Sermon by Fr Chris Yaw; based on Luke 4:1-13
So let's get this straight…
The devil has tried his best to tempt Jesus when Jesus was starving, he hadn't eaten for 40 days. He tried to tempt Jesus when he was tired, he's hiking and spending the hot days and a cold nights out in the barren wilderness, years before there was a Motel 6.
And the devil tried to tempt Jesus when he was lonely, nobody to keep him company, except the devil, who's a really negative person to hang around with...
And so the devil does his best to entice Jesus, to break his humanity, to compromise his divinity, and he totally fails!
And now the devil is going to go off and wait for a "more opportune time?"
Like when Jesus finishes eating at a sushi restaurant? Because I don't care how many pieces of sushi you have you always hungry when you leave -
Or maybe when Jesus is totally exhausted, like after he misses his flight to Tel Aviv and has to spend the night on one of those airport benches?
Or when maybe when Jesus is overcome with loneliness, like when he gets home after a hard day of casting out demons, and goes into his apartment, only to find out: his internet is down!
I mean, if you can't tempt Jesus when he hasn't eaten for 6 weeks, hasn't seen a soul in three fortnights, and is basically sleeping with lizards on rocks in the middle of the desert for 40 nights in a row, come on!
The only way to get Jesus to do what the devil wants him to do is to put him in a place where he'll never go -
Because there are four things that we have learned about Jesus and the way he conducted his life and ministry and they are the four points that I want us to take away from today's sermon.
And these are:
1) That Jesus was able to successfully combat temptation because he stayed close to the words of the Bible, so close that he had them memorized and could come up with them at the drop of a hat - in the moment of any temptation;
2) That he regularly took time out of the day to pray, at all hours of the day and night;
3) that he made sure his best friends, his closest companions, most powerful influences, were people and activities and hobbies and music and ambitions that mirrored his hunger and thirst after God;
4) And that he made sure that the most important things he did during the day were for the benefit of other people - Jesus lived a life of service not to himself but to those, especially, who were in need.
Jesus took those four strands and made a rope out of them that no devil or demon out of hell could ever cut.
And when you and I do the same thing Jesus did, live lives rooted in Scripture, prayer, Godly community, and acts of loving assistance, we are going to find a really effective way of getting rid of negative thinking, negative actions, and be able to be the people we want to be - and the kind of people this world needs.
This sermon is about using age-old disciplines and practices to tap into the deepest part of us, which is love, and which every one of us came here this morning to learn more about, and to learn more about how to release that love, that deepest part of us, into the world.
As you and I begin our Lenten journey, today the first Sunday in Lent, we do well to look at that four-strand rope and ask ourselves: Is this how we, too, can avoid the temptations and the tempter - that is so relentless, non-stop, at trying to beat us up, keep us down, and not make us, the born winners that we are, but the losers that the devil wants us to be?
It's about tapping into the deepest part of us that is yearning for a deeper connection with God, the source of the strength that we need to live the lives that we want to live.
Isn't this the time of year that you and I look at those things that will make us, more and more, the kinds of people we want to be - followers of Jesus, channels of love, reconcilers and heralds of encouragement and good news to the divisive, self-interested, and even war-torn world around us?
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For my kids winter break, we did the poor man's international vacation. We stayed home all day, but we went to a different ethnic restaurant every night!
We tried Italian, Polish, Mexican, Lebanese, German, and Greek. And one thing we discovered was that nearly every one of these places has their own distinctive way of making bread. Flat, fluffy, crispy, puffy - everybody makes it a bit different, but it's basically the same thing, each its own scrumptiously original take on the world's most popular food.
During our Ash Wednesday services, our liturgy invited us to a Holy Lent, and one of the things it invited us to do is to make more room in our lives for Holy Scripture. Some of us do that with morning devotions, others study the Bible in groups, like we encourage with our Tuesday lunch time classes, and others use the prayer book, which is chock full of prayers and liturgies rooted in scripture.
Scripture is the bread of the Christian life - the foundation of our theology, the heart of our faith, the essential nourishment of our spirits. And it comes to us in various forms, and is consumed in various ways.
For Jesus, in today's passage, it was the secret weapon he used to beat back the devil, using verse after verse to remind the tempter of what was true and what wasn't.
For us - how can we use Lent to make Scripture more central in our lives?
That's one of my Lenten goals.
How is God calling us to get more serious about the Bible?
What kind of decision can we make today about that?
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My earliest remembrance of prayer came when I was in elementary school and going to Catholic Mass with my father.
After we received communion we knelt down.
And I looked over at my dad and I said, “What are we supposed to do now?"
And he said, “Pray.”
And I said, What's that?”
And he said, “Just be very quiet, listen to God and talk with God."
50 years, two ordinations, and two theology degrees later, I am still trying to find a better definition than that.
“Be very quiet, listen to God and talk with God.”
In what language?
A Holy Roman emperor named Charles V once said,
"I talk to women in Italian,
"I speak to men in French,
“and I speak to my horse in German.
"But when I speak to God, I speak Spanish!"
My friend Henry likes to remind me that Jesus did not have a special language set aside to converse with God, he valued simplicity and directness.
Jesus' starting point is an unparalleled understanding of God’s love for us: God knows us more deeply than we can imagine.
So Jesus warns against babbling away in prayer, imagining that wonderful displays of long complicated words, delicately refined statements, or inane repetitions might somehow ‘do the trick.’
He told his disciples to call God ‘Abba,’ which the Church made into a starchier ‘Our Father’ - but ‘Abba’ is simply the name any Hebrew child uses for ‘Daddy’ - Jesus encourages us to open our hearts with a childlike trust, and approach God unafraid of who we are and how we say things.
No, Jesus did not have a special language set aside for talking to God.
He trusted that God was already listening.
That makes things easy for us - as we contemplate how we can make prayer a bigger part of our lives.
What does that look like?
Where can we begin?
What can we do today, to start?
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Did you hear of the recent transplant of a pig's heart into a human?
8 weeks and counting...
David Bennett, age 57, from Maryland, had been suffering with a bad heart for years, and two doctors, after many years of waiting for FDA approval, successfully took the heart of a pig and transplanted it into David's chest.
The pig's heart had been harvested just hours earlier and was placed on ice.
The surgeon, Dr Bartley Griffiths, having cracked open the patient's rib cage and made all the necessary preparations, opened the cooler, and was handed the pig's heart and confesses to feeling doubtful.
Dr Griffiths said the heart looked small, had taken on a grayish tone, and didn't look like the hundreds of human hearts he had successfully transplanted during his career.
Nonetheless, he made the necessary adjustments and attachments, and breathed a sigh of relief as he saw the heart take on color and size, and begin to adjust to its new environment. While born into a pig, it was working quite well in a human being!
Under close monitoring, and after numerous medicinal adjustments, David was finally released from the hospital and continues to do well. It appears that the heart of that pig, while created to flourish in a totally different environment, has found that it can survive, perhaps even thrive someplace else.
The malleability of that pig's heart is not too different from us, as we also have the ability to adjust and conform and adapt to lots of different environments
And so we ask ourselves if the environment we've chosen to inhabit is going to keep our hearts healthy and even happy.
Jesus understood how malleable we are, how much a product of our environment we tend to be, and how choosing our influences choosing the things we read and listen to and the people we hang around with, are actually very big decisions because they deeply affect who we are, what we say, and what we do, and how we look at the world.
Can we ask ourselves this Lent, who are we spending the most time with? Either in person, or digitally?
How is that working out?
What are we allowing to influence us, and have we thought of how much control we have over that?
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As you may know, 4 days ago, Ash Wednesday, we held our eighth annual drive-thru ashes in our driveway. From 7:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m., Deacon Donna, food pantry manager Mike, Kathy, Richard, Lori, and Lee, gave ashes to about 600 people and collected donations we never even asked for, of more than $800.
This was the biggest, and busiest day we had ever had. And we thank members of the media, especially broadcast, who have chosen to highlight this event which we concocted not to bless ourselves, but to bless others - an event that each one of you supports by your participation in our community. You weren't giving ashes out on Wednesday but you were.
It's your generosity, and God's grace, that made this happen.
We blessed people like Mario, a middle-aged man who pulled up and, when asked what we might pray for him, began to tear up as he talked about his college-age daughter, who had recently started dating someone who was leading her down the wrong path.
We closed our eyes and prayed, and while the ashes of repentance and renewal were meant to take center stage, the Peace of the Holy Spirit came along, assuring us that God was near and that God would take care of things. We were both touched as God was present in that place and in that moment to bless us both.
Mario, like all of us, appreciates it when other people think of him, when other people pray for him, when other people serve us.
And what we find out, is that we are the ones who are blessed by being able to serve. I think Jesus knew this when he told us that the greatest among you shall be the least, it is how the servant is made greater than the one who is served.
And there's a very good argument that this is how Jesus kept healthy, by having a servant's heart towards everything he faced.
And so you and I ask ourselves, in what ways are we consistently thinking of others?
As we look at our conversations, our bank accounts, our memberships and interactions, in what ways does selflessness replace selfishness?
How is God calling us to better serve?
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When Oscar Wilde famously said the only thing he couldn't resist was temptation, he spoke for all of us.
Do you feel stuck in a rut?
Do you keep making the same poor choice over and over again?...
Hopelessly mired in habits and temptations that are impossible to resist?
The example of Jesus we get today shows us that we don't have to - the good news of the gospel is that we can change - we can follow Jesus' example:
1) he successfully shunned temptation because he stayed close to the words of the Bible, so close that he had them memorized and could come up with them at the drop of a hat - in the moment of any temptation;
2) he regularly took time out of the day to pray, at all hours of the day and night;
3) he made sure that his best friends, his closest companions, most powerful influences, were people and activities and hobbies and music and ambitions that mirrored his hunger and thirst after God;
4) he made sure that the most important things he did during the day were for the benefit of other people - Jesus lived a life of service not to himself but to those, especially, who were in need.
Friends, God doesn't like to see us, God's beloved children, do you even know how lived you are? sad, worried, beaten up and held down - handcuffed with the fear, anxiety, stress, and strain that come from regularly losing the battle and giving in to the temptations that befall us.
Jesus said it clearly, I came to bring life, and life more abundantly.
The four strands, of scripture, prayer, influence, and charity, invite us to come to a better place - to use our discipline, intelligence, and fortitude - and partner with God's grace and power to overcome the obstacles before us to make us better and make the world better
We can change.
We can turn over a new leaf.
For Christianity has not been tried and found lacking -
It has been found difficult, and therefore not tried!
Friends, how are we going to try Christianity this week?
The scripture says, draw close to God, and good will draw close to you.
What does that look like to you today?
How are we going to manage drawing closer to God?
In doing so, can we even imagine the world of health, joy, and newness that awaits?
There's only one way to find out.
Amen.