“When
Temptation Comes”
Matthew
4:1-11
First
Presbyterian
The
Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
March
13, 2011
Lent
1
Sacrament
of Holy Communion
I want to encourage us this year to
think of the season of Lent as a church retreat.
I have participated in dozens of church retreats across the years, many
of them with youth of the churches I have served.
They have been special times, set-apart times, when we could focus on
some aspect of our lives as Christians and discover how to live our faith more
deeply and authentically.
On this Lenten church retreat, we’ll
not be going away and bunking in rustic cabins and making s’mores around a
campfire and taking cold showers. That
might be fun, or not, but the retreat I have in mind comes from disciplining
ourselves to think about and to ponder more than we usually do the life and
lives we are living as the risen body of Christ in the world, as the church,
both in its corporate incarnation – all of us together – and individually as
members of it.
Lent often has about it a somber sense.
But I want to encourage another tone and tenor for our retreat.
While we often have called Lent a “penitential” season – a time of
repentance and penance – and marked it out with the color purple, I want to
suggest an alternate view. In the
time of Jesus, purple was a very rare dye and thus very expensive.
Nowadays, we are used to being able to get any color we want because most
of our dyes are synthetic. But in
those days dyes were natural. The
dye for purple was made from a juice found in minuscule quantities in shellfish.
It took thousands of crustaceans to make a yard or two of purple.
Therefore, it often was associated with royalty since only the very
wealthy could afford it. It was a
statement of elevated status.
So what if we understood that purple as
the color for Lent means to signify our royal nature in the eyes of God?
I think such an interpretation is reasonable for remember how Peter wrote
to the Christians in the first of his pastoral letters that is preserved in the
New Testament? He said, “You
are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people,
in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of
darkness into his marvelous light.”
So, on our Lenten church retreat, I
would propose that we see with the eyes of our minds and hearts our
divinely-decreed royal status that reminds us of who we really are, to whom we
first of all belong, and the high standard to which our words and deeds and
spirits are called. To say it
another way, the Lenten retreat is a time for the church to remember the appeal
to us of Love to love. If I had
thought about it in time, I would have gone to the fabric store and procured for
each of you a swatch of purple that you could put in your home to remind you of
your regal stature in God’s eyes and of the noble life we are called to live
as God lives in us and through us. Maybe
you will want to do that for yourself, to find a piece of purple and put it in a
prominent place during these Lenten weeks of our church retreat.
The Lenten retreat is not so much a
time for gloomy introspection or morose circumspection as it is an opportunity
to grapple with the ways that we are tempted to back away from the primacy of
God in our lives. Lent is not about
shame and judgment and self-flagellation but rather, as we live toward Easter, a
deepening awareness of the presence of the Christ of God in our lives and our
life together and what that means for us.
Our gospel reading for the first Sunday
of our retreat is the account of the temptations faced by Jesus as he was being
prepared by God for his public ministry. As
disciples, followers, and beloved ones of God, similar temptations come to us in
our lives. It is tempting for us to
put God on the back burner while we take care of our seemingly more immediate
needs first. Jesus, having fasted
for forty days and forty nights, was famished and the tempter said to him, “If
you have the power of God in you, command these stones to become bread.”
Can you imagine the faith and maturity it took for Jesus to answer, “It
is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes
from the mouth of God’”? Jesus
knew that if we cater to what we think to be our pressing needs first, we might
well become so satiated or distracted by them that our deepest need, our need
for God, could get starved or stiffed.
There are many things in our lives
that, like bread – both the white kind and the green – are good and
necessary, and thus we get tempted to make them the primary pursuits of our
lives and God gets pushed to the background or the margins of our lives.
When we get the things we think we “really need,” then, we tell
ourselves, then we shall tend to God,
as if a relationship with God is a luxury and not our deepest necessity.
But since we do not live by bread alone, but by
every word that comes from the mouth of God, our Lenten retreat raises the
question for us of how well we know the word of God, how deeply we let it dwell
in us. Do we, do you hunger for the
word of God in your life as much as a good meal or a good portfolio?
Do you spend as much time with the scripture as with the stock market or
the sports page? Do you pray as much
as you play?
Again, the purpose of the Lenten
retreat is not to scold or to induce guilt in us, but simply to remind ourselves
what amazing treasure we are given by God as children of God and to encourage us
to avail ourselves of it.
The next temptation was for Jesus to
create some theological and ecclesiastical excitement by hurling himself down
from the pinnacle of the temple since, the tempter said, scripture promised that
God’s angels would keep him safe. Imagine
the crowds he could attract. Step
right up. Step right up.
See the Son of God leap from the top of the temple.
But Jesus answered that he would not and we are not to put God to the
test. God is not a sideshow to
distract us from our boredom. God is
not the ringmaster of a sacred circus. God
is not a tabloid headline. Jesus did
not use God to draw attention to himself. Rather,
he prepared himself patiently and persistently to be used by God.
During our Lenten retreat, it might be well to ask ourselves if we use
God to draw attention to and to serve our positions and purposes or if we are
more and more allowing ourselves to be used by God.
Finally, Jesus was shown all the
kingdoms of the world. He saw their
splendor but also their squalor. He
saw the grinding poverty and the ruthless tyranny, the abounding inequity,
injustice, and poverty. He was told
by the tempter that he could have them all, all the kingdoms of the world, in
exchange for glorifying him, a small price to pay, the tempter said, for the
chance to make things better for so many. What’ll
it hurt, he asked, to give me God’s place if you still can do God’s work?
But Jesus knew the futility of trying to do God’s work divorced from
God. Like a battery that seems to
work well for a while but, disconnected from its charging source, eventually
runs down and out, life and ministry severed from their Source necessarily
weaken and wane.
Worship, Jesus said, is our charging
source. To be sure, worship might
seem to be inefficient or even irrelevant in the face of the world’s great
needs, and ours. How can singing a
hymn, listening to a passage of scripture and a sermon, eating a cube of bread
and drinking a thimbleful of wine possibly make any
significant difference in the world or even be justified when there is so
much work to do and so many wrongs to be righted?
Isn’t it enough to be spiritual without being religious and isn’t it
enough to be a good person and to do good works?
No and no.
Not in the divine economy. Not
in the way that God has chosen to work in the world and in us.
Worship may seem a slow and ineffective way in the world and thus we are
all the time tempted to bypass it in favor of other good things that seem more
immediately important or gratifying to us. But
worship is where and how the world gets transmuted, transfigured, and
transformed because it is where and how we get transmuted, transfigured, and
transformed, even when we are not fully aware of it.
As we begin our Lenten retreat this
year both as the body of Christ together and individually as members of it,
perhaps as first order consideration we could become aware of the temptations
that come to us. Two things are
almost universally true about temptations. They
come disguised as apparently good things. We
are not usually tempted by things we can flat out see are bad in themselves or
bad for us. Temptations have a way
of cloaking themselves in garb that seems or sounds good and right.
And, second, they usually press or pressure us for immediate response or
action, not wanting us to have the chance to think things through or to take the
long view.
Our gospel reading today tells of
Jesus’ own “Lenten retreat” that prepared him to face the trials and
temptations that surely would come to him. Led
by the same Spirit that led Jesus, let us embark today on ours so that we may
come to live more truly and fully into our royal and regal lives as children of
God, for the sake of the whole world and for ours.
Amen.
Copyright
© 2011 First Presbyterian Church