josephholubsermons
Lent 1
February 21, 2010
Luke 4:1-13
Seductive Signs Along The Discipleship
The story of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness is always the
assigned gospel on this First Sunday of Lent.
A
key to
our understanding and
application of this story for us is to ask the question,
“Why did the gospel writers
(Matthew and Luke) choose to tell this story?”
John does not include it and
Mark’s version is only two verses long, providing none of the
detail that Matthew and Luke provide.
What was their purpose in telling it, and what did the story mean
for them and for their communities of faith?
As I reflected on Luke’s version of the story this week, two
vivid images came into my mind, one from my childhood and one from
last Thanksgiving-2009.
My childhood memory was from the first time my mom, dad and I
went camping with our new pop-up camper in the summer of 1958, our
destination the Black Hills of South Dakota.
The one thing
I remember the most clearly about that trip, even
though it was almost 52 years ago, is not Mount Rushmore and the
beautiful Black Hills, not the awesome Badlands,
but the
plethora of
signs we saw along the side of the highways that said,
“See Wall Drug.”
Those of you familiar with that part of the
country know exactly to what I am referring.
It seemed like every few miles, all over the upper mid-west, the
same little sign would magically reappear along the
roadway’s edge, “See Wall Drug.”
In case you don’t know, Wall Drug is a store located about 50 miles east
of Rapid City in Wall, South Dakota.
I hadn’t thought about Wall Drug for decades but was curious
to see if the place still existed, so I went to the Internet.
Oh
yes, bigger than ever, today boasting of a 77,000 sq. foot store
calling itself, “America’s
favorite roadside attraction,” selling everything from bobble-heads
to books, native American artifacts to cowboy boot spurs.
But what I remember the most were the
ever-present signs
luring us off our designated route to
“See Wall Drug.”
The other image is from our drive to Kansas City last November.
No, I didn’t see even one Wall Drug sign, but I saw
another kind of sign.
When you drive that long, relatively straight, boring ribbon of
endless Interstate-Highway across Kansas, as you approach many of the
exits, you cannot help but notice the super-sized McDonald’s signs that
tower up and loom over the flat Kansas landscape.
Of course, their purpose is to lure you off
the highway to indulge in a “Big
Mac”, “Quarter Pounder with Cheese” or whatever McDonalds is peddling
these days.
As I reflected on this temptation story those images came into
my mind. Why? The
gospels were written partly for the purpose of
defining and describing
discipleship for their communities of faith.
In each gospel Jesus invites the disciples to
follow him.
“Follow me” is an invitation into living his kind of
life.
Temptation is about
being lured off the path of that life of discipleship; being
seduced away from living the Jesus life, the life that we are called
into as his followers and disciples.
Mathew and Luke want their readers to know that as Jesus prepared to begin his public ministry, he would
face three seductive temptations to depart from his
chosen path. Also, LUke would tell us that his community of faith would face the
same three temptations
and, I believe, so do we!
Like those pervasive signs along the highway, we cannot get away
from them. They are
always popping up along the way trying to seduce us and lure us
away from living the Jesus life of discipleship.
The first “sign” of temptation
that pops up on the road of discipleship is the temptation to be
comfortable and secure.
Jesus had been fasting. He had to be hungry and exhausted.
Fasting is a spiritual discipline to help clear away the
clutter in one’s life and to focus on what is most important -
core spiritual values and
identity. This first
temptation would have lured Jesus away from his core mission, that being to embody the radical love God.
But Jesus would not be lured to
break the fast with quick
satisfaction of a desire to be comfortable.
He resisted the tempter with the words,
“One does not live by bread
alone.” His
response was not an indictment of eating or feeding, but it was a
statement of his commitment to his mission of embodying the love
of God as his highest priority, and he
would not be deterred.
His response is a prelude to all the ways we see that he
stayed on course, even when love exacted from him a great personal
cost.
We
invest a great deal in providing
ourselves with easy and comfortable lives.
It can be a gargantuan obstacle especially
when we hear Jesus’ call into his kind of life; a kind of life that
often calls upon us to risk and sacrifice for the sake of God’s
love. This temptation
reaches its ultimate
crescendo when we feel caught
between two paradigms:
the paradigm of our consumer culture that says
you become full by filling
yourself with expressions of comfort and security –
and – the paradigm of the
kingdom of God that Jesus embodied and described when he said you become
full by giving yourself away in
love; by emptying yourself
for the sake of others.
The second “sign” of temptation
that pops up on the road of discipleship is the confusion of
political agenda for the agenda of the kingdom of God.
The temptation offered here was for Jesus’ agenda of the kingdom
of God to be mediated exclusively by the political realm.
I think one of the most dangerous temptations of our time is
the notion that the agenda of the kingdom of God, as embodied in the life
of Jesus, can be mediated by the agenda of a political party or
group.
The power inherent in the kingdom of God
is the power of sacrificial love; the
power of loving neighbor as self; the power of
loving one’s adversary; the
power of including those outside of narrowly drawn religious and
political boundaries; the power of giving oneself away freely and
lavishly in servant-hood to the last and the least; the power of
compassion.
Political power
by nature almost always becomes: exclusive; arrogant; tribal;
authoritarian; characterized by boundaries and hierarchies of relative worth and power;
defines neighbor as those who think alike; and it can become violent.
Political power often expresses itself in coercion, influence,
status and leverage.
The temptation offered to Jesus was to invest in the political realm as the mediator of the kingdom of God, but he would have nothing to do with it. He knew that the agenda of kingdom of God would easily be corrupted and distorted by the political realm. And we clearly see that in his ministry, Jesus didn’t collaborate with political power, but he spoke truth to political power – and in the end was crucified by political power. Our job as disicples is to speak truth to power.
The third “sign” of temptation
that pops up along the road of discipleship is the temptation of the
appeal of the spectacular.
This is what I call the temptation of
BIG RELIGION, with “BIG”
being the operative word.
This is religion that: becomes enamored with itself;
becomes institutionalize with the survival of the institution becoming
the most important value; that
likes big buildings, big personalities; likes to make big impressions;
likes to
wield a big stick of influence;
gravitates toward being dogmatic; offers simplistic answers for everything and everybody; leaves
little room for critical thinking and questioning; has appointed
itself to be the sole mediator for God’s grace in the world.
BIG RELIGION!
When we follow Jesus from this temptation story onward in the gospels,
it becomes clear that he was not about spectacular displays or BIG
RELIGION, but more about a quiet, humble and fluid spirituality of God’s
self-giving love – a love that took him all the way to a cross.
Luke ends the temptation story little different from Matthew by saying,
“When the Devil had finished
every test, he departed from him until an
opportune time.”
To me that's a non-ending! That’s Luke’s way of saying that
the story didn’t end there for Jesus, didn’t end for Luke’s faith
community, and doesn’t end for us.
The story continues.
Those “signs” of temptation
that would lure us off the path of discipleship are going to pop up
again and again and again.
Those seductive signs will especially appear when we feel
called to love as Jesus loved, in uncommon and lavish ways;
when we answer Jesus’ call to
take up our cross and follow; When give ourselves away in ways that far
exceed the narrow and parochial ways in which we normally love.
That is when those signs will appear and try to lure us off the path
of discipleship.
The grace of it is that we are not alone on this journey.
We are being led and accompanied by Jesus every step of the way;
to inspire us to live his life; to pick us up with grace and
encouragement when we falter and are seduced by the signs along the way;
to be our guide, our mentor, our Lord.
Amen.