3-10-19
Grace to you and peace from God our creator and from our
Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
Surprise! Pop Quiz! Question 1: Where was Jesus tempted?
(the wilderness)
Question 2: How long was he there? (40 days)
Question 3: Who was doing the tempting? (the devil)
Question 4: How many temptations did the devil present to
Jesus? (3)
Now here’s a hard one, for extra credit… does anyone know
from where, or what Jesus had just done right before the temptation in the
wilderness? (Baptized) Very good! A Plus to all of you!!!
Now, I bet you didn’t expect to be getting a quiz from
the pulpit today, and many of you probably started to feel more than a little “test
anxiety.” Your heart rate increase, your stomach got butterflies, and your palm
felt clammy. It’s not fun to be surprised by a test like this, and it was mean
of me to do it.
Fortunately, the test that I gave you this morning was
(mostly) open notes – you could find most answers by reading in your bulletin,
or you could rely on one another. Much like the big Confirmation Exam – for
that one, you can use a lot of different resources to help, including the
Bible, Luther’s Small Catechism, any ELCA website, and my past sermons. There
are still plenty of tests left on the Confirmation bulletin board!
Lent sometimes feels like one big 40-day long exam.
Especially if you are a pastor. One of my non-pastor friends noticed that all
of her pastor friends are WAY more excited by Ash Wednesday than they are about
Easter and Christmas. My hunch is that this has something to do with Easter
being at the END of Holy Week and Lent, and Christmas is at the end of Advent.
We always have so much more energy at the beginning
of Lent than we do at the end.
Because there is always so much TO do.
Do you ever get stress dreams when facing big test or
task is looming? I do! And most of the time for me, they come during Lent,
starting right before Transfiguration Sunday. I dreamed many times where I am
at a strange church, and I can’t find the last page of my sermon, or the right
page in the book, or the communion elements are completely missing. I think I
get these dreams probably because there is so much bubbling in my brain during Lent
– plan and organize for Holy Week and Easter, lead our “Eat, Pray, Learn”
series on the Bible, go to all of the events that inevitably get planned for
March, plus, as a pastor, I should have an extra-holy Lenten discipline, right?
But this year at least I didn’t have to write an Ash
Wednesday Sermon! Instead, I asked around to different people if they were
giving up anything interesting for Lent. And what I got was the usual
responses: sugar, cake, ice cream, sweets. After all, that was one of the
temptations that Jesus faced in the wilderness, right? Didn’t the devil try to
give Jesus some cake, and Jesus said no way, we can’t live on cake alone? No?
Well, not quite.
How many of you remember that process of defragmenting a
hard drive? We really don’t do it anymore. It’s is the process of getting rid
of the unnecessary junk in your computer and rearranging the programs to fill
in the gaps, kind of like arranging your bookshelves by height and size for fit.
Once someone shared with me that it took an entire week to defragment his
computer. A WEEK! Seven whole days without a computer! And this was before
smart phones. Can you imagine?
But defragmenting life is still a much longer process. Letting
God defragment your personal hard drive takes an entire Lent, if not longer. But
that’s pretty much Lent in a nutshell. God taking our fragments and putting
them back together to make a whole that is much better than the
cobbled-together mess we’ve come up with; God making something beautiful out of
the confusion of our lives, and our Lenten discipline is aimed to help with
this process by removing from our lives what is taking up space unnecessarily,
so that this space can be filled with something else. I’m not entirely sure God
has in mind that this would mean I should give up sugar.
On the evening of Ash Wednesday, Pastor Matthew Simpson, one
of the pastors over at Trinity next door, talk about how Lenten fasting is not
about “trying to lose the freshman 15 he gained 15 years ago.” He reminded us
that our Lenten practices are not intended to be for just us alone, as
individuals. Our Lenten practices exist in order to benefit our community, not
just for increasing our own personal piety.
When the devil tempted Jesus with the idea of using his
power to satisfy his own hunger in the moment, Jesus refused. Jesus told him,
“a person does not live by bread alone,” which he quotes from Deuteronomy 8:3:
“…one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth
of the Lord. “
But a person also does not live by bread… alone.
Just like we do not live our lives here on earth … alone. We all need one
another to look out for us, pray for us, advocate for us, and support us. We
all need a posse. Jesus faced his wilderness alone, but we don’t have to.
Lent has been described in many ways: a journey, a
disciple, a time of testing, and a wilderness. But Lent is not the only time in
our lives where we feel ask though we’ve lost our way in a wilderness. In those
wilderness times, what got you through? Or, if your
wilderness time also
coincides with Lent 2019, what is helping out through right now?
For me, I was fed and sustained through my most difficult
times through seeing the love of Jesus through the posse of people who loved me
and took care of me. At my lowest time in my life so far, when I was going
through a divorce, I was with a community of faithful people who loved me and
shared communion with me every single week, who ministered to me even though it
was my job to minister to them. I had people who gave me shelter and made sure
I had a meal on the table and didn’t let me eat alone in my most low times. And
after the final hearing with the judge about my divorce, a friend took me to
lunch at IHOP, where we cried and ate stuffed French toast. At the end of a
desert, came dessert.
We do not live by bread alone. Because even if we don’t
have as many people as we need around us to walk through our dark times with
us, we have Jesus. Jesus, whose body was broken and who died alone on a cross
rather than use his identity as God’s son to his own personal advantage. In
fact, later on in Luke, Jesus DOES miraculously multiply bread… not for
himself, but for well over five thousand people.
If you find yourself a slave to ice cream and cookies,
and want to use Lent as an opportunity to lessen their influence in order to
increase your health, please, by all means, choose this as your Lenten
practice. If Facebook has taken up time you would rather spend nurturing
relationships or serving your neighbors, then please, delete that app from your
phone. But there are plenty of other things that we can also choose to fast
from. We can fast from hurtful words,
from resentment, from judgment, from spending money on non-essentials, or from
single-use plastic, or from reading voices that have been privileged in favor
of those who are not white, male, heterosexual or cis-gender, as I’m doing.
These kinds of fast can help create room for healthier living for yourself and
others, much like defragmenting a computer does.
Or you can choose to add something for Lent instead of
removing something. You can start a prayer journal, commit to calling someone
each day, write letters of gratitude to people in your life who have helped you
through your wilderness times, write letters to our representatives on issues
of justice that you care about, drinking
more water, more time with your family, more time spent helping people in need,
the possibilities are endless.
Or, it can be nothing at all and that’s ok too. Jesus
loves us whether we have a challenging Lent practice, or none at all, whether
we keep it up for all of Lent or whether we don’t. Lent is not a test. And even
if it were, it’s still open book and cooperative. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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