First Presbyterian Church

First Presbyterian Church

Rev. Sam Pendergrast

February 10, 2008

Matthew 4:1-11

 

 

“With Jesus in the Wilderness”

 

It is not news that the old, traditional, “mainline” churches are declining. We have been hearing about that for some years. We know it is part of a trend that reflects changing social and cultural values in our country. We know that many of the factors that affect the decline of the church are not things we can control. Even so, I admit anxiety and distress as I observe the loss of members in our Presbyterian Church (U. S. A.) and in many local congregations. We have seen continued budget cuts and staff layoffs at the national offices in Louisville. Our own Presbytery of Transylvania is operating close to the edge of a lake of red ink and has recently cut staff. I imagine many of you in this congregation would admit to considerable anxiety as you consider the future of the church.

 

At the same time, there are some prophetic voices in the church at large that see a remarkable opportunity for rebirth and renewal in what some have called the “disestablishment” of the old main-line churches. Walter Brueggemann may have been the first to write of the experience of the church at the end of the 20^th Century as one of exile. He compared the end of Christendom and the dwindling influence of the church in society to the experience of the nation of Israel being captured by the Babylonians and sent into exile. The familiar signs and symbols, landmarks and customs were gone. The people lamented: “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” Despite appearances, that is good news, say some observers of church and culture. Good news to be in exile? Why on earth would they say that?

 

For a long time the church was lulled into complacency by the sense that people just grew up Christian by being raised in what we thought of as a “Christian nation.” Many pastors and churches assumed that people absorbed religious training and spiritual values from the atmosphere. The church was a dominant social institution. Christian values were assumed to be the values of the nation. Christian education – what more people now are calling “Christian formation” or spiritual formation –once was part of family life, public education and offered several times a week at church. More recently it has been reduced to one hour a week at best. Attendance has been declining. Curriculum has been dumbed down, and often selected on the basis of how easy it was to teach. Many parents have abandoned the promises they made when their children were baptized and let their children decide not to come to Sunday School. My list of laments could go on. The props that existed in society and culture that helped support the church as an institution have been kicked away. As the world has changed around us, the church often has preferred to complain that the world has changed and hide from new demands rather than adapting and developing new skills. The Darwinians among us would observe that a species that does not adapt will not be around long when the habitat is rapidly changing. A good business executive would say that such a company will not compete.

 

That’s where the good news comes in. If the church has been exiled, it has been exiled from a false complacency. The church has been exiled from an alliance with political and economic power and privilege. The church has been exiled from a position of comfort in which it was thought to be easy to be a Christian. A look at the history of the church tells us that the church has thrived when it lives on the margins of power and even when it is persecuted. In China, Mao Tse Tung threw out all foreign missionaries after the Cultural Revolution in 1949 and outlawed Christian churches. During the next twenty years no one from outside China had any contact with Christians in the country and feared the worst. But when China began to open to the West again and Christians were allowed to visit, what they discovered was an utter surprise. Instead of declining under persecution, the church had grown. The number of Christians in China had more than doubled in twenty years. Groups of believers had met in homes, outdoors and in other secret locations, even though pastors were jailed and former church buildings were destroyed or taken over for other uses.

 

Those who are writing and speaking about the church’s new situation of cultural exile in the United States believe that Christians now have the opportunity once again to learn who we are as God’s people. We can recover practices of Christian discipleship and become communities that support one another in our efforts to follow Jesus in an increasingly secular and hostile environment. Being in exile means that we cannot expect people to stream through our doors just because we have a nice building and hold worship each week. Since we are faced with the need to reach out to neighbors and invite them to be part of our fellowship, we have the opportunity to clarify what we believe and how we can explain our faith to others. We Presbyterians have the opportunity to be clear about who we are and what we believe as “thinking Christians” who are in many ways distinct from other more recent religious movements. We have the opportunity to recover rituals and worship practices that give meaning to daily life and help to connect us with the larger reality of God’s purpose for the world. We can demonstrate the power of forgiveness in a community of faith. We can reach out into the world in ways that show God’s love by embracing the pain of the world. In our “haven’t got time for the pain” world, we can show that God always has time for our pain and that of others, and that part of living out God’s way for us is that we can embrace both the joy and the pain of life, lift all of it up in our worship and our life together and trust that God will redeem it all. Those are only some of the signs of why being in exile is a good thing.

 

I thought of this as I reflected on how the Spirit drove Jesus out into the wilderness to be tested. The Greek word used in the text is a word that can mean “test”, “tempt” or “prove”, and has the connotation of something being completed or perfected. We can connect this story with what the author of the letter to the Hebrews said, that Jesus was “made perfect through suffering.” Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness is meant by Matthew to be reminiscent both of Moses’ forty days on the mountain and of the Hebrew children’s forty years in the wilderness. Remember that Jesus completes the vocation of Israel which they failed to complete – a call to be the means by which all nations would be blessed.

 

The temptations Jesus endured in the wilderness are also meant to show us what Jesus as the truly human person does to trust himself to God. His responses to the temptations are both a demonstration of complete trust in God and an example to us.

 

Before I talk about the three particular temptations, I want to say a few words about sin. Some churches in the post-modern situation of exile have abandoned traditional words and symbols of Christian faith, thinking that they are confusing or will scare people away from the church. Maybe they’re afraid of the negative connotation they associate with the word, “sin”. Maybe they think of sins as doing bad things. Maybe they don’t want people coming into church to think they’re being accused of bad motives or to be insulted first thing when they walk through the door. I think we need to honest with people and with ourselves about our theology. Sin means missing the mark. Everybody misses the mark. More often our sins are good intentions gone astray and twisted.

 

Think about the absurd example of a parent with a young child. What if that parent saw the child who could not walk on her own, couldn’t even crawl. What if that parent thought, “Poor thing! She can’t move! I’ll carry her around!” What if that parent carried the baby everywhere? Would the baby ever learn to walk? That’s more often the kind of sin we fall victim to, the kind Jesus was faced with in the desert.

 

Nothing that the devil tempted Jesus to do was a bad thing in itself. Later in the Gospel, Jesus used twelve loaves of bread to feed five thousand people. He walked on water. He pulled a coin from the mouth of a fish to pay his tax. It’s not that miracles are a bad thing. The point is that Jesus is being tempted to treat God as a means to an end, to treat God as an idol and to take shortcuts to meeting needs, influence and power.

 

The temptation to turn stones into bread has been called the temptation to be relevant instead of faithful. The church is always tempted to do what might get results in the short run rather than to be who we know God is calling us to be and to trust God for the results. Another way to describe this temptation is to mistrust God’s ability to empower us to face our trials. Jesus came to demonstrate God’s power. He did not dominate the powers of the world but offered his own vulnerable love to those who would receive it.

 

The temptation to jump off the Temple is the temptation to be spectacular, to forget God’s promise, “My grace is sufficient for you.” Stardom or heroism are tempting shortcuts to take control of getting results and an easy way to forget that “my power is made perfect in weakness.”

 

The temptation to accept the power of domination and to rule all nations is the temptation to compromise with the ways of the world, the temptation to be powerful. The spiritual writer, Henri Nouwen, said, “One of the great ironies of the history of Christianity is that its leaders give in to the temptation for power….” In other words, it is easier to control people than to love them.

 

As you begin Lent and reflect on the temptations of Jesus, remember that God’s Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness, into exile, to be tempted. It was a period of testing in which his identity and purpose were clarified. Remember that whenever you find yourself in a wilderness or in a situation of exile, God may have led you there to strip away excess baggage and to help you see your way more clearly. The work of God in the world is not to help us get what we want but rather to enable us to be part of what God wants for us and for the whole world. We walk in Lent following Jesus amid the distractions of a culture that tells us we deserve and should have everything we want. You are not likely to see a TV commercial that urges you to deny yourself and take up your cross.

 

We need all the help we can get to follow Jesus in this world. We need each other. We need to strip away the excesses of consumerism and the culture of constant entertainment. We need to ask ourselves what we need to give up in order to give Jesus a chance to get our attention. What is it in our lives that is in danger of taking us over? What do we love too much in the wrong way?

 

Lent is a time of emptying, of silence, of exile in the wilderness with Jesus so that we can find out who we are and what God would make of our unique and precious lives. May your time of exile be fruitful. And may our church find new life as we discern God’s way together.