Sermon Prepared for Messiah
Lutheran Church
1st Sunday in Lent, traditional
services – 3/4/01
by Gregory S. Kaurin
Associate Pastor for Spiritual Care and
Development
Text: Luke 4:1-13
The Sermon:
There is a famous short story about a scientist who marries a beautiful woman, gorgeous, but for one flaw. She has an obvious birthmark. The scientist gets it in his head that, if he were to remove that imperfection for her, she would attain the highest beauty. She complies, of course. She loves him. He's doing this for her, right?
Through study and chemicals and applications, it works: the birthmark begins to fade. He is so focused on her imperfection, at first he fails to see it, but as the mark fades, so does she. Until, as the last traces of her birthmark disappear, so does her life. With the imperfection gone, he's left with an empty lifeless object. Nothing's left to love, or to love him. The Birthmark, by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
More often than we realize, we fall for this temptation to manipulate and fix things at others expense and pain. We’ll rationalize our own ambitions. We’ll say we did it with “good intentions,” we did it “for them,” while truly we were acting for ourselves.
Since we have trouble with this, I can say, thank God it was Jesus who dealt with the devil that day in the desert! and throughout his ministry. He dealt with it out in the desert, and finally, while he hung from the cross and people were calling out “IF you are the Christ of God, then save yourself, come down from there!” It was the same voice and temptation that Jesus had heard several years before, “If you are the Christ, the Son of God.”
He answered it the same way throughout his life, “No. Not my ego. God’s will instead!” Thank God it was Jesus who dealt with the devil for us!
These temptations of Christ sound like big weird ones—nothing like our own. Take a stone, turn it to bread? Take over the world? He was whisked to a precipice and told to jump in order to force the aid of angels and of God. How can we relate to any of these?
However, they do represent all the temptations that we face in an expanding circle: 1st the temptation for self-gratification, 2nd the temptation to impose our will over others, like the scientist in Hawthorne’s story did, and 3rd the temptation to impose our will upon God.
These were the same three temptations that were faced by and given into by God’s people on the Exodus from Egypt. And where God’s people fell time and again during those 40 years, Jesus remained strong during his 40 days. In fact, each of Jesus’ answers in the gospel lesson come from the commandments given to the Israelites during their wilderness wanderings, in the 6th and 8th chapters of Deuteronomy.
But how many of these temptations challenge us each day? How many of them succeed in snaring us? I’d bet it’s more than we’d care to count! We will speak of “little white lies.” It wouldn’t surprise me, though, if these were outranked by the numerous “little white temptations.”
Helmut Thielicke, a great theologian, said that these are usually “a mask of harmless, indeed, pious, benevolence.”[1] “Benevolence,” that is, “kind motives.” A mask of harmless, pious benevolence—these are the things I do while I say, “I’m doing it for you,” when, really, I’m doing it for myself.
A few years ago Dr. David Bersoff did some research on temptations. This is what he said to summarize his findings: 1st, “People are more likely to give into temptation when they can remain passive.” It’s easy to give into temptation when you are tempted to not do something. Or 2nd, “…when they feel no one is being harmed.”[2]
That is the first, most common and easily rationalized temptation. It is the temptation that I would like to focus on for the rest of this sermon…
Jesus was alone and hungry in the wilderness. It was one rock from the millions that were around him. One small loaf—what would it have hurt? And why should the Son of God go hungry? He had the voice of creation; if he commanded it, if he asked, he could’ve eaten. Why not?
For us, it sounds something like, “Go ahead, it won’t hurt anyone else.” “It’s only one thing out of the company’s 1000’s; who’s gonna miss it?” “You work hard; you’re important here! You deserve a little extra!”
Sometimes we are tempted to fill that hungering for self-importance, self-congratulations, value or respect through a bit of indulgent pampering. That’s not the real problem—not the occasional pampering. The problem is the voice that suggests, “You deserve it.” The problem is the voice that suggests, “This will give you satisfaction.”
Take the example of a certain man. He’s feeling empty: empty of spirit, depressed, tired. He’s had a hard day, a hard week. Heck, the whole year’s been a tough one. Then, there in the middle of the kitchen counter is a big bag of chocolate chip cookies, a bag he doesn’t need.
“But,” he thinks to himself, “I deserve this. I need to relax and treat myself. I need a little reward.” So, he sits down and eats …the whole bag.
And, believe it or not, it works! He felt an emptiness. Then, all those sugars and fats—not only fill his tummy—but release endorphins and chemicals into his bloodstream. His tummy warms and digests. It’s a powerful reinforcement. It works almost every time …or else he wouldn’t do this! It’s an immediate gratification to mask a more general emptiness.
This goes beyond food temptations and little self-gratifying thefts to an emptiness we try to fill through self-turned, self-improvement, inner-child, personal-power psychologies and philosophies—or worse: all the addictions and delusions with which we try to fill ourselves. These finally will not, cannot satisfy because they are so consumed with self. Most of them, quite literally, eat away at us body and soul. We buy things, smoke things, eat things, drink things, experience things—but these cannot satisfy us because we are feasting on all the wrong stuff.
“Not by bread alone, …but by God’s Word.” It’s interesting to see the connection. Scripture lifts up Jesus as the Living Word of God. Jesus called himself the “Bread of Life, the true Bread; no one who comes to me will ever hunger.”
One preacher I recently heard about noted how bread was such a common, filling food. He went on to point out the number of times Jesus spoke about food, and how often he taught around dinner tables.
He said, “Considering the kind of people and places Jesus was around, you can imagine him today, gathering a group of people and going into the local McDonalds®. Can you see him lifting up a Chicken McNugget®, and saying, ‘Look here! See this Chicken McNugget® that you all try to fill yourselves up with? Now look at me. I am the Chicken McNugget®! Nothing else will satisfy. Anything else will mislead. “I am the Chicken McNugget® of Life!’”
There is an emptiness, a separation between you and me, a separation of us from God, which only the Word of God—the Living Word of God, Jesus Christ—can satisfy.
When Christians speak of eating from the Word of God, it goes beyond just reading and knowing the Bible. The saying goes that “the devil can quote scripture.” We see that in our gospel lesson.
People can and do quote scripture in mean, ultra-pious and condescending ways, in mis-leading and emptying ways, just like the devil did.
Instead, we feed on the Word of God, with Jesus Christ as the Word who stands between the page and us. The Bible is not the only Word from God, except that its inspiration bears and points to the true Word of God himself, Jesus Christ.
The Word is alive! And “inspiration” means, “full of breath,” “full of life.” Inspiration is movement and action. It cannot be static or fixed. So, the Inspired Word of God—whether through scripture or Jesus Christ—is God! The Word is alive and it is life. It will not be held down by our static interpretations anymore than Jesus was held down by the interpreting authorities of his day.
They couldn’t hold him down. Well, of course not! Not even death could hold him down! Jesus Christ. There we see that the love of God is as wide and deep as the cross and as victorious as his empty tomb.
With that Word of God in mind, now when we read about the creation and the salvation of God’s people in the Bible—with our minds on Christ Jesus, the fulfillment of all scripture—now, that is a love that satisfies!
The devil quoted the 91st Psalm. The 91st Psalm speaks of being under God’s protection. The devil misquoted it to question the very faith that the psalm was meant to put forward. He used scripture to point to doubt and to stage an ego trip, saying, “Before you go any further, Jesus, you better make sure he’ll be there like he says he will.”
We know his voice: “If God really cares about you, and loves you, then you shouldn’t get hurt. If God really loves you, then shouldn’t his power be yours to command, as long as you have enough faith?”
Listen to the 91st Psalm, without the devil confusing it:
You need not fear the terrors of the night, the arrow that flies in the day time, the plague that stalks in the darkness, nor the scourge from the noon-day devil. No disaster can overtake you, no plague near your tent.
He has given his angels orders about you to guard you wherever you go. They’ll lift you in their arms lest you hit your foot against a stone.
God says, “Because he clings to me, I rescue him and lift him high. He calls and I answer. I will satisfy him, and give him my salvation.”
It is not a psalm to inspire questions or a test of wills. It is an assurance that God has promised satisfaction and will give salvation, a full salvation from all that holds us down, body and soul!
We feast from the Word of God with the voice of Saint Paul ringing in our ears from the 8th chapter of Romans: We are more than conquerors through the God who loves us. We are certain that neither death nor life, not powers nor addictions, nor fears, neither past nor future, not the heights nor depths, nothing can come between us and the love of God.
Nothing. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. He is Fullness. He is the True Word of God. He is the Bread of Life.
And he is the One who took it …broke it …and gave it to us, saying, “Take, eat. This is my body …broken for you.” For Life. Amen.
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