The First Temptation: Not By Bread Alone

SCRIPTURE:  Matthew 4.1-4 [Jesus' first temptation in the wilderness]

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.

Jesus is taken to the wilderness – this wilderness time is not of Jesus’ own choosing.  As Melissa Harmon says, “This is Jesus’ spiritual boot camp.”

He fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished. 

This hunger is very different than ordinary hunger – not because of how long it lasted, but because of why it was.  Jesus was famished because he had fasted – that is, he had deliberately abstained from food as a spiritual discipline.

Fasting is an act of strengthening rather than weakening.  It is a way of drawing closer to God by putting away all distractions, including the distraction of the belly. Thus it would seem clear that Jesus knew he was to face trials or tests and he prepared to meet them.  It is ironic, then, that his first temptation has to do with the very fact of his preparation.

The tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” 

The Tempter is first referred to as ‘the devil’, in Greek,  diabolou - literally ‘The Slanderer’ (the lie teller) or ‘the adversary’ (opponent, enemy).  This is the adversary of God come to thwart the divine plan for Jesus.

But he answered, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

Deuteronomy 8 is a sermon by Moses to the people about to enter the promised land.  Verse 3 from which Jesus quotes says, “[God] humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna . . . in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”

God reminds the people before they enter into their prosperity that in their poverty, God was their provider.

This is the passage Jesus quotes to The Tempter to reject his offer to make a stone sandwich – the passage that reminds the people Israel not to sacrifice their souls in favor of their bellies . . . that tells them in advance that God well knows who they are and how they will behave . . . that when they get all they want or need, they’ll be tempted to claim all the credit for themselves and deny God in the process.

Perhaps this, then, is at the heart of Jesus’ first temptation: the desire to rush ahead to try to do for ourselves, to take credit for what we have and in the taking, deny the God who provided all along.

Thus might we understand Jesus’ answer:  You, Tempter, would have me turn my back on all God has done for me just to show off what a big deal I am – stone sandwich maker, indeed!  You really think a little snack is worth more to me than God?  I may not see the path ahead clearly.  I may not like where it takes me.  I might plead with God to change my destiny.  But I cannot not forget my God.  Oh, and in case you didn’t notice, my hunger made me stronger, not weaker.  Guess you weren’t paying attention that day in class!

I Will Never Leave Nor Forsake You

Hebrews 13.5: I will never leave nor forsake you.

So I read in preparing for prayer over Syria last night, this God promise the writer of Hebrews sets forth – the context far different as he (presumably) writes about leaving aside the fears and desires created by a lack of material goods.  Or is it?

Was he writing to people starving to death?  To people running for their lives?  To people aching with the fear of never having enough?  to people whose fears had good cause?  I suspect so – there is no need to preach freedom from worry to the rich, the safe, is there?

So maybe this is a word of the Lord for the people of Syria today, this God promise of safe haven and deliverance.  But what can it mean in the midst of real violence, real destruction, real lack?

I cannot presume to say.  Yet the promise stays with me and becomes my prayer for these strangers who are my kin so far away.

Then, perhaps subconsciously harkening back to where the promise is first uttered (in Deuteronomy 31), I think of Moses, his arms uplifted, held in place by Aaron and Hur at his side when he grew weary.

But I mixed my images, holding the Moses image together with the demand that his people be released from captivity.  I forgot the context.  God didn’t, but I did.  Deuteronomy 31's divine promise of eternal presence is in aid of the conquering of the promised land and Aaron and Hur hold Moses’ arms up because his upraised arms assure battle victory to the Israelites.

I cannot escape the imagery of war no matter where I turn.  The irony is lost on me, but perhaps God appreciates the joke as I use these images of battle victory to pray for a turning of hearts and minds away from violence and towards just peace.

There are real combatants on battle fields all over the world today.  Maybe it does make sense to offer prayer for both sides to all these conflicts, prayer that they recall the divine promise to never leave nor forsake. . . maybe were all to remember this God promise, the lasting victory whose name is peace would become real . . . maybe it becomes impossible to lift weapons when, eyes downcast, it is remembered that the ground stood upon is not holy because of the blood shed there, but rather is holy because of the God standing there . . . maybe the feared, implied threat of divine abandonment is so real that it is necessary that we pray that none be left or forsaken . . .

Lord, whatever You do, do not leave them . . . do not leave us.

In Your mercy, hear this prayer.

SermonCliffNote: Stewards of God's Call

God calls whom God will when God will how God will.  The Bible is replete with the call stories of God’s people, including Moses, perhaps the most unwilling of all.

When God came calling in the form of a burning bush, Moses repeatedly protests his own unsuitability, asking who am I to do this thing and who are you to ask me?  My own favorite is when he pleads with God: O Lord, please send someone else!

To all of Moses’ protests, God responds with providing.

Many, if not all, call stories have protest as the response to God’s invitation. . . Amos protests he is just a farmer . . . Jeremiah that he is just a boy . . . Isaiah that he is not worthy . . . Jonah that God’s message is not worthy . . . Esther that she’ll be killed . . .

Yet God persists with all of them.  God provides for all of them.  And God fulfills God’s purposes through all of them.  Even so, not every call story in the Bible is a success: Saul almost brings a nation to ruin that God gave him to take care of . . . Judas was as much a disciple, as much called as Peter and Andrew and James and the rest . . .

Preacher G. Lloyd Rediger speaks of the duty we Christians have to be “responsible stewards” of God’s call to us.  God has given us a heart, a passion, a desire, to do something and that something is God’s call to us.

Yet God’s call is not an invitation received without conflict – often there is doubt . . . and fear . . . confusion . . . and even lack of desire . . . because the call of God is a very big deal . . . and too often we humans live in a perpetual state of smallness, forgetting who and what we were created to be and to do, settling for far too little and calling it good or good enough.

When we believe we are too few . . . too weak . . . too old . . . or too young . . . too tired to act, to move, to help, we make ourselves too small . . .

When we buy in to the lies of our culture that only big money and big business and big churches can do anything of real import, we make ourselves too small . . .

And few though we may be in number, we were not made for small –

In the words of poet Marianne Williamson:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Our imagining is a big part of our stewarding of God’s call . . . for if we cannot or dare not imagine what God has in store, we will not see it come to life.

For God’s call to bear fruit, we must first imagine that it can.

For change to happen in ourselves and in our world, we must first believe, imagine its happening.

The call is always an invitation into the movement of the divine dance of coming and going:  come . . . with me . . . go . . . and do . . .

The question is . . . will we?  Dare we?

Sermon Cliff Note: Stuck in the Eye of the Needle*

Jesus and Moses have a perspective of love, love which knows that when you’re stuck in the eye of the needle, you can either go backward, go forward, or stay stuck.  But in order to move forward, something has to change.

Moses and Jesus both address this condition of ‘stuck-ness’:  the concern that the very wealth of the rich, that which makes our lives so much easier, is or will become a stumbling block.

Wealth competes with God in the hearts of humanity, and all too often, wealth wins.  In Biblical terms, the concern is of idolatry, the worship of anyone or anything other than God.

This turning away from God can be likened to a disease and in our time, it actually has a name, “affluenza”.  That there can be loss in wealth, we all understand; after all, sorrow comes to us all.  But that wealth itself is a form of loss, is more difficult to accept.

The first thing we need to accept is that we are rich.  With food on our tables and roofs over our heads, and clothes on our backs, we are rich.

Secondly, Jesus’ words are motivated not by punishment, but by love.  From that love, Jesus tells the wealthy man what he must do to enter God’s kingdom.  In essence, Jesus is saying, ‘for what you need, do not look to your hands, look to mine.’

Thirdly, neither Jesus nor Moses are idealizing poverty.  The Wisdom of Proverbs chapter 30 is instructive:  “. . . give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that I need, or I shall be full, and deny you, and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’  Or I shall be poor, and steal, and profane the name of my God.”

How quickly we recognize the dangers of poverty.  Yet how rare it is that we pray, “Oh God, please don’t make me rich!”, or when rich, “Oh God, relieve me of this burden!”

But God makes it very clear that this is exactly how we should view our wealth: as burden and temptation, as duty, never as a state to be desired for its own sake, and only to be taken on with humility and care, for the temptation to become stewards for ourselves, rather than for God or for each other, is virtually insurmountable.  We succumb to that temptation to our great peril.  But succumb we do.

To be distracted by the things of this world, thus forgetting God, is to be stuck in the eye of the needle.  The irony is that the prosperity God provides can result in a turning away from the very God who provides it.

Champion swimmers shave their body hair in order to eliminate any drag on their bodies as they press forward to their goal.  Wealth can be a drag, a distraction – from God.

There is much in our world to distract us from God.  But it has a price.  In his book The High Price of Materialism, author Tim Kasser concludes that, providing basic needs are met, people who are rich are not happier than those who are not.  In fact, those who pursue wealth are generally less happy than those who do not.  Most surprising to me, Kasser found that the health and happiness of the people who have dealings with those pursuing wealth are harmed as well!  Finally, he concludes that materialism does not cause unhappiness; rather, unhappiness feeds our desire for things and our desire for things feeds our unhappiness.

Jesus’ call is to move away from feeding our own unhappiness.

Let us join with the Wisdom petitioner of Proverbs and pray, “Oh God, do not make me too rich, lest I forget you.”  Amen.


__________________
*In October of 2006, I ended up one Sunday with two sermons instead of one.  I didn’t like the first one and when it was done again, I didn’t like the second one much either.  So I gave the folks at Headwaters Chapel, where I preach first each Sunday, the choice - ‘A’ or ‘B’.  They chose B, so I preached from the second manuscript.  Then on to McDowell Church where I repeated the offer and the same choice was made (who says God has no sense of humor?).  At McDowell they asked when they would hear the other one.  “Never,” I said.  Turns out I lied.  I dusted off sermon ‘A’ for this Sunday and threw in a bit of ad-libbed political commentary on how our fear is the flip side of the same coin of our plenty when it comes to wealth, using the things I was thinking about in Friday’s blog BethRant6 - Let's End the Generational Wars as my example.  This post is the Cliff Notes version of sermon A.  The scripture passages are from Deuteronomy 8 (Moses’ sermon to the people about to enter the promised land on the temptation of forgetting the origin of the land of plenty in the grace of God) and Mark 10 (on the rich young ruler who lacks only a path cleared of wealth to enter God’s kingdom).