelter of mighty wings.

            Our refuge and fortress, our God in whom we trust.

Let us profess the things that divide our souls:

When you have loved us, we have forgotten you and become distracted and attracted to all else. Bring us back; turn us toward you, that we may know the peace that passes all understanding.

 God is merciful, abounding in steadfast love!

Lord, have mercy upon us.

Christ, have mercy upon us.

Lord, have mercy upon us.

Pastoral Prayer

Jacob Thorne

Gracious God and loving God, we gather today to worship you and to celebrate your presence in your presence in our lives. In the rich gifts of love and friendship, we ask you to help us see your special grace. In the strength and the courage that carry us through difficulties, help us see your healing power. In the offering of our selves, in the letting down of our defenses, in the giving of our lives for others, help us see your kingdom unfolding. 

As we begin our Lenten journey, help us to live the way we want the world to be. As we move through our own wilderness and our own temptations, teach us to love more deeply, to hope more surely, and to turn more readily to you. Remind us all that the season of Lent is a time to hear your voice, to know your touch, and to be moved once again by your Holy Spirit. 

Grasp us, O God, in your firm and steady hand. Shape us in your firm and steady love. Raise us up as your firm and steady people. Make us yours.

Hear us now as together we sing the prayer that your Son taught us…

Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen, Amen.

New Testament Lesson

Luke 4:1-13

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’”

Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdom of the world. And the devil said to him, “To you I will give their glory and all this authority; 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.” Jesus answered him, “It is written,

‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’”

Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written,

            ‘He will command his angels concerning you,

                        to protect you,’

and

            ‘On their hands they will bear you up,

so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’”

Jesus answered him, “It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.

Message

Off Road Vehicle: Temptation to Leave the Road

Tim Carson

And so the journey begins.  As in most journeys, there is a beginning and a destination.  There is packing the bag and putting the one foot in front of the other.  And the trip takes place on a path, a trail, a downhill course, a road.  Maybe there is a map, or navigating by the stars, or finding the way where others have gone before.  Sometimes there is trailblazing and going where no one has ever gone before.  At least there is going where we have never gone before.  Many have competed in the Olympics before, but if it becomes your turn, it’s the first time.

And that’s what we’re on during these 40 days of Lent. We are traveling the road.  It is the great road of Lent and even more the great road of life.  And where does it lead us, this road?  To our true and new selves?  To a deeper reality than we know? To God?  To the way of Jesus?  To a higher way, more commitment, losing ourselves to find ourselves?

In the Jesus story, the road of his destiny compels him to go to Jerusalem where he pours his life out as an offering of pure love. For these 40 days of deep spiritual reflection, we travel along with him and listen to what this tells us. And then there comes the even harder task and that is finding our parallel journey, the tracking of our own destiny and what it means to be faithful on it. The truth is that we’ve already been on the spiritual journey – but are we aware of our traveling?

Every spiritual quest begins with an adult time-out. And I’m coming to believe that our lives are punctuated with a series of these. Call them sabbaticals, time outs, the pause button, the mid-life crisis, dropping out, going away, trekking around the world, selling your house and living on a boat, or going to the wilderness and living like a hermit. When the Bible talks about this, it gets symbolic, because that’s the way the Bible speaks, and the number 40 rises to the fore. The number 40 is the Bible’s favorite number for the place and time between things.

Noah floats around in his ark seeking dry land for how long? 40 days and 40 nights. The children of Israel wander through the wilderness on the way to the Promised Land how long? 40 years. And after his baptism, Jesus heads out to the sticks to play cards with the tempter without so much as a piece of matzo bread for how long? 40 days. They like it, the number 40. It’s the number where you go to end one thing and start another. It’s the number of testing, passage and purification. 40.

Read the Gospel story of Jesus’ number 40 experiences and you notice one thing right off bat: It’s the Spirit that leads him there in the first place. He’s going to encounter the testing by the tester later, but the Spirit sends him. And that’s important to remember. What got us into this place? What does it mean to say that God wounds us? There is a difference between God doing something to us and God leading us to a place where we need to grow, and growth requires suffering. It may not be pleasant, and it may be hard. Maybe the Spirit put us where we are because we need to pass through the number 40 again. It’s happened to me more than once.

Hey, it’s time for you to go to the wilderness again! “Oh, well thanks, Lord. I can’t wait.” 

Why do we need to? Think of it this way: Our lives get so covered over with debris, with stuff, crowded out with the unnecessary, the vast distractions of our inner and outer life, the compulsions that drive us, that sometimes only spiritual shock therapy will do. I like the way that Judy Sorum Brown puts it in her poem, Fire:

What makes a fire burn

is space between the logs,

a breathing space.

Too much of a good thing,

too many logs packed in too tight

can <choke> the flames

almost as surely as a pail of water would.

So building fires

requires attention to the spaces in between,

as much as to the wood.

The wilderness unpacks and restacks us. And that’s a hard thing to do when you think about all the compulsions that normally keep us glued together. We don’t know it, but the ways that we keep grasping and amassing often cut off the spiritual oxygen.

And that’s what the temptations are about. After Jesus has fasted and is at his most vulnerable, then the pressure begins. Isn’t it when we are at our most exhausted, our most vulnerable, when we are at our most wasted, when there is nothing left that the whole cast of characters of our psyche come out on parade?

Jesus’ testing parallels that of his ancestors, the children of Israel, in the wilderness. At the limits of their endurance, they are tempted to forsake God, to stop trusting, to turn back, and to seek out substitutes, imitations, stand-ins for God that make life easier. The same thing, in a different form, happens to Jesus.

Now remember, the character we call Satan – as evolved in Christian tradition – is not the same form known in the Hebrew Scriptures. The Satan (accent on the second syllable) was in no way a competitor for the place and dominion of God. There is no such figure. That’s a later Christian development, the understanding of fallen dark angels that set up competing kingdoms of darkness. No, the Satan was – as in the Genesis story of the Garden of Eden, as in the Book of Job, a tempter, tester, trickster. And the whole point of the Satan was to test the faithfulness of either the virtuous or the person of vast capacity. And Jesus is that.

In this story, Jesus is presented with three tests and the trickster, the Satan, poses them to seem the logical, the attractive choice – which is exactly the point. Our temptations always appear as most attractive options. They often make sense. That’s why they are tests, because they are easily confused with virtue.

Though the order in which these temptations are presented is different in Matthew and Luke (who share a common source for the story), the content is the same: Bread, Temple Jumping and Kingdoms. And every time a temptation comes, Jesus refutes it with a saying from Deuteronomy – out of the wilderness narratives there. He is repeating the story of his ancestors in their wilderness.

The first temptation is to turn stones into bread. What could be more reasonable? You need food and you have the power, why not? What a powerful test of our priorities, values, and commitment. Whenever our security is threatened, when our most basic needs are not met, when the specter of scarcity appears, we are willing to compromise a lot of things.

And that’s why Jesus answers as he does: “Man does not live by bread alone.” That is, our lives do not subsist in our physical needs alone. I would rephrase it, “The lives of spiritual people are not directed by security needs alone.”

Most of us are probably thinking of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. You put your deep emotional needs side by side with your basic security needs like water, food, shelter … what are you going to chose to have met first every time? Right, security. Emotional needs come later. We will shelve our emotional needs, our spiritual needs, and our relational needs. We don’t want to act like we live by bread alone, but the survival instinct is strong.

The second temptation I find the most subtle. The Israelites taught that the virtuous would be protected from calamity by God and even went so far as to say that the angels would save them from falling. They wouldn’t suffer one stone bruise to their heels. So, the tempter says, why not just get up on the high wall of the temple and ski jump off the ramp but with no skis and no snow? And why not? Don’t you believe that the angels will protect the righteous? You see how ingenious is the tempting – he’s using the Scripture (Psalm 91) to convince Jesus it’s just fine.

What Jesus pulls out of his bag is another Scripture. Though the Israelites tested the Lord in their duress, asking for signs and proof, Jesus reminds him that, “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test” (Deuteronomy 6). And here you see it. We shouldn’t be testing God, but God testing us. So often – in especially magical religion, proof-oriented, sign-oriented religion – we are the ones testing God. “O God, if you will just give me a sign, then I could believe.” I can remember saying that when I was about 12-years-old. 

That is sign-based religion. This has the divine-human relationship backwards. And the more grandiose we are about our faith, the more we believe God is at our disposal and not the other way around.

“Dear God, if you really exist, help me nail every triple-toe loop in my free-skate program.” No, no, no. “Dear God, test my trust in you and help me trust you utterly, in everything I do – on the ice or anywhere.” There’s a difference, a real difference here. How do we view God? What shape does our spirituality take? Are we into temple jumping? Who is testing whom?

And the final temptation is the most obvious. And it is the one reserved for those of greatest capacity. You may find that you resonate with one temptation more than another, because I think they speak to us differently at different times. This final temptation is reserved for those with the greatest capacity, those with great strength, and those who have huge potential. It is reserved for those. That would be Jesus. 

Jesus is whisked up to a high mountain with a panoramic view. And the temptation is simple and direct: You want all this? You want control and power? You want to be a king with a kingdom at your disposal? Just say the word, and it’s yours. Uh, but one itsy bitsy caveat: To have it all you’ll have to trade in your soul. It’s a fair trade, this for that. You want the power; you can have it. But at a price.

It is the central theme of Goethe’s Faust. Will Faust trade in the future destiny of his soul in order to obtain special power in the present? Mephistopheles (the trickster, the tempter) wants to know. It’s simple, really. This for that.

You and I know the temptation to make that trade. It may not be all the kingdoms of the world that we are talking about. But the will to power is oh so strong. It is very seductive. And it smacks of self-idolatry, because we want to elevate ourselves above others in order to control them and therefore have ultimate autonomy at the expense of others.  

Sadly, we’ve seen it most recently in the vast greed of the financial-services industry. What humanity has to be sacrificed in order to have all the kingdoms of the world? Whom must we be willing to hurt to have it? “Just bow down and worship me,” says the Satan. “It’s simple, really. You just have to make a trade.”  

Sadly, we’ve witnessed the utter degradation of the environment for the sake of profit and power. “Just bow down and worship me. Really, it’s that simple.”

Sadly, we’ve seen it in churches where networks of the power hungry do anything to control their little ecclesial kingdoms. “Just bow down and worship me,” says the Satan. “No problem. It’s yours, if you are willing to compromise yourself to get it.”

Sadly, we’ve witnessed it throughout the history of the world as one regime, empire, or country extends its power over neighbors, vast domination systems that invade, possess, control, and exploit. And the will to power, the way of might-makes-right endures and is alive and well today.

And Jesus responded as we hope we all might. He said, “You shall worship the Lord your God and serve only Him” (Deuteronomy 6). 

Isn’t it interesting that the antidote to the will to power is right worship; worshipping the Lord your God as opposed to making yourself into a god? If you are involved in right worship, you are not worshipping yourself. The will to power relies on self-worship.

It’s easy to confuse one with the other, isn’t it? Or just desire it more. So how do we choose, how do we allow the Spirit to unstack the firewood and reset it again, so that there is enough air for the fire to breathe?

When you hear the name, Quincy Jones, what do you think of? Probably that he was the music arranger for the likes of Sarah Vaughan, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Ray Charles, and yes, he wrote “Thriller” for Michael Jackson. You might remember that he composed the soundtracks for television and film that included titles like In Cold Blood, The Color Purple, Sanford and Son, and the Bill Cosby Show.

Since that time, Jones has also been a philanthropist, sponsoring home building for Nelson Mandela’s foundation in South Africa.

But what I bet you don’t know is the other Quincy Jones found earlier in his life. Not too long ago, I listened to an interview with him telling about his early years in Chicago and then his family’s move to Washington State. It was a tough time for the young Quincy, and he was struggling with how he could belong and with whom. Unfortunately, he chose the wrong crowd.

One night his hoodlum friends broke into a community center, and they proceeded to ransack and vandalize it. They were messing everything up, breaking windows, creating chaos. In the midst of all this pandemonium, Jones passed by a room with the door standing ajar, and as he pushed it open, he discovered a piano. It must have been some kind of practice room. And Jones said that opening that door and finding that piano instantly changed his life. From that moment on, all of his energies would be channeled in a wholly new direction, and they were.

And I think that’s how it is. We’re in the wilderness, and all the chaos is spinning around us. There is this, that, and the other, and we could choose any of them for all the wrong reasons. And then a door swings open, and there it is, the thing that has been waiting to find us all along. And if we’re ready, and if we are willing to surrender to it, we walk right on in and there is no turning back.

Blessed are those who are led by the Spirit into the wilderness, to live in the number 40 long enough to find the new door. And blessed are those who come to realize that we don’t live by bread alone, and that we don’t do the testing but are the ones who are being tested, and that when it comes down to it, you have to make a choice between all the kingdoms of the world and what they promise and the one thing that is behind the door.

That’s where Jesus’ road led him. And at the end of his fast, when he found himself most vulnerable and tempted by so much, he just walked through the door. And I suppose that’s why the Scripture says that the angels ministered to him. Because sometimes there is little else that will do, even for Jesus.

Thanks be to God. Amen. 

Benediction

And now, may the blessing of God stay with you and keep you as you walk the road of faith. Now and always, Amen.