1st
Sunday in Lent – Year A March
1, 2020
Matthew 4:1-11
When I was in sixth grade, I participated in our
church’s confirmation class. Nobody asked me if I wanted to … it was an
expected right of passage. I don’t remember a lot of details – we memorized the
Ten Commandments and the Apostles’ Creed. In some ways, it felt like being a
Christian was just about believing in and following the rules… and anything fun
was not allowed. At the time, it all felt black and white – do this – don’t do
that. The goal was getting into heaven. But as time went on, I realized that
the journey of faith is not that simple.
Now, let’s be clear. I am not saying that rules and
theologies are not important. Or even necessary. Boundaries give our lives
clarity and help us to meet expectations. They keep us healthy and safe. They
keep us in community with one another. But our lives of faith are not defined
by rules of behavior and biblical interpretation alone. A life of faith is also
about relationship – with God and one another.
As I have grown in faith and felt called to serve the
church, I envisioned a Confirmation journey that focuses less on following
complicated rules and more about how we become the new creations in Christ. And
not just for them, but for all of us. Distilled to the sharpest point, we are
called to live out these two rules: love God with everything we have, and love
others in exactly the same way.
Today’s lessons are complicated and deep. The Genesis
reading is well known. If your bible has paragraph headings, this section would
probably be labeled THE FALL. As Christians, we associate the actions of Adam
and Eve, and the punishment of being driven out of the garden, as a reason for
needing Jesus, who brings wholeness and balance back to our lives, and well
reflected in the epistle lesson for today. But if you ask a Jewish rabbi to
preach on this passage, and he or she will not have the same interpretation as
we are used to hearing.
Dr. Stanley Hauerwas has been thinking about Christian
ethics since he was a Texas farm boy in the 1960’s. He has studied all of the
great Christian theologians, and taught generations of Christian teachers and
preachers in the last 40 years. He is a layperson, not ordained, but early on
felt called to dedicate his life to understanding how the Jesus story informs
the ways we live and act in the world. Recently, he heard a rabbi talking about
this passage, and as he prepared to do the same, he took some of her insights
to heart.
As he contemplated the conversations and explanations
between the story’s principle characters, he realized that Eve did what we
often do - she reframed the story about the tree in the garden’s center and its
fruit to fit the narrative that she believed, not the one that recorded for us
in earlier verses.
In the story, God told Adam and Eve that they could
not eat from the tree in the middle of the garden – everything else was fair
game. But when the serpent asked her about the tree, Eve added something new…
she said that God has forbidden them to even touch the fruit, or they would
die. It’s a little disconcerting to know that the serpent replied correctly - touching
the fruit would not kill them. And by exploiting the lie in Eve’s new version
of the story, the serpent, wanting to prove her wrong, convinced her to eat the
fruit – and to share it with Adam.
The snake was right. They did not die. But this
experience did send them down a new part, and death became a new preoccupation
in their lives.[i]
And a new conflict arises. The garden was created to give life. This life was
anchored in trust of the creator who made the world. Adam and Eve’s ouster from
the garden wasn’t just because they disobeyed God. Their disobedience was
rooted in their lack of trust that God had a better plan.
And this got me to thinking. What if the original sin
was not disobedience but legalism – a preoccupation with making faith about
rules and regulations as a way of earning God’s love, instead of seeing faith
as the path to relationship with God? Does that change the way we think about the
relationship between sin and faith? Does it make a difference in the way we
live? Does it change the way we think about who is in and who is out of the
Kingdom of God?
The Hebrew Bible passage and the gospel passage have
something else in common. Temptation! Eve is tempted by the serpent and gives
in, without much argument. But Jesus’ experience was more complicated and
instructional. Instead of thinking of it as a negative experience, maybe we
should think about how it defines all that is to come.
First, Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness,
but he was not abandoned there. Wild and barren, perhaps, but not a place
devoid of God’s presence. Immediately after his baptism, this was the place where
Jesus became tuned to what relationship with God is all about. We think of the
wilderness as a place of weakness. But that wasn’t true for Jesus either. His
time away gave him what he needed to combat the rational, biblical arguments
that Satan would use in trying to turn him away from God.
When bad stuff happens, good people of faith will sometimes
ask, “Where was God?” We worry that trouble or change happens outside of God’s grace.
But I think about some of those dark or tempting times, and that’s where my
trust in God really took hold. In the wilderness, we learn more about who God
is AND who we are. In an increasingly uncertain world, I am sure this is a good
thing.
Second, Jesus’ temptations are our temptations.[ii] Seeing what Jesus experienced
connects us to Jesus’ humanity. And understanding how Jesus reacted can teach
us how to respond when we are in our own wilderness experiences.
Through Jesus:
* We are called to refuse to use power to make our needs more important than the needs of
others. The first temptation presented to Jesus was to see if he would put
his own needs first. Jesus had been without food and drink for 40 days (which is
bible-speak for a really long time). Think about the Israelites wandering in
the wilderness for 40 years. It didn’t take long for them to use up whatever
provisions they took for themselves. And so, God provided manna to be collected
for their daily needs. If they tried to save some for another day, it spoiled
so that they couldn’t eat it. It was an exercise in learning to trust that God will
provide. It’s one of the hardest lessons to learn: our own survival does not
outweigh the call to follow and trust that God will meet our true needs.
* We are called to refuse
to test God or use God’s power in direct opposition of the way it was intended.
Imagine being offered the power to do and have whatever you want. The second
temptation tested Jesus’ willingness to use the power he had to become the kind
of Messiah that the Jews were expecting…not just powerful, but also willing to
use that power to serve his own spiritual and political needs. Even craftier,
Satan used the words of Psalm 91 to “prove” that this was what God intended for
the Messiah. Instead, Jesus refused to give into the power that was rightfully
his. Using scripture in rebuttal, he reminds us that we are not to put God to
the test. This one is very hard, because testing boundaries is what helps us
grow. But it’s also important to realize that there are consequences that may
not be experienced until much later, changing our lives forever.
* We are called to refuse
use God’s power to gain power for ourselves. Satan’s last temptation was to
try to coax Jesus into raising up an army – It’s the same thing that some of
the religious leaders wanted from Jesus, too. But Jesus refused, knowing power
can corrupt before we even realize it’s happening.
Look around. The world is conflict driven. Our lives
are often defined by wars, conflicts, police actions and revolutions. And when
we gain peace, new conflicts arise, and the world order once again rearranged. And
if there is not conflict around us, some might be tempted to start something,
just because they can. Every day, the temptation to take power feels closer than
ever before, and it will ruin us if we let it. [iii]
Lastly, the passage from Romans teaches us that Jesus
takes away sin’s power over us. We can’t resist by ourselves. Adam and Eve’s
bad choice – believing that they could be on the same level as God – touched
everyone who came after them. But Jesus’ faithfulness to God’s promises gives
us access to the life that God always intended for us. The
good news is this: the power of God in Christ is stronger than the power of
Satan. The power of good always triumphs over the power of evil, and the power
of life—of resurrection—overturns the power of death and destruction every single
time, even if we can’t see it in the here and now.
Resisting temptation is not easy… in fact, it often brings
us to places where we did not expect to be. But I am convinced that when our
comfort and routine are stripped away, we experience the most growth. And when
we stop listening to the voice that says, “You failed,” and listen instead to
the one that says, “You were faithful,” we become the people God created us to
be.[iv] Our freedom comes in our
relationship with Christ. This is not freedom to do whatever we want, is
instead the desire and the will for joyful obedience to God, and satisfaction
in living that life.[v]
Jesus gives us a model for facing every day
temptations. It asks us to understand who God is, how much God loves us, and
how God calls us to live. The season of Lent offers us time to dive deeper,
exploring what it means to live out our baptismal promises. Our baptisms are
not just defined by what we understand about Jesus, but also how we have become
part of a bigger family – the Church – held accountable not just to God, but
also to one another. Life in Christ is both/and, not either/or.[vi]
I’m always interested
in what our sister denominations are doing to keep the baptismal promises
relevant, and found that the ELCA has developed a series of curricula to teach
these principals on a continuing basis. People are called to “put their faith
into practice” by living out the promises contained in the Baptismal liturgy in
these ways:
In that promise, we
pledge as members of the body of Christ through baptism to:
- live among God’s faithful people
- hear the word of God and share in the Lord’s supper
- proclaim the good news of God in Christ through word and deed
- serve all people following the example of Jesus
- strive for justice and peace in all the earth.[vii]
The life of faith is filled with action words… live –
hear – share – proclaim – serve – strive… words that get us out of our heads
and ask us to live from our hearts, with hands and feet taking us into the
world.
In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy
Spirit!
Amen.
[i] Podcast: Crackers and Grape Juice, Lent 1, Year A –
Teer Hardy and Stanley Hauerwas, February 27, 2017. http://crackersandgrapejuice.com/lent-1-lent-year-a-legalism-is-the-original-sin/
[ii] First Sunday in Lent | Renounce — Preaching Notes,
Dawn Chesser
[iii] Charles Campbell, The Word before the Powers: An Ethic
of Preaching. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002., 44-48
[iv] Brian Lowery, We are called to be Faithful, Not
Successful, Christianity Today, March 2017
[v] James Howell, What can we say come March 5? Lent 1, http://jameshowellsweeklypreachingnotions.blogspot.com/
