2022-03-07
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text
Scripture: Luke 4:1-13
A church member this week sent me a collection of “Selected Negative Teaching Evaluations of Jesus Christ.” It’s a tongue-in-cheek series of mock complaints about what Jesus might have been like as an instructor, and it reminds us just how odd and unfamiliar were the ways of Jesus. Here’s a selection of these imagined criticisms from those who might have been his students:
“Very inconvenient class! Always holds lectures on top of mountains [or] in the middle of the Sea of Galilee—but never close to the main campus.”
“Inconsistent attendance policy. Said we had to be in class by 9:00 a.m. every day. Over half the class showed up late or didn’t attend until the last meeting, but we all got the same participation grade.”
“He’s nice enough, I guess, but he doesn’t vet his TAs: they all provide completely different, conflicting lecture notes. (TIP: Try to get in Luke’s section.)”
“By week one, I was already tired of his anti-rich, pro-Samaritan [crap]. I wanted to take a course in Christianity, not liberalism.”
“Kind of absent-minded. My name’s Simon, and he’s called me ‘Peter’ for the entire semester.”
“I wanted to like this class, but on the first day, he submerged us in a river instead of going over the syllabus, and that was kind of a lot.”
“Tells too many stories. Easy to get him off track during lectures.”
“Plays favorites. (Sorry, we can’t all be John ‘The Beloved.’)”
“Bought a bunch of snacks for the whole class once, then never did it again. Kind of a letdown.”
“I asked him to sign my accommodations form from the Disability Services Office, and he spit on the ground and rubbed the dirt in my eyes. I can see now, but it was still rude.”
“Won’t give straight answers. I asked him if something was going to be on the test, and he said, ‘You say that it will be,’ and stared at me with no expression. I mean, come on, bro.”
“Definitely plays favorites. Calls on the same twelve guys over and over. I even heard he took them out to dinner.”
“Instructor is a drama queen. He stopped in the middle of a lecture to announce, ‘ONE OF YOU WILL BETRAY ME,’ right after I had told him that I was switching advisors.”
And finally: “A complete joke. Only got the job because his dad is important” (https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/selected-negative-teaching-evaluations-of-jesus-christ).
And maybe we could add one of our own today: ‘Goes out in the desert without taking any food with him. Imagines the devil tempting him with various alluring possibilities. Who does that? And how can you take anything he says seriously?’ Let’s face it: Jesus isn’t your typical teacher.
I don’t know. Every year we come to this story at the beginning of Lent, and I scratch my head and wonder what’s going on. Jesus’ sojourn in the wilderness and his confrontation with the devil seem so removed from our days of dropped Internet and barking dogs and babies who don’t sleep through the night. I hear these words and I’m immediately stymied. I want something more practical, advice that will make my life better, suggestions for how to improve the world in three easy steps.
But then I think: This is a different kind of scripture entirely. It’s not instructions or advice or history. It’s more like a scene out of Wonder Woman or Black Panther or The Avengers, movies that have captured the imaginations of the world. Good vs. evil. Terrible forces run amok. Choices that, in many ways, seem to have no right answers. Mythical and metaphorical.
And this is what we see in Luke’s story of the temptation of Jesus. This demonic force comes to Jesus in his weakened state and puts before him some impossibly difficult choices. Turn stone to bread when you’re famished? Give me one good reason why not; people are hungry; do it. Claim power over all the world when a Russian dictator murders innocent Ukrainians? Is there really any choice in the matter? Take the power. Test God to see if you’ll be saved when disaster strikes? Why in the world would any of us say no to that? Go on: test God.
These are no-brainers, all of them. Of course we’d all do what the devil seductively suggests! It’s hard to see any reason not to. Except for this: what the devil proposes to Jesus are two egregiously false but nevertheless alluring notions of who God is. This insidious adversary wants Jesus to believe in a magical God who does our bidding. And this metaphorical devil wants Jesus to believe that he is at the very center of the universe.
The tests this devil—and we always have to remember that this is figurative, not literal, biblical language—puts before Jesus seek to lure him into worshiping a God who is there to rescue Jesus—and us—from the disease and evil and destruction that run so rampant in our world. And all the tests the devil puts before Jesus tempt Jesus to put himself first. This alluring counterforce-to-good suggests that any God worth their salt would make only good things happen, and meet our every need. And as a kind of corollary, this devil wants you and me to worship ourselves.
When I was a child, I prayed for God to give me a red bicycle. If God is all-powerful, it seemed to me, then surely the Almighty can grant me that one simple wish: give me a bicycle. And it didn’t stop with childhood. I still ask God to give me what I desperately want. Maybe you’ve done the same. You’ve prayed for a job promotion. Or the stock market to turn around. Or a child to come home safely at night. Or a parent to die quickly and painlessly.
And, to be fair, I think part of a good relationship with God is conveying the things that are on our hearts and minds. It makes sense to let God know our hopes and dreams. That’s how God comes to know us. If our trust in God, though, depends on God’s giving us precisely what we think we want, then we’ve done just as the devil hopes: we’ve fallen victim to a notion of a magical god who grants our every wish. And we’ve placed ourselves at the very center of the universe. Magic and self-centeredness: that’s what God’s relentless nemesis so often tempts us to seek.
So when Luke tells us this tale of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness, it reminds us that those temptations—the temptation to seek a magical god who fulfills our every wish, and the temptation to put ourselves at the center of the universe—those temptations are universal. At one time or another, and perhaps way more often than we’d like to admit, nearly all of us have likely wished for God to do precisely what we want when we want it. And we would have been happy for everything to center on us. Isn’t that what God is supposed to do—make our lives easy and do as we desire? If we have a sick sister and we pray for her healing and she doesn’t get well, or pray for Russia to back off from its aggression and the cruelty doesn’t stop, then why have faith? What’s the point of having a God who doesn’t heed our every desire? Does faith in God make any sense at all if God doesn’t turn every bad situation around and doesn’t let me do what I want?
This story has such power because it says, in this imaginative, metaphorical, fantastical way, just what it is that draws us off-center and away from God. And we may blush or deny it or turn away in shame, but the truth of the matter is that, again and again, we take the devil’s bait: we keep expecting God to rescue us, and we almost unfailingly pursue our own gain. And something is wildly amiss when we do.
Maybe the heart of the matter is this: that we’re invited to put our trust in God even though God isn’t going to miraculously grant every wish and fulfill every desire. And that we are offered the opportunity, every day, indeed every moment, to make the choices that let God’s beautiful and grace-filled peace take shape right here in the midst of our daily lives. Not on our terms, but in God’s unique and wonderful way.
Prayer, breathing in, one of our two great Lenten themes this year, is maybe just this: to give ourselves to something larger than we are, and that won’t necessarily make our lives materially easier or more comfortable. To pray is likely something else entirely. Prayer is to express our gratitude. It’s to trust. It’s to live in the arms of Jesus. It’s to say thank you for the sun and the kalamata olives and the comfortable sofa. It’s to say thank you for family and friends. It’s to say thank you for relationships that fill us and stretch us. It’s to say thank you for self-realizations long-buried but deeply true. Prayer is to recognize the presence of a generous Spirit with us in even the most harrowing challenges. It’s to know “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). None of this may undo a terrible situation—we’re still all going to experience unquenchable pain and loss. Such prayer, though, grounds us and gives us an abiding peace. Practicing the examen that Judy mentioned earlier is a way of attending to God’s presence in the good, the bad, and the ugly. Even when life falls apart, God is there. Not to fix it, but to walk with us and to hold our hands on the journey.
Not only are we called to say thank you, but we’re also always making choices, and those choices, whether we recognize it or not, have an unavoidable power and significance. Just as Jesus faced his own painful temptations, so also do we. And each temptation likely calls for a choice. This is the other theme of our Lenten season this year. We’re beckoned not only to breathe in, but also to breathe out, to choose the good even when it may entail some sacrifice. We decide in favor of our planetary home, for example, and practice habits that preserve and protect it, even when those habits are more expensive or inconvenient. We decide to skip out on a promising work opportunity because a child of ours needs us. We decide to do what we can to sanction Russia’s economy even when it means sacrifices in our own pocketbooks.
Christian discipleship is, in a sense, a constant interplay between breathing in and breathing out—between the prayer that shows us God’s unstinting devotion, and the choices, the actions, that embody that discipleship. Ultimately, of course, the choice we make is both a breathing in and a breathing out. It’s a choice to live in the presence of God. As the Danish philosopher and theologian Soren Kierkegaard once wrote, “God is present in the moment of choice, not in order to watch but in order to be chosen. Therefore, each person must choose.” And picking up on the confrontation Jesus has with the powers of evil, he says, “Terrible is the battle, in a person’s innermost being, between God and the world” (source unknown).
With our grateful, breathing-in prayer, and with our healing, breathing-out choices, and today with our communion meal that embodies it all, we elect to put ourselves in thrall to the God who is bigger than magic, bigger than any of us. It’s that prayer and those choices, that breathing in and breathing out, that form us and declare our deepest identity. Who will we choose? What will we do? We know what matters most, don’t we.
Oh, and one last thing: how would we evaluate Jesus’ class in Christian discipleship? Maybe like this: It’s hard. And it has changed my life.