Ash Wednesday Sermon: "The Morningstar"

Luke 4:1-13

1 Jesus returned from the Jordan River full of the Holy Spirit, and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness. 2 There he was tempted for forty days by the devil. He ate nothing during those days and afterward Jesus was starving. 3 The devil said to him, “Since you are God’s Son, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.”
4 Jesus replied, “It’s written, People won’t live only by bread.”[a]

5 Next the devil led him to a high place and showed him in a single instant all the kingdoms of the world. 6 The devil said, “I will give you this whole domain and the glory of all these kingdoms. It’s been entrusted to me and I can give it to anyone I want. 7 Therefore, if you will worship me, it will all be yours.”

8 Jesus answered, “It’s written, You will worship the Lord your God and serve only him.”[b]

9 The devil brought him into Jerusalem and stood him at the highest point of the temple. He said to him, “Since you are God’s Son, throw yourself down from here; 10 for it’s written: He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you 11 and they will take you up in their hands so that you won’t hit your foot on a stone.[c]”

12 Jesus answered, “It’s been said, Don’t test the Lord your God.”[d] 13 After finishing every temptation, the devil departed from him until the next opportunity. (CEB)

"The Morningstar"

The Reverend Lillian Daniel, an immensely talented pastor in the United Church of Christ and a Christian visionary in her own right, writes in a book on pastoral ministry that she co-authored, called “This Odd and Wondrous Calling,” about her experience as a pastoral intern at a parish while in seminary. She says: “I remember sitting at the back of the sanctuary, reviewing my notes for my very first seminary-intern sermon. It was to be a mighty word from god that would correct all the hypocrisy, greed, and faithlessness of the local church that was, nonetheless, supporting my education as they had supported that of so many others. As I mustered my courage to sock it to them, I overheard one woman lean across her walker and whisper loudly to her pew mate, “Ah, our new intern is preaching. I see it’s time for our annual scolding.” Later, I would pastor a church near that very divinity school, and hear for myself a few annual scoldings.”

Now, we have no seminary intern here to deliver us our annual scoldings—you just have me! And it would be all too easy to dismiss Ash Wednesday as the day when the parish pastor administers said annual scolding. After all, we have come to a place in the life of the church—the big church, not just our parish, but the entire church—where it is easier to either preach exclusively about God’s love or exclusively about God’s wrath. God is either your chummy pal who you could always shoot some pinochle with, or God is this perpetually infuriated son-of-a-gun with serious anger management issues. There is no in between. And those polarities are appealing to people—they are simple, easy to remember, and Scriptural in the sense that in Revelation, God says to us that because we are neither cold nor hot, that we are lukewarm, He will spit us out of His mouth. So if our faith is in a God who is not lukewarm, maybe that lukewarm God will not spit us out of His church? But…no, that cannot be it, either. The truth is, honestly, that I think many, perhaps most, churches are guilty of idolatry in the basest, most fundamental sense of the term—they have gone and made God in their own image, rather than the other way around, of trying to craft themselves in God’s image. Which is perhaps the most profound sin of all…after all, the very first two commandments of the Ten Commandments are to have no other Gods before Yahweh, and to not make for ourselves any idol or graven image. In trying to make God like us, we violate both commandments.

The temptation in the wilderness, the story in Luke, and in Mark, and in Matthew, thought not in John, is, then, the opportunity for Jesus try to create God in His own image as well. The tempter, Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub, whatever you want to call him, appears, and tries again and again and again to goad Jesus into using His Godlike powers for selfish purposes. The things Jesus is asked to do, to turn stones into bread, to call upon angels to save lives, these are the powers of God in the Old Testament, the God who sends manna to the Israelites on Sinai, and who sends down the chariot of fire to save Elijah from earthly death. What Jesus is being asked to do in the wilderness is to play God, to take on the role of the Father who has, for the moment, left Him in the wilderness. The first time that Jesus is forsaken, to use Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s language, is not upon the Cross, it is here, at the very beginning of His ministry. Here, in the wilderness.

And we are still at the very beginning of our ministry together. This venerable church is nearly 85 years old, but our ministry, the ministry of you and me, is barely six months old, still just an infant. We are in the wilderness together, we are in the beginning of ministry together, and so we, too, must resist the goading and taunting of evil to try to play God. We must take the high road.

And it is because of our own circumstances together, of being in the wilderness together, that I actually prefer to use a different title for the tempter, one that is not used as often—The Morningstar. In astrology, traditionally this is Venus, the planet named after the Roman goddess of temptation, but that is not why I find the name appropriate. I find it appropriate because Venus appears in the sky in the mornings—hence her other name. No, the name of the Morningstar is appropriate because the Latin name of Lucifer, when translated into English, literally means “the light bearer.” And that is the core of evil’s power, that it offers to us the light of false comfort and hollow hopes. We may find short term solace in the harm we do to our fellow human beings, by denying their humanity, by ignoring their needs and pains and poverties. All of those things may make us feel better about ourselves, but that is us giving into the temptation that cruelty and evil provides, that is the equivalent of us being goaded into trying to turn stones into bread.

The ultimate irony of this name, Lucifer, actually comes from the 14th chapter of Isaiah, where the king of Babylon is referred to in Hebrew as “Helel,” which roughly translates into English as the “Shining One,” and many translations do elect to actually use the name of the Morningstar. And Isaiah says unto this king, this kingdom that will one day destroy Judah, Isaiah’s home, “How you have fallen from heaven, Shining One, the son of dawn!” Fallen, fallen, is Babylon the great, Revelation says. And fallen too, are we, when we elect to follow the ways of Babylon, to hurt the lives of others in order to make ourselves feel greater than the humble beings we truly are. Fallen are we, the church of Jesus Christ, fallen are we who fall short of the simple, yet great commands, of our Lord and Savior to love our neighbors as ourselves and to do unto them what we would want done for us. And so God demands our repentance, because it is right—neither easy or convenient—but because it is right to do so.

It is right to do so because only through repentance can we reclaim our broken selves. Only through repentance can our souls that have been shattered by sin be made whole once more. The calling of the Disciples of Christ, to be a movement for wholeness in a fragmented world, that calling is to pick up those fragments that have been caused by sin and to carefully and lovingly place them back together into the whole body of Christ—the whole body, the body that is not sustained by bread alone, the body that could leap from the earth’s top and survive even without God’s angels being called down, the body that can even survive the Morningstar’s threat at the very end of the story to return until the opportune time. Because it is Christ, and none other, who can one day reclaim the name of the Morningstar, the Shining One, the light that is meant to guide us rather than deceive us. It is even so in Scripture—in Revelation 22, the very last chapter of the Bible, Jesus proclaims to John on Patmos, “I have sent my angels to you…for I am the root and the descendant of David, I am the bright Morningstar.”

You see, that is the promise that our repentance holds—that it would, one day, perhaps far away in the mist and fog of the distant future, be a part of Christ’s reclamation of the divine light. Evil dared to make itself in the image of God, the image of Christ, and, by extension, the image of us. And in doing so, evil has enjoyed many, many successes. But here, in this story from Luke, evil has come to a tired and hungry man and leaves empty-handed. When evil comes to you, in the temptation to do what is convenient and what is easy, rather than what is right, know that you, too, have the power to make evil leave empty-handed. And that is not because you dare to create God in your own image, it is because God dared to create you in His.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
February 22, 2012