GRACE IN THE WILDERNESS

A Sermon by Rev. James D. Brown

Market Square Presbyterian Church

The First Sunday in Lent

February 10, 2008

 

Jeremiah 31:1-6 and Matthew 4:1-11

 

“For how long have you been completely alone in your life?”  Seriously, think for a moment—when were you completely by yourself, no one else in view, no one to talk with, not one other person around? 

 

David Douglas, who was our Consecration Sunday speaker two years ago, poses this question in his book, Wilderness Sojourn, Notes in the Desert Silence.[1]  When he asks his friends this question, the answer tends to be, “Oh I once was in strange city by myself for several days where I knew no one.”  But that’s not the point.  When were you altogether alone?

 

David says that only rarely has anyone come up with a period of time longer than 24 hours.  David notes:  “The experience of prolonged solitude, voluntarily chosen, is rare.  It should not be surprising that few of us pass time by ourselves in the wilderness; we seldom seek out solitude anywhere.”

 

David’s book is about a seven day sojourn of his in the desert of the Southwest.  His question is a provocative one as we turn our attention to Jesus and his wilderness sojourn.   It’s a remarkable passage, coming right after Jesus’ baptism by John in the Jordan. 

 

We tend in a romantic sort of way to view the baptism of an adult as something that happens on the far side of doubt and temptation.  The story of Jesus’ baptism sets us straight—temptations take on greater strength once we find ourselves on the narrow road toward righteousness with God.  Matthew has Jesus coming right up out of the water of the Jordan and into the Judean desert. 

 

I can’t help but be reminded of making my way along one of the dusty paths in Qumran last summer and looking up into the vast expanse of sandy cliffs and thinking:  “I’ve walked today where Jesus walked.” 

 

Now we find ourselves stepping off the beaten path and heading with Jesus into that absolutely awesome desert expanse for forty days and forty nights.  Let’s look closely at the very first verse in our lesson.

 

Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.

 

Jesus is led by the Spirit.  When I hear the word Spirit I think of the wind blowing outside our sanctuary this morning.  The word in Greek is pneuma, meaning air or wind.  We can’t see it, but we feel its presence.  It envelops us; it is everywhere all at once.  It is God with us.

 

Jesus is led by the Spirit into the wilderness.   Wilderness is a word that begs to be defined in a way that would reflect what the Judean desert meant for Jesus.    David Douglas, who was in the congregation I served in Santa Fe for over a decade, shares this personal lament.  I suspect he may have had me as well as a few other preachers I know in mind.  I should add that I left Santa Fe the year before his book was published:

 

I harbor a hope of hearing one day, particularly during sermons,

the word wilderness used other than as a metaphor for gloom,

bafflement, and personal crisis.  It is employed so relentlessly

as a pejorative figure of speech, as a condition from which to

extricate ourselves as soon as possible.  Forgotten is the paradoxical

biblical role of desert and mountain—to heal as well as humble, to

reconcile as well as reproach—and the possibility that, on occasion,

“in the wilderness” is precisely where we should be journeying.[2]

         

David rightly reminds us that Jesus, like pilgrims before and since, “found grace in the wilderness,” as Jeremiah puts it.   Over and over we read of Jesus removing himself from the crowds and even his own disciples to pray and fast and listen for God’s still small voice. 

 

Let’s look to the nature of the grace Jesus experiences and models for us.  Matthew couches it in terms of temptation by the devil.  Where’s the grace in that? we ask.  I think it becomes clear as we wrestle a bit with what we mean by the words devil and temptation. 

 

The word used here for devil is diabolos.  The word did not originate as a title or a proper name.  It means slanderer, one who makes accusations against another in order to undo them.  As William Barclay says in his book on The Lord’s Prayer, diabolos “is the personification of all that is against God and all that is out to ruin [us] in this life and the life to come.”  Barclay goes on:

 

It makes little difference whether we speak of evil or of the Evil One.

We know quite well that there is in this world a force of evil which

attacks goodness and which invites to sin.  That force may be a personal

force, or that force may be what we might call the cumulative effect of

all the evil acts and evil decisions which have been part of the human

scene.  Be the force personal or impersonal, it is there.[3]

 

I’ll give you my thought on this.  I truly believe that the Spirit of God, the pneuma of God, envelops and permeates all of creation.  I can’t imagine the devil as a being who has power the same way God has power.  I can imagine being part of a created order whose author is God, a created order not yet finished and one in which human beings are always making choices between the things that are of God and the things that are alien to God. For reasons known only to God, we humans are free to do good and to do evil. 

 

This was driven home for me when I read this last week that Kenneth Yost was one of the government officials gunned down by an irate citizen in Kirkwood, MO.  His wife Carol has been a tremendous leader in the work of Presbyterian Disaster Assistance to heal the scars of Katrina.  Now this tireless servant of others has lost her partner in a mindless act of violence.  Evil is real for sure.  Diabolical acts are an everyday occurrence.

 

This brings us to the word tempted.  David Douglas once looked out on “the maroon hills and ravines where Jesus fasted and prayed” and saw it as less “a setting for temptation than as one for preparation.”  I think this is a very helpful insight.  Jesus takes himself off the beaten path as a thirty-year old to watch and wonder and fast and pray as he prepares for the ministry being thrust upon him by the Spirit of God. Let’s look at the temptations he must face and then has to put aside if he is to truly reflect the love and justice of the One who has anointed him to save his people.

 

“Command these stones to become loaves of bread.”  A clue here is that after forty days and forty nights Jesus is famished.  He is one of us.  He is preparing himself to place his trust in God the way you and I place our trust in God.  His bread will be our bread.  He will not escape the vicissitudes of an authentic human life.  He will not play the magician.

 

I was standing in the drug store the other day waiting for a prescription when I pulled a book off the shelf in front of me.  It was quite an amazing book to be found in a drug store.  Its basic point is that no matter what ails you, you will be made whole by taking a few herbs and drinking eight glasses of water each day.  It’s so tempting to try to escape our human condition, make our way to the fountain of youth, and become like gods. 

 

Jesus says, “No, we do not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes out of the mouth of God.  So prepare yourself for a truly human life, frailties and all.”  Drink your eight glasses of water, and also take your medicine when you need too.  But be sure to place your ultimate trust in God.

 

“Throw yourself down from the pinnacle of the temple and angels will bear you up.”  Jesus peers into the future and sees Jerusalem as a place where his earthly life could well come to an end if he follows the Spirit’s leading and proclaims God’s reign, God’s kingdom being realized in his own life and witness.  Preaching mercy and compassion and humility and self-sacrificing love in a first-century culture awash in armies and empire and religious zealots will make a lot of very powerful people very mad.  More than his foot will be dashed against a stone.

 

This temptation is like unto the first one.  We know it all too well.  We look around at all the problems facing us—just think of global warming—and long for miraculous rescue.  We put off serious reflection and debate, and we especially put off the self-sacrifice clearly required of us—hoping, it seems, to be borne aloft on angels’ wings.  Instead we are called to carve out authentically human lives, called home to live the gospel day by day, knowing full well that this will take courage and fortitude and, maybe, suffering as well.

 

Finally, Jesus has to put aside the temptation to take the world around him through force of arms, to assume the role of an emperor and exercise power over the kingdoms of this world.  “All these I will give you….”  But what would Jesus really gain if he became like Caesar?

  

One commentator says that Jesus is putting aside the temptation to accept the world at face value—with its overriding selfishness and greed and practical atheism—and live as if there is no god but raw power.  Someone has called this the temptation of self-inflicted myopia—choosing not to see clearly what is out there, even when standing on a very high mountain peak.

 

As this challenging text reverberates among us, we do well to remember the conclusion of the bestseller of a few years back, How the Irish Saved Civilization, by Thomas Cahill.  The book chronicles the role of St. Patrick and later heroic monks and scribes who preserved the writings of Western civilization during the Dark Ages that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire.  

 

Cahill’s conclusions are troubling, which is usually not the best way to end a sermon.  But if our trip into the desert with Jesus is to have any relevance at all, we best hear Cahill out.  He points out troubling things we choose to ignore—like the fact that Americans constitute five percent of the world’s population and yet purchase fifty percent of its cocaine.  Or that the world’s population has doubled in my lifetime and at the current rate will double again by 2050.    

 

I’ll close with his final paragraph.  If nothing else it will give us pause, which is what this desert story from the life of Jesus is all about—a healthy pause to take stock as we set our course on a path that leads to Jerusalem, where we will find both a cross and an empty tomb:

Perhaps history is always divided into Romans and Catholics—or,

better, catholics.  The Romans are the rich and powerful who run

things their way and must always accrue more because they

instinctively believe that there will never be enough to go around;

the catholics, as their name implies, are universalists who

instinctively believe that all humanity makes one family, that

every human being is an equal child of God, and that God will

provide….If our civilization is to be saved…if we are to be saved,

it will not be by Romans but by saints.[4]

 

Based on today’s lesson we can add, saints who dare to hear and heed the clarion call to “Worship the Lord your God, and God alone.”  Only then can we expect angels to come and wait on us, too.

 

MARKET SQUARE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

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