Sermon for 1 Lent
St. Monica and St. James
March 1, 2020
Matthew 4:1-11
“…and afterward he was famished.” It’s when we are at our lowest, weakest, most vulnerable moments that our faith in God helps us to overcome the forces that would destroy us. We can know this through the Scriptures.
Prayer: 8am simple doxology.
11am: Let us pray: All the faithful make their prayers to you, O God, in times of trouble. May your calming presence be felt in our hearts and your Word spoken in truth and love from my lips. Let this be an acceptable offering in your Holy Name. Amen.
I don’t think it’s an accident that
our Gospel today is focused on temptation.
Lent has started and presumably we
have all made some sort of commitment to either give up a habit, take on a new
life-affirming one, or otherwise make an effort to walk more humbly with our
God. We hear that Jesus spent forty days and forty nights in the wilderness…so
even Jesus is in a Lenten period.
Matthew’s account of Jesus’
temptation paints a vivid picture of the struggle with his accuser (fun fact:
Satan is the Hebrew for accuser or adversary). If we enter deeply into this
Gospel narrative…we might find ourselves being able to see the stones and feel
that ache in the stomach that says, “if only these rocks could become
bread.”
Perhaps we can imagine being at the
highest point of the temple with the wind whipping around us. We might be
filled with a daredevil impulse beckoning us to let ourselves go without
worrying if we’d crash land. Remember: angels will catch us!
Or possibly we can visualize being
on top of that mountain surveying all the land and wealth in the valleys below.
What would it be like to not just be the one-percent…but even richer than a
Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet combined?
I imagine that if Jesus was facing
off with the accuser in the wilderness on his best day, when he was feeling fit
and healthy, he probably would have run logic circles around Satan and twisted
him up into a pretzel with a parable of some kind.
But Matthew doesn’t present us a
Jesus on his most robust day. Hear the words again: “He fasted forty days and
forty nights, and afterward he was famished.”
Famished. Not simply hungry or-as
the Brits might say—peckish.
Famished is more than that. Jesus is
weak, dizzy, parched throat, low blood sugar, starving.
He is completely vulnerable, and he
is alone. What a perfect entry point for the tempter to come in and whisper:
“you’re the Son of God…go ahead: turn those stones into bread so you can eat.”
And yet…even in this diminished
state, Jesus goes back to the Hebrew Scriptures…noting that “one does not live
by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Not only
has he said, “Not today, Satan!”; he returns to the God known through the
Scriptures to summon the strength to resist temptation. And as this scene
progresses…and the pull toward a narcissistic self-obsession…”All these I will
give you if you fall down and worship me!”…the greater the enticements to turn
away God, the more this weakened Jesus was turning back to the One who knew him
best…relying on the word from Scripture to feed him.
I think that’s the real message for
us. During those times when we are feeling tried and tested, and at our
greatest moments of insecurity that’s when the ego will tempt us to believe
that we are invincible, that we don’t need any help, that we have everything
under control.
Think about the destructive and bad
theology behind the message: “God helps those who help themselves”
Really? I don’t think that is what
Jesus was saying in this dialogue with the devil.
“God doesn’t give us more than we can handle.”
No, sometimes the things before
us…whether a personal crisis or ones of a more global nature…are truly more
than we can handle. Certainly, there is a lot in our world that is more
than we can individually handle! Our egos are too frail to sustain us.
What I believe Jesus is showing us
about God is that it’s not our selves and centering on our self
that feeds us, keep us safe in times of trouble, and makes us rich. It is our
realization that our strength, our life, our breath is dependent upon God. And it is God who is love and loves us dearly
in those times when we are at our weakest, most vulnerable and completely famished.
How can we know this is true? Well,
for me…at the moments when I have been the most challenged and even in times
when I am feeling that spring of joy in my step…I have turned to the words of
the psalmist, who seems to be the best Biblical poet and captures the ups and
downs of what it is to be human.
Whether it is phrases such as
“Restore us, O God of Hosts, show us
the light of your countenance and we shall be saved” (Ps.80) or
“Taste and see that the Lord is
good,”(Ps.34)
Reading and sitting with those words
have been the necessary touchstones and the gentle reminders that I am not
alone and that God is with me and isn’t absent from our world.
As we journey through this season of
Lent, we will no doubt face temptation and our egos will prick at us and
persuade us to forget about God and become so self-absorbed as to believe that
we don’t need anybody else. I don’t know what Lenten discipline you’ve
adopted…or if you’ve even thought about adopting one. But I would encourage us
to consider finding a phrase or a line of Scripture that speaks to our soul and
feed on that for these forty days. Keep it somewhere where you can read it and
meditate on it daily. In these troubled times of pandemics and politics…see how
feasting on the Word might give you the strength to carry on.
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