Sermon for 1 Lent, Year C (02/29/2004)
"Remember Who You Are"
For some reason today’s Gospel
reminded me of the movie, The Lion King.
To be fair, with two
small children,
virtually
everything reminds me of one Disney film or another.
If you remember the movie, Simba
is a young lion
struggling to make a
difficult choice in his life,
tempted to stay
an adolescent and ignore his responsibilities as king.
At a
pivotal moment he sees a vision of his father who says:
“Remember who you are—my son and the one true king.”
Remember who you are.
That is the key to
overcoming temptation.
And temptation
is something we all must face—
even
Jesus.
And the devil wastes no time.
As soon as Jesus has
been baptized and is ready to begin his ministry,
he is tempted
to give it up.
Every temptation begins with a
powerful but subtle word—
“If.”
If you are the
Son of God…prove it.
It is common to see Jesus’
response as a kind of a done deal.
Surely Jesus wasn’t
really tempted by these offers.
This was a kind
of pro forma test.
But I’m not so sure.
I think it must have
been very tempting indeed to give in.
After all, what was at the bottom
of the devil’s offer?
All gain with no pain.
No rejection by the
Jewish leaders.
No hard work of
preaching and teaching.
No
suffering and death.
Become the messiah the easy way.
Don’t choose the path of
obedience and servanthood.
Choose the path
of power and glory.
All
you have to do is deny who you are—God’s son—
and become my son instead.
Jesus gave the right answers and
sent the devil away.
But the questions, the
temptations, didn’t go away so easily.
They never do.
He was haunted, I’m sure, by the
“what-if’s”.
Even after three years
of teaching,
just moments
before his arrest,
he
struggled with temptation again in the garden.
“Father, if it be your will, let
this cup pass from me.”
But again, with the
reality of his death now imminent,
he chose the
path of obedience,
the
way of the suffering servant.
“Not my will, but thine be done.”
From beginning to end, Jesus
remained true—
true to himself, true to
his calling,
true to God.
Remember who you are.
That’s the key.
When the devil tempted
him, Jesus was able to resist
because he knew
who he was.
What gave him the strength to
resist the devil and remember who he was?
Was it his superhuman
powers?
No! The whole
point of the story is that Jesus is human, vulnerable.
He
faced the same temptations we do in the same way.
His example teaches us how to overcome them
in the same way.
First, he knew his religious
tradition.
Every time the devil
tried to trip him up
Jesus
responded, not with some elaborate intellectual argument,
or a
cost-benefit analysis,
but with a quote from the Bible.
We sometimes forget that Jesus
was a Jew,
raised and formed in the
religion of Mary and Joseph,
the tradition
of the patriarchs and prophets.
There
is lots of debate about how learned Jesus was,
whether or not he spoke Greek, or even could
read and write.
But there is no doubt that he
knew his faith, his tradition inside and out:
knew it well enough to
confound the scholars in the temple when he was a kid;
knew it well
enough to confound his opponents when he was an adult.
Second, Jesus knew the living
presence of God through a life of prayer.
Again and again we read
in the gospels that Jesus prayed.
He prayed with
his disciples and taught them how to pray,
and he
took time to be alone in prayer.
Think of what Jesus is doing when
the temptation occurs.
He is not on an
overnight retreat at a comfortable monastery.
Instead, he has
gone into the desert to fast and pray for forty days.
The
desert…no food…forty days.
Jesus is serious about prayer.
That prayer, strengthened and
intensified by fasting
is what gave Jesus
strength to withstand the devil.
The devil
didn’t show up because he was there;
Jesus’
prayer and fasting brought the devil out of hiding
and out into the open.
We are still tempted to take the
easy way out,
to substitute pleasure,
security and privilege
for the way of
the cross,
the
path of obedience and self-sacrifice.
Against this we need to draw from
the same sources of strength as Jesus.
We need to know our
tradition.
How many of us
here today feel ignorant about the Bible?
How
many of us know the story of faith
or could even share our own story of faith?
And, like Jesus, we need to have
a life rooted in prayer.
Prayer is tough; it’s
awkward.
It’s easy to
put off when we are busy and tired
(and
when aren’t we busy and tired?).
We stumble over the right words.
But we need to keep at it.
Finally, we need each other to
make it work.
Jesus faced his
temptations alone.
His own Jewish
religious leaders had, for the most part,
written him off as a dangerous wacko.
He didn’t yet have the community of
disciples.
And later, when he did, those
disciples weren’t always very reliable.
They fell asleep on him
in the garden
and deserted
him at the cross.
But it was these same disciples
whom Jesus later built into the church.
After his resurrection,
they became the nucleus of a movement
which is going
strong in 2004 and numbers billions,
including you and me here today.
He promised that whatever
happened,
whatever temptations we
faced,
he would be
with us through this community of faith,
so
that we would never have to be alone in our struggle.
That’s one of the things church
is for.
There are plenty of more
entertaining things you could do on a Sunday.
But church is
not about entertainment.
Week by week, year by year, we
repeat the same prayers,
we read, teach and
preach out of the same Bible,
so that we can
be formed in this tradition of faith,
nurtured in a transforming relationship with Christ
within the community of the church.
The reality is that not one of us
here today is good enough to make it on our own.
We aren’t smart enough,
or faithful enough,
We aren’t holy
enough or wise enough
to
meet the temptations the devil throws our way.
That is, we aren’t strong enough
alone.
But together, together
in this community of struggling believers,
together in the
grace of Jesus and the love of God,
together in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit,
we are strong enough, holy enough and good
enough
to send the devil packing.
We may not like to admit it, but
we need the support of Christian friends.
Through prayer groups,
Bible study groups,
through
education events and fellowship events
through friendships and one on one mentoring,
even through sorting clothes and making
quilts
we are supported and strengthened.
So as we walk through our own
deserts,
and face our own
temptations,
it is this
support that makes all the difference,
keeps
us rooted in the tradition of our faith,
grounded in a life of prayer
and always helps us remember who we
are.
