Reverend Ian Doescher

The First Sunday of Lent

This past Wednesday was Ash Wednesday, marking the beginning of the season of Lent.  Lent is a forty-day period of introspection and repentance, intended as an emulation of Jesus’ forty-day fast that we hear about in today’s gospel reading from Luke.  (Technically, Lent is forty-six days long, but that’s another story altogether.)  Lent is a time for looking over our lives, and giving a long hard look to where God is working and what God is doing in our lives.  For many people, Lent is a time to give up something they normally have a hard time doing without—chocolate is a popular thing to fast from during Lent, which may be why the chocolate Easter Bunny industry is doing very well.  For most people, once Lent ends on the day of Easter, all bets are off.  Back to eating chocolate, or drinking alcohol, or playing video games, or doing whatever miniature vice you decided to give up for Lent.

Jesus fasts for forty days in the wilderness, and frankly this is unimaginable to me.  There is a popular activity for youth groups called the thirty-hour famine, a combination service project and lock-in that was created by World Vision.  The event, which is usually a fundraiser to combat world hunger, involves youth groups getting together at noon on a certain day, usually a Saturday, then playing games, having activities and spending the night at the church, all of which lasts until 6 p.m. the next day.  The trick is that during those thirty hours, the youth group doesn’t eat at all—hence the thirty-hour famine.  And usually at the end, there is a dinner—or, more accurately, a breakfast, a break-fast—made by parents and friends in celebration of the youth’s accomplishment of going thirty hours without food.  And predictably, when these events occur, the teenagers involved declare that their experiences of hunger during the thirty hours helped them understand what it might be like for someone to live a life where actual famine is a reality.  Undoubtedly these sentiments are heartfelt, even if we might question how accurate the comparison is between hunger felt at the end of thirty hours of not eating, and hunger that comes from the effects of famine and malnourishment.  But my point here is that if it is difficult for us to think about going thirty hours without food, it is nearly impossible to imagine Jesus going without food for forty days.  On the other hand, many African American churches have a tradition of using fasts as a time of discernment.  If you have a difficult problem to figure out, a life decision to be made, spend some time fasting on it.  Rather than let your gut be filled with unnecessary food that will just bog your body and your mind down, fast a little and get some clarity.  This, I think, is much closer to the reason why Jesus went into the wilderness to fast.  Jesus went to the desert not so much to get a sense for what it means to be hungry—which is what the thirty-hour famine tries to accomplish—but rather to prepare himself for the mission that lay ahead. Jesus goes into the desert to fast for forty days and nights in the same spirit of people who fast in the African American church: to prepare himself for what is to come next, to clear his mind and set him straight with God.

Luke says, “He ate nothing during those days,” and then adds, in perhaps the greatest understatement of the Bible, “and at the end of them he was hungry.”   Well, I should think so.  And it is then, at the end of the forty days, that the temptation comes.  Of all the dirty tricks that the tempter, the accuser, ha-satan, or simply the devil, plays, perhaps the worst is coming to Jesus at the end of the forty days, when Jesus is famished.  The devil tempts Jesus three times, and I want to look a bit more closely at what is involved in each of the three temptations.  At my meeting with my young clergy group this past Tuesday, we tried to decide which of the three temptations was the greatest—Matthew and Luke list the order of the temptations slightly differently, so we wondered if there were some rhyme or reason to the ways in which the temptations are ordered in various gospels.  But none of us could really agree on which temptation was greater—the temptation to turn stones into bread, the temptation to have authority over all kingdoms of the world, or the temptation to jump from the highest point of the temple and let angels rescue him.  That’s the order Luke lists the temptations in—stone into bread, authority over all nations, and jumping from the height—and I’m going to talk about those three in exactly the opposite order as they are told in the gospel of Luke.

That means the first temptation to talk about is jumping from the height of the temple.  “The devil led [Jesus] to Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the temple.  ‘If you are the Son of God,’ he said, ‘throw yourself down from here.  For it is written: “He will command his angels concerning you to guard you carefully; they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.”’  Jesus answered, ‘It says: “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”’”  It is worth noting that this third temptation is the only time here in Luke 4 where the devil quotes scripture, although Jesus does so each time he refutes the devil.  It is as though after two unsuccessful tries at tempting Jesus, the devil finally decides to play Jesus’ game of quoting scripture, in other words to put his case in words Jesus seems to understand.  Of course, the devil’s ploy doesn’t work.  But this is a helpful reminder for our day and age that just because someone quotes scripture, it doesn’t mean what they’re saying is from God.  Looking at the specific temptation the devil offers here, we see that it is one of superhuman ability or the ability to cheat death.  It’s difficult to imagine just how the angels would guard Jesus, such that he would be lifted up in their hands if he jumped.  Is the result that Jesus would appear to fly, or that Jesus would fall but not die?  It’s hard to say, but either scenario is tempting.  I’ll admit to being one of the millions who enjoys superhero movies.  I’ll admit to having had discussions with good friends about whether we’d rather be Superman or Batman.  So if this temptation the devil offers Jesus is to jump from the temple top and suddenly have the ability to fly, that’s pretty cool.  I can see why someone would want that.  Or, what if it’s the temptation to fall but not die?  To cheat death?  That’s maybe an even greater temptation.  “Death and taxes,” the saying goes, are the two things humans can’t avoid.  But what if you could avoid death?  That seems like one of the great temptations known to humanity, and volumes of fiction have been written about people trying to cheat death.

The second temptation is the temptation to great power.  “The devil led [Jesus] up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world.  And he said to him, ‘I will give you all their authority and splendor, for it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to.  So if you worship me, it will all be yours.’  Jesus answered, ‘It is written, “Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.”’”  There’s a line that recurs throughout the Mel Brooks movie “The History of the World, Part One,” and that line is, “It’s good to be the king.”  It’s good to be the king, because kings have access to almost endless power.  My mom sometimes starts off sentences with the words “When I’m queen of the world.”  Usually those sentences are a way to express her strong like or dislike of a particular thing.  “When I’m queen of the world, perfume will be outlawed.”  “When I’m queen of the world, Robert Redford will wait on me night and day.”  And so on.  Wouldn’t we all love to be rulers of the world?  So here, in this second temptation, the devil offers Jesus the chance to have as much power as a human can have, and all Jesus has to do is worship the devil once, and it will be his.  We’ve probably all heard the story of Faust, the fictional character who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge.  Faust is a character originally German in origin, but whose story has been told again and again for centuries, by playwrights like Marlowe and Goethe.  It’s a story that seems to resonate with people, maybe because we all feel like we’d like to make a deal with the devil, but we also all know that such deals come to no good end.  Jesus knows that too, and gives up the opportunity to sell his own soul to the devil, to become the original Faust, even for all the power in the world.

That brings us to the third temptation, which as I said a minute ago is the one that comes first in the gospel of Luke: “The devil said to [Jesus], ‘If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.’  Jesus answered, ‘It is written: “Man does not live on bread alone.”’”  Jesus will be tempted with power and superhuman ability after this, but right now, Jesus is merely asked to turn stone to bread.  Why not?  If he can turn water into wine, surely he can turn stone into bread.  And what’s so great about bread after all, compared to what’s coming next—unending power and superhuman ability?  But I think we miss something important if we think it’s easy for Jesus to pass up turning stone into bread.  Instead, I think this first temptation is the greatest temptation for two reasons: first, because it is a chance to make something out of nothing, and second, because it offers to fulfill an immediate need.  Let me take those one at a time.  First, making something out of nothing.  My friend Ken pointed out during our young clergy group meeting that this tendency to want to make something out of nothing—bread from stone—is a really human temptation, and something we fall into regularly.  He used our dependence on credit cards as his example, making something—all this great stuff we can buy—out of essentially nothing but the promise to pay back the money… sometime.  I think another good example is lottery tickets.  I confess to buying a very occasional Powerball ticket when the prize gets above the $200 million mark—as though winning $20 million wouldn’t be enough for me—but I also admit that I know this is a case of trying to make something out of nothing, trying to turn my little dollar into a fortune I literally wouldn’t know what to do with.  The human temptation to make something out of nothing—bread from stones—is what lies behind pyramid schemes, get-rich-quick advice, and Ponzi schemes.  And time and time again we learn that you just can’t make something out of nothing, and if you do it is likely to catch up with you in one way or another.

So the devil’s temptation for Jesus to make stones into bread is partially a temptation to make something out of nothing.  But it is also a temptation to fulfill Jesus’ immediate needs.  Alcoholics Anonymous has an easy-to-remember acrostic device about when you should and shouldn’t make decisions or take action.  That device is called HALT, spelled with a capital H-A-L-T.  The four letters of HALT stand for four states of being, four things a person might feel: hungry, angry, lonely, and tired.  Hungry, angry, lonely, and tired.  And the wisdom from Alcoholics Anonymous is that if you are feeling any of those four things—hungry, angry, lonely, or tired—and you are thinking about making a big decision or taking some particular action, you should HALT.  You should stop yourself in your tracks, because times when we are hungry, angry, lonely or tired are times when are most vulnerable, times when we make the worst choices possible.  Anyone who has been a parent knows that the root cause of temper tantrums isn’t usually the toy that has gone missing or the balloon that popped—much more often it’s about a child being hungry or tired.  And the same is true for adults too.  So when the devil tempts Jesus with the words, “tell this stone to become bread,” the devil is putting before Jesus the answer, the key, to one of these four vulnerable emotional states, and the one that Luke has just finished telling us Jesus is feeling: “at the end of [the forty days Jesus] was hungry.”

I submit that the biggest temptations we face are not the temptations to have unending power and to be the ruler over many nations, the biggest temptations aren’t the temptations to have the superhuman ability to fly or cheat death.  Instead, I think our biggest human temptations come from the desire to make something out of nothing, and to satisfy immediate problems.  There’s nothing about adultery, nothing about cheating, nothing about greed, nothing about overeating, nothing about being petty or rude—there’s nothing about any of these things that promises power or superhuman ability.  Instead, they offer to meet our immediate needs.  They offer to give us a satisfying “fix” that helps us feel better or feel good for a little while.  The real-life temptations most of us face—and maybe right now you’ve all got an image in your head of what your temptations are—I think our real-life temptations are like hard drugs, offering a quick fix so we can feel good for a while.  These are the things we have to really watch out for, because they are the things that drive a wedge between us and God.  I think in the gospel of Luke Jesus faced his hardest temptation first, giving up the temptation to command stones to turn into bread, making something out of nothing and satisfying that desire to end his hunger.  But Jesus knew better than that, he knew that people don’t live on bread alone, that the immediate feeling of hunger he was facing was nothing compared to his relationship with an almighty and everlasting God.  Jesus had his heart focused on holier things, and I think that once Jesus passed up that first temptation, the devil didn’t stand a chance with the subsequent temptations toward power and superhuman ability.  Jesus, fully human, had already faced the hardest temptation of all, and had turned the devil away.

Friends, at its best Lent can be more than a time for giving up chocolate for forty-six days.  At its best, Lent can be a time to examine our temptations and our desires, and ask not only whether we are being honest with ourselves about what is tempting us, but also ask whether those temptations and desires are in keeping with God’s will.  The good news in all of this is that in our times of temptation, in our times of desire that threaten to push us farther from God, in those times God’s Spirit is there with us.  Jesus “was led by the spirit in the desert,” and immediately after he is tempted Jesus is described as returning to Galilee “in the power of the Spirit.”  The Spirit never left Jesus, from those forty days in the desert to his three temptations by the devil.  And the Holy Spirit never leaves us, God’s presence is always with us, even in times of temptation, particularly temptation that is so difficult because so ordinary, incredibly hard though incredibly human.  Thanks be to a God who remains with us even in our worst moments of temptation, even when we give into temptation and fall into sin, even when we call to God from the depths of our sin and risk the belief that God does forgive.  May each of us have a blessed season of Lent.  Amen.