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A SHOWDOWN IN THE DESERT Deuteronomy 26.1-11 If you were here last week you know that we spent some time thinking about what happened on one particular mountaintop at one point in the course of Jesus’ and his disciples wandering journeys of teaching, healing, and preaching the good news of the kingdom of God. The last Sunday before the season which began this week, the season of Lent, is usually devoted to the story of the Transfiguration, and we dwelled on that story in all its mystery and majesty last week. And as we pivot now into this season of purple vestments, with the whiff of Wednesday’s ashes still lingering in the air, and as we read on from that mountaintop event, we might, if we read carefully, notice a crucial, pivotal line from the Gospel of Luke, not many verse down from the Transfiguration story. It is a thematic marker in the narrative, marking a shift in tone and in urgency. The wandering part of the journey is done. Now Jesus has but one goal, and he pursues it relentlessly. For in Luke 9.51, we read, “When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.” He set his face. It was set. There was no indecision, no waffling, no turning back, no detours taken. Luke tells us that Jesus had a flinty, feral resolve that no trial or temptation could unhinge. He knew where he was going, and he knew why. This verse, Luke 9.51, should, I believe, loom in the background of all of our Lenten musings in the coming weeks, and the image of that steel-eyed, flinty resolve, born of love, born of a fierce obedience to his Father in heaven should linger in our hearts. For the journey of Lent is a journey with our Jesus to Jerusalem. It is a journey, for those first disciples, of gradual realization of what fate might await Jesus in Jerusalem, a realization that dawned upon them all too slowly. We, of course, know, because we’ve seen the end of the movie. Still, Lent remains for us in the Christian tradition a season of discovery, of inward spiritual journey, of gradual awakening, just like the earth awakening to life after a long winter. It is a season of testing and of being tested, of confrontation, of stretching what we know and what we can do and endure. This is one of the reasons why the first Sunday after Ash Wednesday, we traditionally dwell for a time, both in our Gospel reading and in the reading from the Pentateuch, the five books of the Law, on the experience of the desert. The desert, is a place of testing, of yearning, of learning to trust, of putting aside present comfort for future gain, and of forging identity. “My ancestor was a wandering Aramaean,” runs the opening line of the Israelite narrative of faith, referring to Jacob, who fled from his family and was found by God and his angels while sleeping (where?) in the desert. We, too, were aliens once, homeless, vagabond, few in number. In the story of Exodus, the many tribes, clans and lineages of Hebrew slaves depart Egypt a disaggregated rebel horde, but they enter Canaan, forty years later, a nation, the children of Israel, the people of God. In the desert, they had found their identity. But it was not without cost, without trial, and error. Not without testing, and an arduous journey, fraught with peril and pitfalls. None of those, the story of Moses tells us, who had themselves fled Egypt on the night of the first Passover, not even Moses himself, would in fact enter the Promised Land. Only their descendants would, their children and grandchildren. There was some bitterness along the way. Israel was tested in the desert, and likewise, Israel, we are told explicitly in Exodus 17, tested God. “Take us back to Egypt,” they complained. The desert, you see, can be an unforgiving place, and Lent is hard. In Luke’s story we find Jesus, immediately following his baptism by John in the Jordan, being full of the Holy Spirit, and led by the Spirit into the desert, into the wilderness, where he endured a period of preparation. In the Bible, as we have seen in the stories of Queen Esther, for example, or the prophet Daniel, the people of Nineveh in Jonah’s story, and even King David, fasting is a spiritual practice of preparation and purification. Fasting, going without food, is inevitably coupled, in the Bible, with a time of intense prayer, for although it is a trial of physical endurance to fast, it is also, in the Bible, typically an exercise that is done in preparation for an even more intense spiritual trial. So Jesus, empowered by the Spirit, went out into the desert, where he fasted for 40 days and nights. And at the end of that time, Luke tells us, stating the obvious, he was famished. We’ve all known times when, having to rise to unusually strenuous or arduous challenges in our emotional, spiritual, or family life, we have gone without proper food or sleep, either by accident or by choice, because, perhaps, there was so much to do, so much to lose or to win, and we knew it. And sometimes in those times, the importance of the cause or our dedication to it has been such that, even while our bodies suffered, our spirits were fed and flourished, like the 80-something woman who marched with Dr. King in Selma in 1963, who confessed, “My feets is tired, but my soul, she’s at rest.”S It was a showdown in the desert. Jesus battled his cunning adversary as boldly and as cannily as any gunslinger from the old west. The devil took aim three times, and each slug had a word of Scripture inscribed on it. (Yes, the devil can quote Scripture, too. Be careful with this book.) The first test was the test of limitless possibility, and of cheap, short-term satisfaction. You can do it, the devil says, so why not? You can have it, so why deny yourself? The devil, employing a variety of the old trick he used with Eve in the Garden of Eden, but this time appealing to what Jesus already knew was the power in him the power of the Son of God, urged Jesus, “it’s there for the taking, why shouldn’t you take it?” I am reminded of the great line from Albert Camus’s perennially timely novel The Plague, where he as the narrator say, “Our townsfolk were not more to blame than others; they forgot to be modest, that was all, and thought everything was still possible for them.” Or the line that we still hear from the admen on TV: “Now you can have the – fill in the blank: car, wristwatch, handsome home – you deserve.” How do they know I deserve it? The truth is, they don’t, but that’s the subtlety of the seduction. In the world of the admen, everything is possible, no desire is forbidden, there is nothing you can’t, or shouldn’t have. And pretty soon, if you follow this line to the end of the road, you’re Tiger Woods reading a prepared statement to the press. The second test was the test of dominion, of world domination. The key words the devil uses this time are “glory” and “authority”, and he promises to give them both to Jesus. But Jesus knows that glory belongs to God alone, and authority is something that even he, the Son of God, must earn, in reliance upon the Spirit of God. It’s something like the difference, as someone told me long ago, between someone who vociferously, aggressively, insistently demands other people’s respect or attention, and someone who, by their very nature and bearing and being, commands it. It won’t be Luke’s Gospel, but rather at the end of Mathew’s Gospel, following the account of all that would happen during that week in Jerusalem, in which Jesus tells his disciples, uttering an implicit rebuke to the devil and his second test, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. I earned it.” Then comes the third test, the test of invulnerability, the childish fantasy of invincibility. It comes when we start believing our own press releases, and forgetting who it was who brought us up out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. It comes when we begin to see ourselves as indestructible, or worse yet, irreplaceable, and we get careless, listless. We start to coast, like we’re twelve years old on a bicycle going down hill, not thinking that there’s a train track at the bottom of the hill, not seeing the signal flashing. Lent is a time to start taking care, of ourselves, of our families, of the things that are most important to us, including our spiritual lives and the life of faith. Believe me when I tell you that I know I’m not only preaching to the choir this morning, I’m preaching to myself. Not too long ago, six-year-old Beatrice looked up at me and said, in as sincere and as innocent a voice as you could ask for, “Daddy, can you please wait to die until I’m eighteen?” I don’t know where she got that from, no idea where that question came from. I immediately told her, don’t worry, honey, I’m not going to die. No, actually I didn’t say that, but that was my first impulse – that was what I wanted to say. See, it’s the fantasy of indestructibility. If Lent has anything to teach us, it is not to indulge that fantasy. If the Gospels have anything to teach us, it is to believe in the one power in the world that is indeed indestructible, the power of God’s love, and of the victory which is ours to celebrate when Lenten longing ebbs into Easter’s glorious dawn. Luke tells us at the end of his desert account that the devil left Jesus, departing from him, it says, “until an opportune time.” There is a strand of Christian tradition, in both literature and popular piety, that tells of the devil accosting Jesus a second time in the night of his passion, in Gethsemane, and on the cross, testing his resolve, tempting him to abort the mission. This would be the opportune time to which Luke refers. Let us bend the knees of our hears, and kneel in wonder, praise and thanksgiving that Jesus won round one with the devil, the showdown in the desert, which was but preparation, to firm his resolve and to solidify his sense of calling and purpose and identity as God’s beloved Son, in advance of round two; and let us rejoice with exceeding gladness and give thanks to God that he also won the showdown on the hill outside Jerusalem. For his victory, his triumph over death, if we follow him, keeping faith especially in these days of Lenten longing and hope, is also our victory.In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Rev. Jim Thomas
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