(sermon 3/6/2022)
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.
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How many of you here are familiar with the musical “Guys and Dolls”? Either the film version or a stage production; it doesn’t matter; how many of you have seen it? So most of you; good. If you’re familiar with it, you know that it’s a double love story – the stories of New York gambler Nathan Detroit and his love, the singer and dancer Miss Adelaide; and another gambler named Skye Masterson, who surprisingly falls in love with Sarah Brown, the very prim and proper head of the local down-and-out faith mission. Recently, a friend of ours told us that he’d been cast in a local production of the musical, in the role of Arvide Abernathy, one of the workers at the mission. The musical was being staged at a local venue just around the corner from our place, and I’m embarrassed to say that in all the years it’s been around, which is… well, longer than I’ve been alive; we’ll just leave it at that – I’d never seen it, neither the movie or a live production of it, so this past Friday evening we went to see it, and it was really very good.
If you’re familiar with the musical, you know there are several memorable songs that came out of it – Certainly “Luck Be a Lady Tonight” – and I know that if you’re at least my age or older, you just heard Frank Sinatra singing in your head. And there was another one near the end, sung by the character Nicely Nicely Johnson, in a scene where all the gamblers have gotten shanghaied into attending a midnight prayer meeting at the mission. In the scene, some of the gamblers are offering their testimony, and Nicely Nicely Johnson does his in song – it’s a musical, after all – singing “Sit Down You’re Rocking the Boat.” I won’t repeat all the lyrics here, but the gist of it is that he’s dreaming that he’s on a boat headed for heaven, but he keeps being tempted – first, somehow he ends up with a pair of dice and he wants to gamble, then somehow a bottle of alcohol appears in his hands and he wants to drink it, and all the other people yell at him, telling him that he’s rocking the boat, causing trouble, making waves; things that are risking them all getting to heaven, and the rest of the passengers keep calling out to him “Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat!”
Don’t rock the boat. Go along to get along. Go with the flow. How many times have you heard that? How many times have you said it? How many times have you been told it? The idea that things generally go easier, and supposedly better, if you just do things according to the rules; according to the normal patterns; or as we Presbyterians always say, doing things “decently and in order.”
Of course, there are times when things aren’t right, and we actually need to – we’re expected, called, even, to be boat-rockers, pot-stirrers. Where those regular patterns are creating pain, suffering, violence, injustice, death; we need to go against that grain, break those rules. But under most circumstances, we can sense that there is some inherent order to things, a natural rhythm and flow to things that if you follow it, things are going to proceed better, and end up better, and that if you resist or ignore that pattern, you do so at your own risk. Things are going to be much more difficult; things are going to turn out worse for you, and probably for those around you.
In a sense, this is actually what’s at the core of our gospel reading today, the story of Jesus being tempted by Satan in the Wilderness. The temptations that Jesus faced weren’t the ones that Nicely Nicely Johnson faced in his dream. Jesus faced temptations were simultaneously more basic and more important – the temptation to stray from God’s order – to sin – in order to obtain basic sustenance, all the way up to the temptation to sin for vast power. In considering this passage, Satan continually increases the scope of things that Jesus is tempted to accept, starting small, with just getting some bread, and then ramping all the way up to having all the power of all the kingdoms of the world. In one sense that smaller-to-larger pattern makes sense. Satan fails when he tempts Jesus with something small, and when that doesn’t work he ups the ante. But you can look at the temptation in reverse, too. In that case, the embedded question would be “does obeying God and God’s order of things matter equally across the board? Does it matter less when it comes to lesser things?” I mean, none of us has ever had the kind of power that Jesus was tempted with, it’s really almost incomprehensible, so in a sense maybe it would be easy to resist something you couldn’t even imagine. We’ve gotten along without it. But we all know what it feels like to be hungry, so to bend the rules a little bit if we don’t even have enough bread to fill our bellies – surely, that would be OK, wouldn’t it? God wouldn’t mind if we bent the rules to take care of our basic needs, surely. Well, whatever order we think about this story, we do know that Jesus resisted his temptations. Quoting scripture to Satan, and properly understanding the intent behind it, he successfully avoided sin.
We Christians have spent two thousand years discussing sin, and human beings in general have considered it for a lot longer. What exactly is sin, and what isn’t it? Different people will say different things, but to me, when you boil it all down, it comes down to the idea that sin is anything that draws us away from the order of things that God has established for us, for creation, away from those patterns and rhythms that work for the best for us and for others. Sind isn’t a matter of breaking some item or another on a checklist of do’s and don’t’s set up by a God looking to punish us for something. It’s really just that God wants us to benefit – ultimately to suffer less, not more, by aligning ourselves with these patterns, these ways, this order that simply leads to the kind of abundant life that God wants for us.
Jesus recognizes in the Wilderness that even as much as he’s genuinely tempted by the immediate benefit that he’d enjoy if he gave into them – even though he has to endure some difficulty, discomfort, suffering, in his immediate short term, he’s still better off in the long run if he holds fast to God’s overall pattern of what’s best. He recognizes that sometimes, it isn’t easy to do the right thing. That sometimes, avoiding sin – staying on God’s desired path – results in some short-term cost, some sacrifice, in order to achieve some longer-term good in the universe, the world, in our own lives.
There are any number of different ways that we encounter this reality of the universe. Throughout Lent, we’re looking at the devotional book “A Time to Grow” by Kara Eidson. Each week she considers one aspect of how our food is grown, harvested, and distributed. She looks at the whole way we think about food in our society, and the realities of it, and in the process, we can see parallels between the growth of good, healthy food, and our own spiritual growth. On Ash Wednesday, the theme we considered was “soil.” Today’s theme is “order” and how that comes into play in food production – from mapping out a garden in terms of where to plant certain crops based on the characteristics of the soil, how moist or dry it is, how much sunlight it receives – to the actual order, pattern, and extremes of the changing of the seasons. To the fact that virtually every time we try to short-circuit the established order of producing and eating simple, healthy food, and we replace it with artificial this and chemically enhanced that, filling our guts with the worst kind of drive-through, deep-fried, mega-carb, sugar-bombed, high-calorie, low nutrition substitutes, we know we’re going to pay a heavy price for it. This is just one every day, real-world validation of what we see Jesus doing in today’s gospel text – not giving in to the temptation of the short-term easy fix, but rather, staying the course, even when it’s difficult, keeping aligned with God’s order for things.
But what’s the whole reason for establishing that kind of order? What’s God’s point in all this? I mean yes, in general things go easier and better for us, and others, if we go with the flow and don’t rock the boat in terms of God’s order for things; and we know that even when it isn’t always easy, sometimes it requires some sacrifice, it’s still all working for the best – but what exactly is that best that God has in mind for us behind it all?
At one point in “Guys and Dolls,” Arvide Abernathy sings a song – it shows up in the stage production; for some reason it got cut from the film, and that was a shame, since I think it’s probably the sweetest, most beautiful song in the entire production – called “More I Could Not Wish for You,” to Sarah Brown. Out of all of his love and admiration for Sarah, he tells her that he wishes so many good things for her in her life – fortune, wealth, material things; people waiting on her hand and foot; music, happiness, and wisdom – but the thing that he wishes most for her is that she would discover her real, true love – the one who will love her, care for her, the one who would always embrace her in their arms. In a sense, that’s the core message of the gospel. That’s the same thing that’s behind God’s order for things. It’s all designed with the hope, the wish, that we, too, would know and have a good, abundant life, and through that, that we’d recognize that in the greatest sense, the one who loves us, cares for us, protects us in their arms, is God’s very self. That’s what’s at the core of God’s wish for us – that we’d see this order, this pattern, and that we’d understand how important it is that we stay aligned with that divinely established order, that cosmic rhythm, universal pattern just as Jesus did in the Wilderness. If we do that, we’ll experience that more abundant life that God wants for us – an abundance that in another place, the scriptures describe as “full measure, pressed down, and overflowing” – or maybe, as Miss Adelaide might have said, a Bushel and a Peck.
Thanks be to God.
en arche 