In case you missed church this morning

This is the sermon that the very hospitable people of Clarksville Presbyterian Church heard me preach today. They have a lovely stained glass window of Jesus the Good Shepherd, and some blessed person is out there waiting to be called by them!

Identity Crisis

            No sooner is Jesus baptized by John in the wilderness and declared to be Son of God than the Holy Spirit leads him even deeper into the desert for a prolonged period of fasting and solitude. Only he’s not alone. The devil himself pays Jesus a visit.

            What’s Ol’ Scratch doing out there, interrupting Jesus’s spiritual retreat with the Lord? Perhaps Jesus’s reputation has preceded him, and the devil has slithered out of some sulfurous hole in the sand to verify the rumors for himself. “Are you really the Son of God? Prove it. Change these stones into bread. Throw yourself off the top of the temple.”

            I’m not so sure. In the gospels, the demons always seem to recognize Jesus the very moment he enters a town, a house, a synagogue. It’s you and me and the people of Capernaum and Nazareth and Jerusalem who had a hard time recognizing Jesus. Ol’ Scratch knows who Jesus is. They go back a long way.

            What is the big question is, What kind of Messiah is Jesus going to be? According to Greek scholars, the word “if” in our gospel lesson could just as easily be translated “since,” and that casts these temptations in a whole new light. “Since you are the Son of God, take a flying leap. Since you are the Son of God, bake bread in the wilderness.” The devil is presenting Jesus with three alternative ways to exercise his divine Sonship. To that extent, the temptations represent an identity crisis that the devil is fomenting in Jesus’s mind. Lucifer tempts Jesus to be a Rich Messiah, a Powerful Messiah, and/or a Famous Messiah. Let’s think about those three temptations one at a time.

            “Since you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” There’s no need for you to lack anything, Jesus. You’re the Son of God! You deserve a full tummy and a comfy pillow, not a rock, to lay your head on at night.

            But Jesus replies, “One does not live by bread alone.” Certainly the body needs food and drink, and clothing and shelter and occasionally medicine and the healing arts to live, but life itself is more than the ongoing functioning of our mortal flesh. Our flesh is enlivened by a soul, and the soul requires its own type of nourishment: God’s Word. Despite the best food and clothing and shelter and medicine, our bodies will fail us for good one day. If there is any hope that they will one day be raised to life and immortality, it depends on God’s grace to reunite the body with a soul that is full and healthy with the faith, hope and love we can only find in the scriptures. The danger is that bloated stomachs and lives crammed with creature comforts crowd out the soul’s nourishment, just as weeds crowd out the healthy fruits and vegetables in the garden. In emptying himself into a hungry human body, the Son of God has filled that very body with the stuff of immortality. Jesus says no to bread today, so that he can say Yes to eternal life.

            The second temptation doesn’t involve that little word translated if or since, but it’s equally appealing. Lucifer holds before Jesus’s eyes all the kingdoms of the world: Rome in all its glory, Washington DC in its stately majesty. “You know,” says Ol’ Scratch, “they all work for me, but I’ll put ‘em to work for you if only you’ll worship me.”

            In his commentary on this passage, John Calvin, the father of our Presbyterian and Reformed tradition, says that the devil is lying to Jesus. He’s offering what he can’t deliver. God, not the devil, rules the world, and even the political powers are finally subject to the Almighty.

            There are days when I think Calvin is right, and there are days when I think he is wrong. I have a high regard for those who are called to public office, especially at the local level--the man or woman who runs for school board because he or she is passionate about the well-being of children, for instance. But it seems that the higher you go, the more you have to compromise in order to get anything done. I don’t doubt that when Senators and Congressmen of either party enter that smoke-filled room to cut a deal, Lucifer is in there, orchestrating the negotiations.

            At any rate Jesus declines the offer because Jesus is not a free agent. He is the union of divinity and humanity, and he manifests an unshakable and unswerving loyalty to the Governor of the Universe. “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him,” he tells the devil. Jesus is a King, but unlike every other ruler to walk the face of the earth, Jesus’s kingship isn’t compromised by deals with the devil. He is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords because he submits to the King of Creation.

            Maybe the third time will be the charm, so the devil takes Jesus to the pinnacle of the temple, and presents him with a third way to exercise his Sonship. Throw yourself down into the temple courtyard. The angels will cushion your landing. And won’t that make an impression! People will be in awe of you. They will worship the ground you walk on.

            Give the devil his due. Feats of fame and glory are powerfully attractive. Wouldn’t you like to be Lindsey Vonn, who flew down that mountain at Whistler this week and lived to tell about it? Whose face will grace magazine covers and Wheaties boxes for years to come?

            Then again, there are other kinds of celebrity descents. Did you see Tiger Woods’ press conference this week? Pride goeth before a fall, and so do a whole multitude of vices. In those cases the angels don’t intervene to catch us before we scrape our knees. A hard landing of one type or the other awaits everyone at the pinnacle of worldly success. In a few years, even Lindsey Vonn won’t be able to get down that course without crashing.

            Jesus doesn’t tempt fate, or God with a stab at fame and fortune. Instead Jesus is lifted up in the most ignominious way possible: his hands stretched out and nailed to a cross, an object of ridicule and not adulation. He does not trust that God will keep him safe no matter what. He trusts that in life and in death he belongs to God, so he can stretch out his hands and offer his Spirit up to the Lord.

            What kind of Savior is Jesus? Empty, he is full of divinity, and he can fill us with life and immortality. Powerless, he is coming in power to judge the living and the dead. The name of the man who died virtually alone, abandoned by his friends outside the city walls in an obscure Roman backwater has become the name that is above every name, the name to which every knee will bow. Having passed every test, Jesus is clearer than ever about who he is and whose he is, and no sooner does the devil depart from him that Jesus departs from the desert to inaugurate his ministry.

            I think that the kind of Messiah Jesus is cannot help but shape how we go to him, and for what. In a bad economy, there is a great need for bread, and yet all that seems available to us are the stones of unemployment and debt. But remember, in good economies and in bad there is the perennial need for faith and hope and love, for the renewing of our minds according to the Word of God. If we need bread, we can turn to the Lord, and the one who went hungry in the desert, who knows and understands our plight, will have mercy on us, just as fed the crowds in the desert long ago. But he will feed us also with the bread of life--with his words which will grow and bear fruit in our souls forever. We hope for an end to this recession, but perhaps we can also accept hard times as something of an imposed fast, an opportunity to be filled by the Holy Spirit, though our coffers are empty.

            When it comes to the kingdoms of this world, well, if you are a Republican, you’re disappointed that your party is out of power, and if you’re a Democrat, perhaps you’re disappointed that your party hasn’t accomplished more. Those who worship the King of kings and Lord of lords will always be disappointed whether their party is in or out of power, for our earthly kings are always making deals with the devil in order to get the job done. A little evil for the greater good. But the King of kings and Lord of lords is goodness and beauty and truth undiluted. That means that Republicans and Democrats can worship together because both are pledged to the same higher loyalty, and both can avoid being too disappointed in the political process because when it comes to earthly authorities of any stripe, we won’t set our expectations as high as the heavens.

            Lastly, in a society that is increasingly secular, we long for the days when Christianity was a more dominant force in the culture, when there were traffic jams on Sunday morning--not just to get to the lake, but to get the kids to Sunday school--and when big steeple pastors and theologians graced the covers of Time magazine. The Church today seems diminished by comparison. And yet these days of cultural irrelevance may be a blessing in disguise for us. The fresh breeze of the Holy Spirit always blows out of the obscure corners of the world. Out of the desert came Jesus, lean and tested, to heal the sick, raise the dead, feed the hungry, and reconcile us to God. His work goes on in the power of the Spirit in the Church, and it is often in the backwaters where new energy for the Church’s mission bubbles up.

             I am a Church History geek, so forgive me if I close by sharing one story in particular that may illuminate this strange work of the Spirit. Pachomius was a young man drafted into the Roman army during one of its more unstable periods in the 4^th century. He was housed with other conscripts in awful conditions but was ministered to by Christians in that neighborhood. When he got out of the army, he remembered the kindness of those Christians and became one. He was baptized, and he moved to the Egyptian desert to live as a hermit, as countless others had done in that time and place out of a desire to imitate Jesus’s retreat into the wilderness.

Then Pachomius had a vision: to establish a community of monks living together and accountable to each other under God’s Word. The Spirit led him to an abandoned village on the edge of the desert where Pachomius founded a monastic community that grew to several thousand people. His spiritual writings and opinions on how to organize communities influenced the creation of monastic communities in western Europe, in which the remnants of education and civil administration were kept alive after the fall of the Roman Empire. And Pachomius never got ordained. A layman to the end of his life, he once went and hid when the bishop who’d heard about his holiness of life came to lay hands on him.

            In this day and age in which is seems as though the Church is drying up like desert sand, God the Holy Spirit may well be doing a new thing. In obscure places and among ordinary people, Jesus Christ is filling men and women and children with the Word, and empowering them for ministry so that one day every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord. Maybe God the Holy Spirit is doing that right here in this community and in this congregation.