The Rev'd Kenneth H. Saunders III
Christ Church - Cleveland, NC
RCL Year C (Lent 1) - February 21, 2010
Written also for the "Opponents of Christ" series
Deuteronomy 26:1-11
Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16
Romans 10:8b-13
Luke 4:1-13
Frederick Buechner, the famous American writer and theologian, in his 1992 publication “Listening to Your Life,” writes: "For Christians, to observe the forty days of Lent is to do the same thing with roughly a tenth of each year's days. After being baptized by John in the River Jordan, Jesus went off alone into the wilderness where he spent forty days asking himself the question of what it meant to be Jesus. During Lent, Christians are supposed to ask one way or another what it means to be themselves..."
What it means to be themselves…
What does it mean to be ourselves? I mean, really be ourselves…
As we dig down deep during lent and examine the yucky-ness of our lives (cause we all have yucky-ness in our lives) and seek to learn who we truly are, we may root up many demons… you know, those things in our life that cause us NOT to be what God created us to be… it’s a very difficult thing for us to do, but we can’t deal with those demons in our life if we just ignore them… cause they don’t go away.
Our self reflection about the would of, could of, or should of (s) in our life are not so that we can sit idle and morn regret – for something that we did or didn’t do, but we do this “soul searching” so that we can face the outpouring of love and grace from God with a clean conscience. That is what repenting and forgiveness is all about.
That is why we are specifically called in this season of Lent to repent… repent and reflect and repent again… it is a time for the “come to Jesus meetings” in our lives…
I had a person that worked for me… This guy was really good at his job, which was sales… he could sell snow to an Eskimo, and then get them to buy a freezer to keep it in. But, as good as he was, his paperwork was never in order… I would get after him time and time again to clean up his paperwork…
Every time I had to officially council him, we would call it a CTJM – or a “Come to Jesus Meeting”… So lent, for us, is sort of a “come to Jesus meeting,” where we go through the paperwork of our lives and clean house! To purge everything from our lives that draws us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord!
Jesus went off in the wilderness right before he stepped out in ministry to “learn who Jesus was” as Buechner says… and there he met his demon, the devil, the tempter, the deceiver, the slanderer, or the traitor…
Now, when we think of the “devil,” some of us think of this manifestation of evil that we learned to think of as Lucifer, or satan who, according to some interpretations was really God’s fallen angel… You remember being taught that the angel, according to Isaiah 14, thought he was just as powerful as God… and was cast out of heaven…
The word Lucifer, is more of the Latin translation of the Hebrew word used in scripture, Helel, which means “to shine brightly.” And word “Helel” was the Hebrew term for “morning star.” But 200 years before Christ, the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek called it “Satanos” and then the translation in the 3rd Century after Christ into Latin… Scholars continue to argue… and things seem to be “lost in translation”…
But we need to know, however, that the scripture doesn’t say anything about Jesus being tempted by Lucifer or Satan… it just says “the devil” which comes from the Greek in the New Testament “ho diabolos.”
Now, our society has even perverted the seriousness of it a bit, by making it an anthropomorphic figure of this funny little red guy with horns, a pitchfork and a pointed tail that sits up on your shoulder… telling us what to do and what NOT to do…
But that is NOT what we’re talking about… that’s not what “ho diablos” is…
We are talking about real, serious, earnest temptations here…
Imagine this… you are alone in the wilderness and you are hungry… and you can do anything you want to… you are ALL POWERFUL… wouldn’t your first instinct be to turn rocks into bread?
Jesus’ was… but he knew that he didn’t create the rocks to be bread… and he knew that in order to succeed in the ministry that was before him, that he needed to restrain in order to teach… to teach us that we need to learn to feed each other beyond the physical need to eat, that we need to help each other live our lives to the fullest, and truly reach out and love our neighbor as our self… Really teach us that we cannot live by bread alone, like it says in the Book of Deuteronomy…
And imagine… if the world was running amuck (and is…), and all the people are fighting with each other, and worshiping false gods (or what I like to call mammon), which is money (or wealth), and again you were ALL MIGHTY… wouldn’t your answer be to wave your hand and establish equity and respect among all people, and establish your true dominion over everything? wouldn’t you?
Jesus surely thought of it in the desert, thinking about all the destruction and deceit in the world that he could make perfect with just one wave… but again did not succumb to the temptation in order that we might learn… in order to teach us… to teach us that even though God’s wonderful abundant grace is free for the asking, we have a responsibility to turn to God and live for God in order to fully accept it… To teach us to only worship Only the Lord Our God and serve only Him, like it says in Exodus…
And imagine… if we were IMMORTAL and could instantly prove our divinity by doing some death defying act that would establish our eternal fortitude… or our inability to die… then wouldn’t it make sense in some perverted way, to jump off of the highest point in the city?
You can better bet that Jesus thought deeply about this “easy way out”… but again, was not driven by temptation so that he might teach us… teach us that life is full of trials… full of “prove its” and “I dare yous” – and it doesn’t make us any greater if we push the envelope and give in to others whims and wishes to put ourselves in stupidity’s way…
But Jesus wanted to teach us what he learned… Do not put the Lord your God to the test…
Then the temptation left Jesus for a time… and we are left with the story of Jesus’ real encounter with the demons of his human life… living his human life as he teaches us to live ours… Jesus never told us that our lives would be easy… we all have trials in this life, trials of our own humanity to deal with… trials that we must go through, not because God is testing us… but, to realize that we are called to go through these things with God’s help…
The temptation is very real, but I doubt very seriously there’s a little red guy with horns sitting up on your shoulder whispering in your ear… so when you make the wrong choice, you can’t claim “the devil made me do it…”
We cannot live though the trials and tribulations of this life without God’s help… that’s why we ascribe in our baptismal vows to “persevere in resisting evil, and whenever we fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord” – with God’s help!
It’s because we can’t do it alone, and thanks be to God, we are not expected to…
In Lent we are expected to go deep, and dig around in the dark places of yuck-ness in our lives and call out the devils… the temptations… and own them… and deal with them… and repent of them and turn to God… so that, as Buechner says, “we can in one way or another ask ourselves what it means to be us…”
So that in the end, we can remember that we are all children of the living God. So, in our digging around for demons, and in our introspective self examination during this lenten season… and as we are discovering what it means to be us…
We need not forget Who we are and Who’s we are!!
Christ Church - Cleveland, NC
RCL Year C (Lent 1) - February 21, 2010
Written also for the "Opponents of Christ" series
Deuteronomy 26:1-11
Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16
Romans 10:8b-13
Luke 4:1-13
Frederick Buechner, the famous American writer and theologian, in his 1992 publication “Listening to Your Life,” writes: "For Christians, to observe the forty days of Lent is to do the same thing with roughly a tenth of each year's days. After being baptized by John in the River Jordan, Jesus went off alone into the wilderness where he spent forty days asking himself the question of what it meant to be Jesus. During Lent, Christians are supposed to ask one way or another what it means to be themselves..."
What it means to be themselves…
What does it mean to be ourselves? I mean, really be ourselves…
As we dig down deep during lent and examine the yucky-ness of our lives (cause we all have yucky-ness in our lives) and seek to learn who we truly are, we may root up many demons… you know, those things in our life that cause us NOT to be what God created us to be… it’s a very difficult thing for us to do, but we can’t deal with those demons in our life if we just ignore them… cause they don’t go away.
Our self reflection about the would of, could of, or should of (s) in our life are not so that we can sit idle and morn regret – for something that we did or didn’t do, but we do this “soul searching” so that we can face the outpouring of love and grace from God with a clean conscience. That is what repenting and forgiveness is all about.
That is why we are specifically called in this season of Lent to repent… repent and reflect and repent again… it is a time for the “come to Jesus meetings” in our lives…
I had a person that worked for me… This guy was really good at his job, which was sales… he could sell snow to an Eskimo, and then get them to buy a freezer to keep it in. But, as good as he was, his paperwork was never in order… I would get after him time and time again to clean up his paperwork…
Every time I had to officially council him, we would call it a CTJM – or a “Come to Jesus Meeting”… So lent, for us, is sort of a “come to Jesus meeting,” where we go through the paperwork of our lives and clean house! To purge everything from our lives that draws us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord!
Jesus went off in the wilderness right before he stepped out in ministry to “learn who Jesus was” as Buechner says… and there he met his demon, the devil, the tempter, the deceiver, the slanderer, or the traitor…
Now, when we think of the “devil,” some of us think of this manifestation of evil that we learned to think of as Lucifer, or satan who, according to some interpretations was really God’s fallen angel… You remember being taught that the angel, according to Isaiah 14, thought he was just as powerful as God… and was cast out of heaven…
The word Lucifer, is more of the Latin translation of the Hebrew word used in scripture, Helel, which means “to shine brightly.” And word “Helel” was the Hebrew term for “morning star.” But 200 years before Christ, the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek called it “Satanos” and then the translation in the 3rd Century after Christ into Latin… Scholars continue to argue… and things seem to be “lost in translation”…
But we need to know, however, that the scripture doesn’t say anything about Jesus being tempted by Lucifer or Satan… it just says “the devil” which comes from the Greek in the New Testament “ho diabolos.”
Now, our society has even perverted the seriousness of it a bit, by making it an anthropomorphic figure of this funny little red guy with horns, a pitchfork and a pointed tail that sits up on your shoulder… telling us what to do and what NOT to do…
But that is NOT what we’re talking about… that’s not what “ho diablos” is…
We are talking about real, serious, earnest temptations here…
Imagine this… you are alone in the wilderness and you are hungry… and you can do anything you want to… you are ALL POWERFUL… wouldn’t your first instinct be to turn rocks into bread?
Jesus’ was… but he knew that he didn’t create the rocks to be bread… and he knew that in order to succeed in the ministry that was before him, that he needed to restrain in order to teach… to teach us that we need to learn to feed each other beyond the physical need to eat, that we need to help each other live our lives to the fullest, and truly reach out and love our neighbor as our self… Really teach us that we cannot live by bread alone, like it says in the Book of Deuteronomy…
And imagine… if the world was running amuck (and is…), and all the people are fighting with each other, and worshiping false gods (or what I like to call mammon), which is money (or wealth), and again you were ALL MIGHTY… wouldn’t your answer be to wave your hand and establish equity and respect among all people, and establish your true dominion over everything? wouldn’t you?
Jesus surely thought of it in the desert, thinking about all the destruction and deceit in the world that he could make perfect with just one wave… but again did not succumb to the temptation in order that we might learn… in order to teach us… to teach us that even though God’s wonderful abundant grace is free for the asking, we have a responsibility to turn to God and live for God in order to fully accept it… To teach us to only worship Only the Lord Our God and serve only Him, like it says in Exodus…
And imagine… if we were IMMORTAL and could instantly prove our divinity by doing some death defying act that would establish our eternal fortitude… or our inability to die… then wouldn’t it make sense in some perverted way, to jump off of the highest point in the city?
You can better bet that Jesus thought deeply about this “easy way out”… but again, was not driven by temptation so that he might teach us… teach us that life is full of trials… full of “prove its” and “I dare yous” – and it doesn’t make us any greater if we push the envelope and give in to others whims and wishes to put ourselves in stupidity’s way…
But Jesus wanted to teach us what he learned… Do not put the Lord your God to the test…
Then the temptation left Jesus for a time… and we are left with the story of Jesus’ real encounter with the demons of his human life… living his human life as he teaches us to live ours… Jesus never told us that our lives would be easy… we all have trials in this life, trials of our own humanity to deal with… trials that we must go through, not because God is testing us… but, to realize that we are called to go through these things with God’s help…
The temptation is very real, but I doubt very seriously there’s a little red guy with horns sitting up on your shoulder whispering in your ear… so when you make the wrong choice, you can’t claim “the devil made me do it…”
We cannot live though the trials and tribulations of this life without God’s help… that’s why we ascribe in our baptismal vows to “persevere in resisting evil, and whenever we fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord” – with God’s help!
It’s because we can’t do it alone, and thanks be to God, we are not expected to…
In Lent we are expected to go deep, and dig around in the dark places of yuck-ness in our lives and call out the devils… the temptations… and own them… and deal with them… and repent of them and turn to God… so that, as Buechner says, “we can in one way or another ask ourselves what it means to be us…”
So that in the end, we can remember that we are all children of the living God. So, in our digging around for demons, and in our introspective self examination during this lenten season… and as we are discovering what it means to be us…
We need not forget Who we are and Who’s we are!!
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