What A Friend!

(Scriptures: Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7, Psalm 32, Romans 5:12-19 Matthew 4:1-11)

Today is the first Sunday in Lent, those forty days each year in which we follow Jesus on his journey to the cross. It’s a time to shut out the world’s distractions, and focus on Jesus, so that, having been refreshed in our time with Jesus, we are renewed to return to the world to share God’s love through our words and actions. As Jesus spent 40 days alone in the desert, pondering the call he heard from God, so are we to draw apart and consider the calling to which God has called each of us, and the calling to which God has called this faith community called Emanuel Church.

We aren’t given a lot of detail about what Jesus was doing out in the desert. This morning’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel takes place immediately after Jesus’ baptism, when, as John was baptizing him, the spirit came down like a dove, and a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the beloved, in whom I am well pleased.” Then we’re told that the Spirit led him into the desert for forty days, to be tempted by the devil. Matthew’s Gospel brings out parallels between Jesus’ experience and that of Moses, and today’s reading is no exception; in Matthew’s telling, Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness parallel the 40 years of Moses’ and Israel’s wandering in the wilderness – except where Israel and even Moses ultimately fell short, Jesus overcame temptation and remained faithful to God.

Twice, the devil introduces the question, ‘If you are the Son of God….’ After the affirmation of love that Jesus experienced at his baptism, with the voice from heaven calling Jesus God’s Son, the Beloved…now, after Jesus has been out baking in the heat of the desert for 40 days, growing hungrier by the minute, the devil introduces doubt. If you are the Son of God, turn these stones into bread. If you are the Son of God, throw yourself off this mountain so that God will bear you up. If you are the Son of God. If. Are you sure that voice of love you heard at your baptism was God’s voice? Maybe it was wishful thinking. Maybe you dreamed the whole thing. Giving into those doubts, giving into that “if” would lead to distance between Jesus and the Father.

The three temptations themselves – to turn stones into bread, to force God into a display of power, to gain political power at the cost of turning from God – on one level, are outside our experience. They seem like decisions we will never face. After all, I can’t snap my fingers and turn stones into bread, and I suspect you can’t either. And yet, in overcoming all these temptations, Jesus must define what his ministry will be about. Will Jesus use his powers to benefit others, or himself? Will his ministry be about humbly serving those in need, or dazzling others with flashy displays of power? Will Jesus be a Savior, or an earthly dictator? In all these encounters with the devil, Jesus is being tempted to make his ministry smaller than God intends, to make his ministry about himself rather than others. Three times, the devil offers Jesus a chance to save his life, rather than lose it. Three times, the devil offers Jesus an easy short-cut to glory that bypasses the cross.

Our Old Testament reading from Genesis shows the consequence of doubting God’s goodness and trying to take shortcuts to fulfillment. Adam and Eve lived in the Garden, in communion with God, with all their needs met. It was the voice of the serpent that introduced doubts – “Did God say, you cannot eat of any tree in the Garden…..If you eat from the fruit of the forbidden tree, you will not die, but rather your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” They ate, and in their new awareness of their nakedness before God and one another, they hid. Where there had been close communion between God and humans, now there was shame and alienation; humans hid from God.

So, in a sense, our lectionary, by putting the Genesis story of the fall alongside the story of Jesus temptation in the wilderness, underscores that Jesus overcame the temptation that defeated Adam and Eve. In Genesis, in the garden, the tempter succeeded in breaking the communion between God and humankind. In the wilderness, the tempter tried the same thing - tried to introduce doubt and distance and alienation between Jesus and the Father, tried to induce Jesus to bypass the painful way of the cross – but Jesus stood firm.

These are temptations all of us face as individuals, and that we face as the church, the body of Christ. Every one of us goes through wilderness periods in our lives, when the earthly comforts that normally sustain us, are taken away. How will we respond? Will we follow the advice of Job’s wife to “curse God and die?” Will we take shortcuts to try to regain the comfort we once had, or the comfort we would like to have – resorting to morally questionable means, be it cheating clients or cheating on taxes as a shortcut to maintain our financial security, resorting to morally questionable means such as cheating on a spouse or partner as a shortcut to meeting our emotional needs, if our primary relationship has seemingly gone stale. Will we make our faith about meeting our own needs rather than meeting the needs of others?

History records many times when the church has given into the temptation to amass wealth and power while the poor have starved, where the church has played political games in an attempt to assure its own welfare. How about the church of our time? In our day, when the cultural supports of “respectability” that once propped up the church have been taken away, the church faces temptation as well. Will the church – be it our particular congregation, Emanuel Church, or the universal church, the Holy Catholic, Apostolic, big “C” church - risk popularity by standing against oppression, violence, and injustice, by speaking out against our national sin of greed that has created a society where a few hundred people hold more wealth than the poorest third of our neighbors – let alone the poor of other countries - or will we take the safe route of telling people what they want to hear, reassured in our respectability, limiting our denunciation of sin to pointing our fingers at those on the margins that our society scapegoats as sinners, thus building walls around ourselves and buying into bigotry in order to reassure ourselves of our self-righteousness, rather than looking at our own complicity, the part we all play in perpetuating injustice and violence. Will the church challenge our members to grow, or by entertaining them lull them to sleep? Will we as Christians receive the spiritual bread that will sustain us on our journey, that will strengthen us to take on the world, the flesh, and the devil - or will we gorge ourselves on the spiritual junk food that’s out there – and, like fast food restaurants on every major road selling super-duper-humdinger McWhopper burgers that are like a heart attack on a sesame seed bun, you can find spiritual junk food literally everywhere, from the many and various TV and radio preachers and most of the feel-good books in the religion section of many bookstores, spiritual junk food that makes us fat rather than strong, makes us spiritually lazy and sleepy, content to sit back on our couch, safe in our little cocoon, rather than energizing us to love and worship God and love and serve our neighbor. When we hear the voices calling our church to be content to be a little holy huddle, focused on our own survival and, to the extent our resources allow, our own comfort, rather than preaching the Gospel and sharing God’s love with our neighborhood, our city, our country, our world – when we hear the voices of our day calling us to be respectable rather than faithful – in the society of his day, Jesus was absolutely anything but respectable - we can be sure that this is the voice of the tempter, telling us to play it safe and take shortcuts, and not the voice of God.

That’s the bad news. The good news of the Gospel is that, even if we’ve wandered off course, taken shortcuts, compromised our faith, made deals with the devil that have left us estranged from God and neighbor, God does not leave us there. The Psalmist knew what it was to live with the guilt that comes with cutting corners and making deals with the devil - “while I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the summer’s heat.” And we’ve all been there. But the Psalmist doesn’t leave us there. He goes on: “Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not hide my iniquity. I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,’ and you forgave the guilt of my sin.” In the words of the hymn, we have the privilege of taking to the Lord in prayer all our sins and shortcomings. We need not worry about others standing in judgment of us, for the ground is level at the foot of the cross. At the foot of the cross nobody is respectable and nobody is disrespectable. At the foot of the cross we all stand on the same level, as sinners in need of God’s grace. We follow a God always in search of the last, the lost, and the least. We always have the privilege to take it – whatever it is that separates us from God and neighbor, whatever it is that weighs us down and holds us back – we always have the privilege to take it to the Lord in prayer.

John Newton, the former slave trader who wrote the hymn “Amazing Grace,” near the end of his life was heard to say, “My memory is nearly gone, but I remember two things: that I am a great sinner, and that Christ is a great Savior.” In these forty days of Lent, may we never hesitate to come to that great Savior. May we never hesitate to take all that we have and all that we are to the Lord in prayer. Amen.
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Please join us at Emanuel United Church of Christ on Sunday mornings at 10 a.m. We're on Fillmore Street, just off Thompson. www.emanuelphila.org