Thursday, February 15, 2018

Ash Wednesday 2018: "Lose the World, Gain the Heavens," Luke 4:1-13

Luke 4:1-13

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


Ash Wednesday 2018

It has become a personal tradition by now, my sixth Ash Wednesday with you (it would be seven, but last year’s Ash Wednesday came while I was on sabbatical). In order to set the tone for a unique service that is often much more somber than our more celebratory praise worship services of Sunday morning, I read this short excerpt from the UCC pastor and author Lillian Daniel’s book This Odd and Wondrous Calling, as she recounts the experience of preaching her first-ever sermon as a seminary student performing the required field education internship that all Master of Divinity students must complete in order to earn their degree:

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.”

An annual scolding is a helpfully humorous way to describe Ash Wednesday—the first day of the church season of Lent and a day of penitence in which we confess to God our sins and seek forgiveness both from God and from those whom we have sinned against.

Lent lasts for forty days—from now until Good Friday, minus the Sundays—and that number is meant to parallel the forty days that Jesus spends fasting in the wilderness according to Matthew and Luke before being tested by Satan, which is Hebrew for “the Adversary.”

“The Adversary” is an apt label for the devil in this passage from Luke, for he verbally jousts back and forth with Jesus, tempting the Son of God with one thing after another before finally fleeing and thus permitting angels to tend to our Messiah.

The first of the devil’s temptations is simple enough: ask Jesus to turn stones into bread. As a common theme in these temptations, both the devil and Jesus quote Scripture back at one another, and together with the first temptation, it shows that even the most fundamental building blocks of physical and spiritual sustenance—bread and the Word of God—can be turned into weapons with which to do harm when put in the wrong hands. Jesus resists such weaponry, though, despite the starvation inherent in so long a fast.

The third of the devil’s three temptations involves Jesus throwing Himself off the highest point of the Jerusalem temple so that angels will catch Him and prevent Him from dying. To choose so central a point from which to jump makes the intent of the temptation clear, albeit unspoken in the text itself: people will see Jesus evade death through this divine intervention, and thus believe in Him as the Son of God. Yet Jesus, quoting Scripture, again demurs.

It is the second of these three temptations, the temptation to be given power over all the kingdoms and nations of the earth, that I want to talk about the most with you tonight.

I want to talk with you about it because it is perhaps the most relevant to ourselves in our own human condition. Yes, we crave food, but food is not by itself sinful—we are simply admonished as Jesus says, to not live on the food alone, and so we don’t.

Nor must we feel terribly tempted to leap from the highest point in town to prove our own divinity, because we each know that we are not the Messiah.

But being tempted by earthly power? That’s right up our alley, and always has been. Never mind the fact that, at its core, Christianity has always been a religion about surrender—the surrendering of complete divinity that becoming human entailed for Jesus and His surrender to the Roman Empire after the machinations that led to His crucifixion were put into motion.

That is not how we ourselves typically want to go. But it is the way of Jesus, and giving up what we must in order to follow that way is not a request, it is an expectation.

We fail to live up to that expectation, though, each time we put our desire for control and power over the wellbeing of another, be it another person, or another group of people, or even an entire nation. That tendency is but another form of selfishness, but a form that is not merely contained within our own thoughts and feelings that we otherwise keep only to ourselves.

This crass pursuit of transactional power—you give me influence, I give you influence—is increasingly what American Christianity has been associated with over the past couple of years. I say that quite confidently. We are known not for our pursuit of self-control and surrender, but by our pursuit of earthly power, control, and influence.

Just hours ago today, we saw one lethal consequence of pursuit of such earthly power and influence—although it is a consequence that we have seen on replay again and again since the Columbine High School shooting. The Parkland mass shooting in Florida is the latest in a long string of such attacks that, by pure happenstance, happen in a nation with some of the most lax gun laws in the industrialized world—laxness that exists because of the temporal power, control, and influence that groups like the NRA have over our political leaders.

That influence, by the by, is in the interests not of people, but of material possessions—of guns. Guns have no heart, no soul; as we are continually reminded by their defenders, they don’t kill people. People kill people. But would the Christ who repeatedly exhorted His followers to forsake material possessions make a similar defense? The same Christ who told the rich young man who loved his possessions to sell them and then have treasure in heaven? Or would Christ champion the children, not the gun?

But that is not where the locus of political power is at present in our nation. And we are seduced by such powerful forces that promise us the means with which to not only obtain power but also to keep hold of it. Surrendering it tends not to be in our nature—as a nation, as a church, and as individuals. We not only want what we cannot have, we want what we already have—desperately.

Yet, if Christ is to be our eternal example, then our mandate is clear: to lose our worldly power if we must, but in so doing, to gain the heavens. For every single thing the devil offers Jesus is fleeting. Bread crumbles. A moment of drama is but a moment. And earthly power, over generations, always is handed over, whether by hook, by crook, or by the inevitable passage of time.

That is the common question asked by the temptations the devil presents to Jesus: are we willing to sacrifice eternity for what we want in the inherently fleeting present moment? And not what we *need* in the present—but, again, what we *want*.

The well-deserved knock against those of us in the church is that far, far too often—both lately and at many other times throughout our history—our answer to that question is absolutely, we are willing to sacrifice the heavens to gain the earth, not the other way around.

In so doing, we do harm to one another. We do harm to God. And we do harm to ourselves.

May we take this season of Lent, then, as a time to turn that harm into healing, in the hope and prayer that our renunciation of such harm, of such pursuit of fleeting power to forsake the heavens and their creator, ends with us, and that a new church, one surrounded by life and not by murder, and which heralds a world of goodness rather than violence, might yet be possible.

It is a dream I have.

May it be so. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington 
February 14, 2018

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