Sunday, February 21, 1999

Rev. Linda Carder

MATTHEW 4:1 - 11

My friend Marva is a constant traveler. She's on the road all the time, and for this reason, she says, she knows O'Hare Airport in Chicago inside out, upside down, and backwards. Now, what you need to know about Marva is she's blind in one eye, deaf in the opposite ear, has a game leg, and constantly fights the ravages of diabetes. But she's on the road all the time anyway. Marva tells that one time she was in the Chicago airport, and a woman looked absolutely lost. She seemed to be getting more distressed by the moment. So Marva went over to her and asked what was wrong. The woman said she just couldn't find her way around the airport, needed to be in such-and-such a place by a certain time, had no clue where it was, didn't know where to get her baggage. "Well," says Marva, "This is a piece of cake! You go down this hall, you turn right down there where you see that booth, you take the C concourse, you take the escalator downstairs, you come out. Piece of cake!" Well, after this description and a little more help, the woman was quite grateful. She looked up at Marva, near tears, and said, "You must be such a nice person! Thank you very much!" Well, Marva says, "Well, actually, I'm not a nice person at all. I married my husband Harold because he's a really nice person and I thought it might rub off on me. Hasn't worked. But you know, I do things like this because I'm trying to share the love of God with anybody I meet." The woman was astounded. And they parted with great glee.

That is the struggle of Christians, isn't it? To live our lives in faith. To live our daily lives so that they show that we claim and proclaim our faith. Marva does it very well. I'm not sure I'm quite so good at it.

This morning we read from Matthew's gospel the story of the Temptation. Matthew was in an early Christian community, and the real struggle was helping those who were followers of Jesus know just what that meant and know who Jesus was. They were all part of the Jewish community. They were still having meetings in the synagogues and so on, so to distinguish just who this Jesus was for those who were followers wasn't an easy task. So, what to do? You tell the stories. And Matthew told the story, thank goodness, and we have it now. Matthew, because of his community, was pretty intentional about how he told the story. First there's a baptism, where God says very clearly--the Spirit comes down from the heavens and says clearly-- "This is my Son, the Beloved, in whom I am well pleased." Jesus is led into the wilderness by that very same Spirit that led him up to the mountain and that came to him at the baptismal waters, and Jesus is tempted by the devil. Then Jesus, after he leaves the wilderness and has been successful in not accepting the Temptations, begins his earthly ministry. So Matthew sets up for us the context in which Jesus begins his ministry. Jesus was named and claimed by God, and therefore we can, as well as those in Matthew's community, know who Jesus is. The Son of God, the Messiah.

And the Temptations that faced Jesus are ones we know. We know full well. We know we should not live by bread alone. Yet we are tempted daily to stack up money, to eat more than we need. We are even tempted to turn bread and butter into bombs, making war rather than peace. We know we're not supposed to do that. We know we're not supposed to put God to the test. We know we're not supposed to have a loss of faith in God's power. We know we're supposed to be able to trust that. But as we live our daily life and struggle with a loved one being ill for a long time and dying, or we struggle with the sudden death of a teenager, when we struggle with loneliness, divorce, or the death of a spouse after many, many years, when we struggle with not having the children we thought we might have, it's really hard not to put God to the test, and to lose faith in God's power.

And idolatry? Oh, we're not tempted by idols any more? Well, you know, I was visiting a friend in Wisconsin after I'd moved out there from this area. Having been a football fan while I was here, I certainly knew of Vince Lombardi, and I knew whence he came. So I say to my little white-headed friend with the glasses on her eyes, "Hey, can we go over to the stadium? Can we go to the Packers' stadium and just see it?" She lowered her glasses on her nose, looked over the glasses with her bright blue eyes, had a kind of a mischievous glint on her face, and she says, "Oh, you want to go and bow at the foot of the great green god?" Well, I don't mean to imply that there's only one kind of possible idolatry that we have. We are bombarded by possible idols, if idols are those things that take us away from our spiritual life and take us away from praising God.

No, we may not have the devil talking to us directly and zapping us from one place to another, but the voices of temptation are so seductive that we get confused. It's easy to get confused. Our story reminds us that we follow the one who was human, just like us, and lived in the very same world, and struggled with the same kinds of things, but who was triumphant, who was named and claimed by God as God's own, and lived that way here on earth. We have this story.

The story also reminds us of the Israelites in the wilderness. When the Spirit took Jesus into the wilderness for forty days and forty nights, it reminds us, doesn't it, of the Israelites in the wilderness for forty years. Robert Raines tells us that the wilderness is the place where we can be apprehended by God. It's a simple place where we aren't impeded by all the distractions, the things that confuse us, the things that would get our mind off who we are and in whom we need to trust. And so we can come closer to God there in the wilderness.

I was teasing Jim over the phone before I came, "Gee, Jim, what do you do for Easter? Here it is, the first Sunday of Lent, you have the Temptation passage, a baptism, communion, and a possible new staff member here--what on earth do you do for Easter?" He laughed. Maybe we need to clear out some stuff as we walk our way toward Easter. That traditionally has been a time of penitence. Last year, when I was at our large Plymouth Church in Des Moines for this Sunday, they were talking about the Catholic church right behind, and the focus being on penitence there. For us, the Protestants in recent years, the focus has been on a kind of dying to the distractions and temptations, all the things around us that keep us from allowing God to come into our lives. Another way of going into Lent is by trying to be aware of all the worldly stuff that claims us and escape as often as we can, once a week, once a day, to some quiet, simple, uncomplicated space, to leave room where we can come face to face with God. And we can walk a little more intentionally with God. Where we can get to know this God who also names us and claims us, and know this Jesus who invites us to this table today, who says to us, "You know, I've been with you in all your human brokenness, and the suffering that batters at you has battered at me as well. As you do, I know loneliness and a fear that my work is futile. As you do, I grieve the scarcity of resources and the crying need of people. With you, I've endured the scorns of the powers and principalities. I've fought the temptation to imitate them. Because I love you, I have become as frail as you are. Because the power of evil breaks you, I choose to allow it to break me as well. Accept this broken bread and this cup in my name, and eat it. Because I love you."

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