The Sermon Text —Luke 4:1-13

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.’ Jesus answered him, ‘It is written, "One does not live by bread alone." ’

Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, ‘To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.’ Jesus answered him, ‘It is written,

"Worship the Lord your God,
and serve only him." ’

Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written,

"He will command his angels concerning you,
to protect you",

and

"On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone."

Jesus answered him, ‘It is said, "Do not put the Lord your God to the test."’ When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.

"It’s A Wonderful World?"

One of my favorite pop songs, particularly when sung by Louis Armstrong, is: What a Wonderful World. Most of you know it…it begins:

I see trees of green, red roses too.
I see them bloom for me and for you
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.

One of the lines a bit later says,

I see friends shaking hands, saying, "how do you do. They’re really saying, "I love you.

Each verse ends: What A Wonderful World.

For the most part, this is the way I feel. The world I live in is a wonderful world. I have work I absolutely enjoy. I’m surrounded by people I adore. I have a terrific family – a wonderful, wife, great children who I love, and who love me. I have good friends, and health. My days are filled doing things I enjoy doing. It’s a wonderful world!

Or is it?

It doesn’t take long to paint a different picture, does it? We are digging in from a horrific winter storm. We wonder, is it our imagination or are there more peaks and valleys – more weather extremes than ever before? A winter tornado in Florida, the gulf coast still trying to put their lives together after Katrina, Asian countries still reeling three years later after a Tsunami.

Nearly every week another friend enters the hospital. This week it is Larry Otis who collapsed in church on Ash Wednesday. Next week, who knows?

We thought that Americans were making progress with the age-old problem of race, but perhaps not. How many Mel Gibsons still hold distorted views of Jewish people? How many think like Seinfeld’s Kramer, who goes by Michael Richards, whose most unfunny performance at a West Coast comedy club not only evoked the demeaning "N" word, but also suggested there was a day when Black men were strung up. Here in Madison Hmong people were shocked when a university professor reportedly suggested that all Hmong men were either predators or gang members.

Our society has a major problem with drugs and alcohol. Find the section on DUIs in the paper and you shake your head. A man in Stoughton arrested for the 15^th time on a drunk driving charge is a symbol of how out of control things happen to be. It happens at every level of life. Most of Hollywood appears to be in rehab. Mel Gibson was, Lindsay Lohan ought to be, and Brittany Spears? She’s in, she’s out, she’s in. Who has time to keep track? If you have people who have problems with drugs or alcohol it is not a wonderful world.

Christians gather on this first Sunday in Lent to face the major reason for the problems in the world—sin. We are separated from God. The Creator’s intent was for all of us to live in harmony with each other, with nature, with ourselves, and most of all with God. But things are not the way they are supposed to be. We have sinned against God by what we have done and what we have failed to do. We have not loved our neighbors as we have loved ourselves.

We are fully aware that we face incredible temptations each day. It seems archaic to sing, "Hoards of devils fill this land all threatening to devour us," but we recognize the idea. Evil has a power, a seductive power that sucks us in. If we don’t learn to deal with it, we lose who we are and what we intend to be.

One of our temptations is stereotyping people. A priest in a big city was riding on the subway. Across from him was a man in smelly, dirty clothes who appeared to be dealing with a hangover. He was reading a newspaper. Suddenly the man looked up from his newspaper and said, "Father, rheumatism creates such great pain. What causes it?"

The priest saw an opportunity to urge the man to change his life and said, "It normally comes from a life of dissipation. Bad eating, excessive drinking, riotous living with wild women." The man let out a sigh and said, "How sad!" The priest paused to let his words sink in and then said, "You look surprised." The man said, "I’m shocked." Then the priest said, "How long have you had rheumatism?"

The man looked up and said, "Oh, I don’t have rheumatism, I was just reading in the paper that the Pope does."

Stereotyping always comes around and smacks us in the face.

Rather than worry about the sins of others, Lent is designed for us to face our own problems. The first step – just like the first step in dealing with drugs and alcohol – is to face our sin. We go through periods of denial regarding our own goodness, just as problem drinkers go through their denial. Some of our denial is a societal one. In the early 1900s there was a movement that said, "In every day and every way we are getting better and better and better." World War I put an end to that non-sense.

We’ve gone through periods in education where it assumed that children were basically good and pure and that the goal of educators was to get out of their way so they could follow their natural instincts. Most of these experiments proved to be disasters. The commune movement—where no one erected any stops signs, where children never learned the word no, where children were free to raise themselveshad terrible consequences. Values clarification came out of a movement that believed we are all basically good, and our values are basically all good. We didn’t have to teach values, we just clarified them.

"We’re all basically good," springs up every now and then. Most of the time it sounds like total denial. In the personal realm we hear it when someone has been caught doing something tawdry, of someone has been arrested for a crime, even an heinous crime. We hear them plead, "Basically, I am a good person." Back to Michael Richards…the Kramer guy…and Mel Gibson. Gibson insisted that he wasn’t anti-Semitic; Richards insisted that he wasn’t a racist. Right, you just play one in public.

We begin worship with the admission that we are sinners. We don’t have it all together. We need help. We ask God for help. An admission of sin is not a sign of weakness; it is a sign that we see ourselves as God sees us, as people who need to live with limitations. We all face temptations – they come at us in powerful ways. That is why Lent begins by looking at the temptations of Jesus and how he handled them.

His first temptation was to use his remarkable gifts to take care of himself first and foremost. "Me first," is a huge temptation in our lives. Bread, in this passage, is a metaphor for all of our material needs – needs that are basically good and necessary, but which ought not be elevated above every other value. One of our great temptations is to treat wants as needs. One of the reasons young families get trapped economically is that they buy bigger homes than they can afford, or second homes or bigger cars, thus forcing them both to work and to juggle their family responsibilities. Their debt makes working a need, and excessive work makes family life a pressure cooker.

Jesus knows from scripture that we don’t live by things alone. Our first and primary responsibility is to God.

The second temptation he faced was to change his tactics to reach a noble goal. It is one of our temptations as well. The temptation goes like this: if we have the right goals then we it is okay to cut corners in order to meet these goals. My goal is a noble goal – to ensure justice for everyone. To reach that goal I may have to defeat my opponents even if it means I ridicule them, or taunt them, or harass them. After all they are the enemy and they stand in the way of my noble goal. This is often the thinking when someone decides to run for public office. As an elected official, the thinking goes, I can do everyone a lot of good. In order to get elected I may have to twist the truth, or alter some facts. But since my goal is noble, it is okay. Once elected, I may have to do something I don’t like in order to be elected again. I may have to take money from someone because without money I can’t be elected and fulfill the noble goal.

People reason the same way when they cheat on a test. They do so to reach a noble goal…graduation. Once they graduate they can do wonderful things for the world. Cheating is necessary. But we know that no ignoble means leads to a noble end.

We may or may not be tempted in the same manner as Jesus, but we will be tempted. We need to be aware that we answer to someone greater than ourselves, and that we need to get both our means and our ends straight. That is why Jesus deals with each temptation by quoting scripture. We can’t always trust ourselves – we need to answer to our higher power. We are not capable of being our own judge. We need to be accountable.

The way that happens is to listen to God’s word. Again we go to Martin Luther’s powerful hymn:

The hymn suggests that scripture, that "one little word," has the power to set our lives back on course. It has the power to get us outside of ourselves, and get us thinking like God. We’ve begun forty days of renewal. That means we have forty days to walk with and listen intently to God. Forty days to become the people God wants us to be. Amen.

© 2007