First Sunday in Lent
Grace be to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Last Sunday, a few of us gathered in the fellowship hall to watch a documentary called “Mission: Joy!”. It chronicles a visit between the Dalai Lama of Tibet and Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa. The film alternated between the conversation with these two faith leaders and their lives’ stories.
At one point, the Dalai Lama talked about a Tibetan woman who had been a prisoner of war in China. For eighteen years, she had been abused and tortured in prison. Afterwards, she had told the Dalai Lama that she had struggled with temptation the whole time. What was the temptation? The temptation to lose compassion for her Chinese jailers.
As I heard this, I already had the readings for today’s worship service in the back of my mind. I knew we would be reading the story of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness. This temptation story of a Chinese prison experience highlighted for me what temptation is truly about. It’s not about resisting the piece of chocolate or the urge to cheat on taxes.
Rather, the temptations the Bible speaks about strike much deeper to the core of our being. Temptations asks us, “Who am I at my core?”
The Tibetan prisoner knew that at her core she was a compassionate person. The terrible conditions of her captivity threatened to knock that compassion out of her, to erase it, to change who she really was.
When the devil accosts Jesus in the wilderness, he strikes on the same level. “If you are the Son of God,” he asks Jesus. The devil questions Jesus’ true identity.
Jesus is tested in the wilderness, in a barren, desolate, hostile environment. It is easy to imagine having to struggle in such a landscape.
However, we know that the temptation to lose our core identity doesn’t just strike in those kinds of situation. It can also trouble us when life is really good.
Right before today’s gospel reading starts, Luke gives us Jesus’ ancestry. He lists a long list of names to describe Jesus’ lineage. The end of the last verse reads, “son of Adam, son of God”. Luke traces Jesus’ lineage all the back to Adam. He, too, faced temptations.
Adam and Eve were not in the wilderness. On the contrary, they lived in the Garden of Eden. Everything around them was lush and vibrant and perfect. They had everything they needed for a wonderful life, including a really close relationship with God.
Along came the tempter. In his tricky way, he ruined the trust Adam and Eve had in God and God’s provision. Led on by the tempter, the two began doubting that God really did have their best interest at heart. Even though they were surrounded by everything they needed, they wanted more: to be like God.
Their identity are humans wasn’t good enough anymore. The tempter had shaken their core. No longer did they identify as God’s beloved creatures, called to worship God and care for God’s creation. They were tempted into assuming another identity, as gods themselves. The result was terrible, for them and the world.
This temptation to question who we truly are can assault us in the Garden of Eden when life is great, in the wilderness when life is hard, and anywhere in between.
In our reading from the Old Testament, Moses is worried about exactly that. Currently, he is talking to the people of Israel in the wilderness. They are still wandering in the desert after having escaped from Egypt. For forty years, God has led them and protected them and sustained them with daily bread and water.
During all these years, Israel developed its identity as the people of God. They rejoiced in their covenant with this marvelous God who kept them alive in the desert and who had promised them a land of their own.
Now they are getting close to the Promised Land. Before they enter, Moses tries to prepare them. Above all, he wants to give them tools by which they can maintain their sense of identity as God’s people.
“When you have come into the land that the Lord God is giving you,” Moses says, every year at harvest time, gather the first fruits and bring them to God in thanksgiving. By doing that, they will remember that the Land belongs to God and that both the land and its produce are gifts from God.
Then the people are to recite this beautiful creed: “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. 6When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, 7we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. 8The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; 9and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. 10So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O Lord, have given me.”
In this creed, the people recite their story with God. They describe how they got to be a people to begin with and how they came to live in Egypt. They remember their suffering vividly, and they recall the mighty acts of God that freed them from bondage. They describe God as one who hears their voice and sees their oppression and does something about it. They confess that wandering is part of their story repeatedly, from their wandering Aramean ancestor to their current wandering in the desert towards the Promised Land. They praise the land with its bounty, and you can hear their sense of belonging: “He brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.”
It’s remarkable just how many identity markers are being recounted in this creed. This is who we are: descendants of wandering Arameans, former slaves whom God has set free, a people that has experienced God’s grace and protection, living in a land that God has given us to inhabit, but that still belongs to God.
This is Israel’s story, Israel’s identity. They are not just reciting this story, they are living it, making it their own. The creed begins in the third person: my ancestor, he went down, he became a great nation. Then, it switches to the first person: The Egyptians treated us harshly, we cried, the Lord set us free and gave us this land. You can see how the people completely identify with their story and how it gives them a strong identity.
Moses is giving them this creed so they won’t lose their sense of identity. Once they are settled in the land and life is good, they will be sorely tempted to forget the core of their being. In the desert it was easy to realize that life is a gift and that all depends on a gracious God. Once they build their nice little houses and have several acres under plow and the barns are decently full, it will be so very easy to forget that life is still a gift and still depends on God’s grace.
Moses was right to be concerned. The people will indeed forget. Just read the books of Judges and Joshua and the books describing the descent of Israel and Judah into exile. The people lost their core identity as God’s people, and the result was terrible.
This is our temptation, too. We so easily forget that all we have and all we are, as individuals and as a people, are gifts from God. When life is good, we are so very susceptible to the message of the tempter: You can create your own luck; you can pull yourself up by your own bootstraps; what has God ever done for you?
Once our core identity as a beloved child of a gracious God has been called into question, we become prey to all kinds of alternative stories told by the tempter, such as: Find your identity in being the rich person or the beautiful person or the really fit person or the successful person or the super-achieving person or the most popular person or the person who is best at this, that or the other thing. You know the messages, drilled into us by commercials and social media and peer pressure – the voices of the tempter.
We must remember our story so we can keep our true identity. If you want to know how essential our story is to our identity, visit someone with dementia. People who don’t know their ancestors, their family members, their hobbies, their profession, their faith have lost their sense of who they are.
We must remember our story, our creed. Just like Israel did, we must slip into the tales of our ancestors in the faith and make it our story, our experience, so we can proclaim with hopeful trust: “God did this for us. I experienced this mighty act of God.”
Moses gives his people a creed and a ritual to remember their story. Jesus relies on the story of Holy Scripture and the spiritual disciplines of prayer and fasting. We need to know our story so we can tap into our identity as children of God any time the tempter tries to lure us away from our creator.
That’s why we teach Sunday school and catechism, why we gather for Bible study and preach sermons: To remember the story and make it our own.
I love the way theologian Scott Hoezee puts it in his commentary, so I am closing this sermon by quoting him:
But at the center of the Christian life […] is a sacrament that insists we remember. We remember that we belong to God alone in both creation and redemption. We remember that our very lives are not our own but were purchased at great cost by Christ Jesus our Lord on a hill far away—a hill far away but never really “long ago” in that the sacramental life of the church insists that time is even more relative than Einstein thought. “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” the old spiritual asks. The correct answer is “Yes.” Or as the Apostle Paul will later put it, “I have been crucified with Christ such that it is no longer I that live but Christ lives in me.”
The only question—apropos for any time but certainly for the start of the Season of Lent—is whether we can see ourselves in that picture. Do we know who we are? Do we know whose we are? Do we know to Whom we owe absolutely everything?
Amen.