I’m sure by now many of you have heard the news – our church was broken into
early Monday morning. Four middle school boys pushed an air conditioner in one
of our daycare room windows and got into the daycare through that window.
They went around the first floor of the education wing, banging on locked doors,
or doors they assumed were locked. They took some CD players and some matchbox
cars. They stole some soda and some yogurt from the daycare refrigerator.
When I got up on Monday morning, my day off, I checked my cell phone, which I
keep on silent, and it had all kinds of calls, mostly from the daycare. So I
called Debbie the daycare director and she told me what had happened.
My mind quickly reverted to the time in December 2002 when our church was broken
into by a young man looking for goods that he could sell to buy drugs. I was
younger and less experienced at that time. I was unprepared for the kind of
damage he did to our building. I was unprepared for the kind of media attention
we received: Pastor George and I were frequently on TV talking to reporters.
I did the best I could in the situation, but I remember being very stressed
about the way the church was being depicted by the media. It’s not the media’s
fault. It’s that George and I had different approaches to handling media in this
kind of situation, and we didn’t realize those differences until we were forced
to by the reality of this situation.
So this time I decided I wasn’t going to make the same mistakes that I did
before. After talking with Kim I determined that there really was no need for me
to come in and talk to the police. Lamar had already taken care of the building
situation. Nothing of ours was taken.
I didn’t stress. I went about my business. I reassured Debbie that the building
was still safe and that this was probably just a couple of under-parented youths
who thought it would be funny to break into a church.
Sure enough, the police did their detective work correctly. While they were
questioning some youths who were picked up for something else, they noted the
shoeprints they found matched one of the boys’ shoes. The officer asked real
nice whether or not they had broken into the church and the boys said they did.
The daycare got their CD players back, and they even got their matchbox cars
back. Now if you know me, this way of handling the situation is a real break
with my past. Normally I’m a complete control freak who stresses over every
detail and agonizes over how the community is going to perceive our church when
it hears about something like this.
I feel like I succeeded where I had stumbled in the past. I was able to navigate
easily through the pitfalls that had tripped me up the last time. Hopefully this
means I learned something.
Have you ever had an experience like that? A time when you had the opportunity
to succeed in a situation where you had previously failed? Or maybe you had the
opportunity to handle something correctly after watching someone else handle the
same thing poorly.
That’s the kind of approach I want to take to this story of Jesus and his
temptation in the desert. Luke wants us to see that Jesus succeeded where the
people of Israel had failed in the past. They were God’s chosen people, but he
was the Son of God. I’ll explain a little more about what that means in a bit.
This extended version of the story of Jesus’ temptation is usually the scripture
we preachers preach on during the first Sunday of Lent. It reminds us that Lent
is a time for getting back to the basics of our faith and asking ourselves what
kind of followers of Jesus we want to be.
This story takes place before the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. Luke has already
explained to us how Jesus can be called Son of God. In Luke he is born when God
causes an unwed mother to become pregnant. She then marries Joseph, who
apparently raises Jesus as his own son.
Luke also wants to stress Jesus’ humanity, rather than just focusing on Jesus’
status as God’s divine Son. What better way to do that than to write out Jesus’
family tree. Luke traces Joseph’s genealogy back through David and Abraham all
the way back to Adam. Luke ends the genealogy by referring to Adam as “Son of
God.”
Adam is a Son of God in that he was created directly by God’s hand. But he isn’t
born of God the way Jesus was in Luke. So the question we have to keep in mind
as we read this passage is: “What kind of Son of God is Jesus going to be?”
Traditionally the King of Israel was considered to be God’s own son. Psalm 2,
which was probably used at coronations refers to the king as “my son” saying
“Today I have given birth to you.” As a son was thought to represent his father,
so the king was thought to represent God to the people. Obviously some kings
represented God more faithfully than others.
Jesus also came to bring God’s kingdom to earth in Luke, but it was not an
earthly kingdom with structures of power and territory to defend and taxes to
collect and armies to command. Jesus, the Son of God who represented God in this
kingdom, would pay taxes to an earthly king. He would be rejected by earthly
rulers.
He did not command an army or defend territory. He taught a group of random
people to go out into their community and announce God’s favor, heal the sick,
and cast out demons from people who were possessed. In payment for all his
troubles he ended up being executed by the Roman army.
For him, that’s what it meant to be the Son of God. Anyone who wanted to be a
part of that kingdom had to expect the same for themselves. Like we said last
week, it wasn’t glorious, but it reflected God’s own glory.
But Jesus would succeed where earlier kings had failed. Their power would often
corrupt them to where they allowed and even perpetrated injustice on their own
subjects. They often misused their armies’ resources. And they frequently
abandoned their God to start worshipping the gods of other nations.
As a new kind of Son of God, Jesus wouldn’t do those things. He took a journey
into the desert, reminiscent of the journey the Israelites took after leaving
Egypt to go to the Promised Land. As you might recall, the trip took a little
longer than it should have.
They were supposed to have marched right into the Promised Land. But because of
their lack of faith in God the trip took forty years. Jesus also went into the
desert, and his time there was forty days.
While the Israelites were in the desert they complained about not having enough
food to eat, even though God had already provided them with bread and meat and
water. So after Jesus was good and hungry, the Devil says to Jesus, “Hey there’s
no need to be hungry. You’re the Son of God. Turn these stones into bread.”
Jesus responds by affirming that as the Son of God, his life is entirely
dependent on God’s own goodness, not on his own power. He reminds himself of
Moses’ words to the Israelites not to lose sight of their need for God and their
faith in God’s providence. In the situation where the Israelites doubted God,
Jesus kept his faith in God and didn’t let his hunger rattle him.
The second temptation Jesus endures in Luke is that the devil takes Jesus up to
a high vantage point, to where he could see all the kingdoms of the world at the
same time. Remember that this was written at a time when folks believed that the
world was flat. So if you got high enough you could see the entire world.
The devil claims that he has been given power over the entire world. Now that
doesn’t sound right. We would tend to think that God has power over the world
and that God just tolerates what the devil does.
But Luke’s mindset is that the devil had power over the world and that Jesus
came to announce God’s intention to take the place over again. So in essence,
the devil is offering to make Jesus’ job easier if he will just worship the
devil.
Sounds crazy, right? Even if it might make Jesus’ job easier, there’s no way
that as the Son of God he’s going to acknowledge someone else as God. Jesus
again quotes the words of Moses from Deuteronomy.
Moses reminded the people that they had this bad habit of starting to follow
other religions when they came into contact with people who followed other
religions. This habit got them into a lot of trouble with God. Moses reminded
them not to start following other religions when they got into the Promised
Land.
Jesus remembered those words and reassured himself that he wasn’t going to make
the same mistake the Israelites made. He wasn’t about to start calling someone
else God.
The last temptation Jesus endured in Luke was the temptation to show himself and
everyone else in Jerusalem that he was the Son of God. The devil took him to
this high point of the temple building in Jerusalem and said to him, “Take a
dive off this building. God would never let you hurt yourself. You’re the Son of
God.” The devil even quoted from Psalm 91 to support his claim.
Jesus again remembered the words of Moses to the Israelites as the prepared to
enter the Promised Land. Moses reminded the people not to start disobeying God
and see if God would do anything about it. Because in their history, God usually
did do something about it.
Moses told them not to test God. The devil was asking Jesus to do the same
thing: put yourself in harm’s way and see if God will save you. Certainly God
would send angels to save God’s own Son.
Jesus said, “No, I know better than to test God.” At this point the devil leaves
him alone and waits for another chance to try to sabotage Jesus’ work for the
kingdom of God.
Now there are a lot of things we could say about this passage and a lot of truth
can be gleaned from it. But this morning I want to focus on Jesus’ intention to
avoid making the same mistakes his people had made in the past.
Luke’s message in this passage is that Jesus succeeded in remaining faithful to
God in a situation where his ancestors had failed to remain faithful. He learned
from their mistakes and steered clear of them in his own life.
When we tend to talk about avoiding temptation in our own lives, the
conversation usually revolves around wrestling with bad habits and tendencies
that we’ve given into in the past.
The conversation is usually couched in terms of us using our will power to avoid
things we know are wrong, even though part of us really wants to do them anyway.
And of course our devotion to God is in question if we give in to a particular
temptation.
A favorite of the church is sexual temptation. We are sexual beings and we are
constantly at odds with our desires to do things that the Bible says are wrong.
If you are a good, faithful Christian you use every resource available to you to
resist that temptation: prayer, Bible reading, help from other Christians
wrestling with the same temptation, outside activities to distract you, etc.
If you are successful in resisting those temptations, you are obviously serious
about your faith and have clearly given God control over your life. If you screw
up, you are obviously not serious about your faith and have not give God control
over your life.
There certainly is forgiveness, but it only goes so far. After all, why would
God want to forgive someone who is almost certainly going to make the same
mistake over and over? The end result is that many folks feel like complete
failures in God’s eyes.
And there is an incentive not to talk about your weaknesses at church because
you will look like a failure to the folks at church and they may decide to limit
your participation in the life of the church until you can stop sinning forever.
The way we’ve talked about temptation has set people up for failure. It leaves
people feeling depressed and unworthy. And it tends to completely ignore most of
what we’ve learned about psychology, family dynamics, and brain chemistry in the
past 100 years.
In my mind the conversation about temptation and sin faith needs to be talked
about in very different terms. If I’ve learned anything through my own faith
experience, it’s that becoming more godly is a life-long process of making
mistakes, and evaluating and learning from those mistakes.
Jesus wasn’t on his own out there in the desert. He had the experiences of his
ancestors to draw from. He had witnessed the mistakes of others. He was aware of
the consequences of their actions. He was determined not to make those mistakes
again.
The longer you live and the more you reflect on the Christian life, the more you
realize that our life-long struggle with sin and injustice, our battles with our
own desires to do what we know is wrong, those are not a set of wins and losses.
They are a process of becoming godlier.
Sometimes we do well and sometimes we do poorly. But like Jesus we are always
looking to learn from our mistakes and the mistakes of others.
When you look at it this way, then we can affirm that we’re not saved because we
resist the temptation to do bad things. We’re saved by God’s grace, and we
resist temptation because we’ve been given grace, not because we still want to
keep trying to earn it.
Nora Gallagher, a writer and a layperson licensed to preach by the Episcopal
Bishop of Los Angeles connects Jesus’ temptations and our upcoming journey
through Lent in this way: “The work of Lent is to rewrite the story by enlarging
our capacity to take in the parts that we always want to leave out: the parts
that aren’t so pretty, that make us less heroic but more real.
When we want to be like someone else, we have ot ask ourselves, “If I had what
she has, what I would be? Her. Not me. If I was famous I would be: still me,
only famous, with another whole set of problems.
If I met a new partner then I would be? Happy, for awhile, and then he, too,
would probably neglect to pick up the towels in the bathroom. I make light of
it, but we know how much we have to accept about ourselves, all the hard truths,
that will cause us to enlarge our own humanity, and write a new, and I would
say, a better, story.
In Lent, accepting the ashes of our vulnerability to temptation will enlarge our
capacity to suffer. And, of course, with that work will come an enlarged
capacity for joy.”
There is no joy in coming to terms with our own limits and weaknesses. IT is no
fun to admit that we are tempted and that we are liable to give in to temptation
now and then, or maybe even more frequently.
The joy is in learning from our mistakes, becoming a better person, moving on in
the process, accepting God’s grace in our lives, and giving ourselves some
grace.
The journey of Lent is forty days, as was the time of Jesus’ temptation. We will
be tempted to abandon the journey and do something a little more exciting. But
we’ve all learned over the years that you learn best how to be godly by staying
the course, making adjustments, and doing it better the next time. And that next
time is now.