lent 1
the gospel of luke 4:1-13
for the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, March 11, 2019
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This sermon was originally preached at St. Paul’s House, a Lutheran Life community on March 10, 2019, and was adapted for the LSTC community.
Yesterday was the first Sunday in Lent, a season in our Church year that is specifically focused on renewing our relationship with God. On re-centering ourselves and our lives in the overflowing love and mercy of God. We are given this time as a gift, and as a reminder.
Because we are surrounded by forces that draw our attention away from God. Forces that encourage us to seek power and prestige. That privilege self-reliance over reliance on God and community. That set up systems of wealth and resource hoarding. That alienate us from each other in our shared belovedness, perpetuating abuse. We are made to feel like failures when we aren’t busy, and we are overwhelmed with images and noise and distractions.
This isn’t an exhaustive list – we all have stories about times we couldn’t rest in the presence of God. When we were distracted, or intentionally moved away from God, because the abundant love of God was too much, too vulnerable. The devil’s temptations are easy.
It’s all too easy to say yes when our fears and our social structures reinforce these distractions. Power, wealth, independence – we are taught to covet these things. They are heralded as the point of our finite lives. And they are things that can drive a wedge between us and God, as they are intended to.
But God wants so fervently to be with us that God sends their Holy Child, incarnate in human flesh, to live among us.
And in the flesh, Jesus encounters these same distractions from the devil – temptations to move away from God. Jesus is in an extremely tender position by the time we enter the story. It is forty days into his testing and fasting. And now, after being led by the Holy Spirit to this wilderness place, Jesus is faced with three final tests. These are temptations that challenge Jesus’ sense of self, his relationship to power, and challenge him to claim the way he will live out his baptismal vocation as the Holy Child of God.
The wilderness is an honest space. When I think about wilderness I think about the desert, harsh and unforgiving, yet beautiful and mystical. I think about the depths of the ocean, with sea creatures we have yet to know or name, entire ecosystems that exist with the barest hint of sunshine. I think about Survivor, the reality TV show (that’s still going strong!). Players come in with ideas about how they’ll play the game, but after day 5 of limited food and wilderness conditions, that all falls away.
Wilderness spaces aren’t pretending to be anything they’re not, and require the same of humans who venture into them. Any illusions of power or control are erased in the wilderness. Any illusions of greatness are washed away in the wilderness. Pretense is gone, replaced with our honest selves, and the presence of the Divine.
Jesus responds to the temptations in the wilderness, these tests, by rooting himself firmly in the grace and the Word of God. His responses are from Deuteronomy, and his experience in the wilderness mirrors the ancient stories of Moses and the Israelites, wandering and discerning in the desert after being led to liberation through God. Jesus is not experiencing these tests in a vacuum, and, similar to the coming-of-age-rites in some American Indian and Alaskan Native tribes, this time physically apart from community is meant to prepare Jesus to return to community as his full self.
At the end of his forty-day journey, Jesus declares the kind of Holy Child of God he will be. Rejecting worldly power, rejecting splendor, rejecting the easy (and socially acceptable) temptations from the devil. After forty days of fasting and tests, Jesus is resting in God’s promise, with the Holy Spirit. He claims his identity as the Holy Child of God, a God who is loving and expansive and asks us to exist in wilderness spaces, being no one but who we are.
This rooted-ness in God is what we are being called to in the season of Lent, and throughout our lives. Historically, the practices of this season are fasting, prayer, and almsgiving, practices to re-center ourselves in God. Many people give up harmful vices during Lent, rejecting distractions and temptations. Others add in spiritual practices and recommit to actions of justice and love. Any impulse to compare ourselves to each other is another test from the devil. Personally, I am spending more time on creative projects, and memorizing Psalm 148. That’s all, and that’s enough. Lenten practices should be healthy and faithful for you. This time is a gift, to draw nearer to God, as God draws nearer to us.
The Lenten wilderness is an honest space. It isn’t inherently positive, or negative, but truthful. The devil shows up, but God does too. There is gratitude in wilderness, expansive beauty, suffering, connection, fear. In the desert, after forty days, Jesus is left with nothing but the grace of God, and he holds fast to that promise. He rejects the devil’s temptations, remembering again and again the presence of God. He does this when he is in a tender space – assured of his baptismal vocation as the Holy Child of God, assured that he is starving, and tired, and tested to his limits, and assured that God and the Holy Spirit are with him.
We were reminded on Ash Wednesday that we were formed from dust and will return to dust, always surrounded with God’s love. Like this wilderness, this isn’t a space to fear, although fear can be an instinctual reaction. Like the wilderness, the reality of our mortality is honest. These past few months have been a time of loss for our community. I would invite us to continue to honor that – mourning and grief are holy spaces.
Times of trial and temptation will happen. Even Jesus isn’t exempt from them. There are forces that alienate us from God moving in this world. And God is simply asking us to be no one but who we are, in all the messiness and sacredness that holds. As Jesus was tested and rejected the devil in the wilderness, rooted in God, so too can we reject the forces that divide us from God, trusting the ways that God draws nearer to us – in our hearts, in our prayers, and in each other.
Reed Fowler 