Feb. 17, 2013 First Sunday in Lent

Luke 4:1-13

1 Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the desert, 2 where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry.
    3 The devil said to him, "If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread."
    4 Jesus answered, "It is written: 'Man does not live on bread alone.'[a]"
    5 The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. 6 And he said to him, "I will give you all their authority and splendor, for it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. 7 So if you worship me, it will all be yours."
    8 Jesus answered, "It is written: 'Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.'[b]"
    9 The devil led him to Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. "If you are the Son of God," he said, "throw yourself down from here. 10 For it is written:
   " 'He will command his angels concerning you
      to guard you carefully;
    11 they will lift you up in their hands,
      so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.'[c]"
    12 Jesus answered, "It says: 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'[d]"
    13 When the devil had finished all this tempting, he left him until an opportune time.

“JESUS TEMPTATION AND OURS”

Jesus is ready to take on the world and all that needs changing therein.  He knew God better then any mortal before him, and was more ready to do God’s will then anyone had ever been.

And yet, he is still temptable.
The battle with evil begins at the moment when he is sure he is the One sent of God.

It is the temptation to take the easy way out.  To sell his soul for a bite of bread.
We too are tempted to think that we can live by bread alone.

It is the temptation to believe that the end does justify the means - idolatry is okay if it is for the right reason. I can keep my faith separate from the rest of my life, bowing to God on Sunday and doing what I have to do to make it the rest of the time.
No!  Our faith is to lead us to do justice and love kindness and walk humbly with our God”   (Micah 6:8)  Nothing less is enough.

It is the temptation to prove God’s goodness by trying to control what God does - by thinking we can be in charge of God’s miracles.

And the temptations keep coming as long as we live; as well as the challenge to make our faith a “power and passion in authority among the powers and passions of our lives.”  P.T. Forsyth


“GOOD - AND TEMPTING”

It would be easy to say that the way to deal with temptation is to not really live.  Not really affirm the appetites and passions of life as beautiful.  Not really affirm the ambition of life as good.  Not let the spirit of life out of its cage to really fly.

The church has implied this in the past by making the holier less passionate , the purer less ambitious, the righteous less in touch with the real world.  But it "ain’t necessarily so!"

It is the good, the beautiful, the precious which tempts us, not the ugly, bad, valueless.

Ours is the task of learning how to overcome temptation without destroying the good which is ours to experience and share.  Learning how to live with passion, ambition and the desire to get all we can out of life, and doing this in a way which does not destroy but enhances life

For we do not live by bread alone and we do not live alone.
We cannot continually put ourselves first and come out on top.

 “TEMPTED TO BELONG TO THE WORLD”

Jesus second temptation was to go for it big.  As Henri Nouwen says, “The whole life of Jesus of Nazareth was a life in which all upward mobility was resisted.”

With Jesus the first are last, the wise are the foolish, the powerful are the weak, the rich are the poor, and the free are the slaves.  He reverses the order of things.  He comes down to us.  He didn’t go for the biggest and the best in the eyes of this world.

This is our temptation too.  “In (our) technological and highly competitive society we are characterized by a pervasive drive for upward mobility....The result is a spiral of increasing desire for power which parallels a spiral of increasing feelings of weakness.”  Nouwan

We do not belong to the world.  We belong to God.  But we are tempted to belong to the world.  To worship power.  It is for this reason that we need to repent many times and say with Jesus, “Be off Satan, I must follow the downward way of the cross, for I worship the Lord my God and serve only Him.  In my powerlessness his power and love are made perfect.”