The 1st Sunday of Lent: Cycle B 23-24

The 1st Sunday of Lent
Genesis 9:8-15 | 1 Peter 3:18-22 | Mark 1:12-15

Grant, almighty God, through the yearly observance of Holy Lent, that we may grow in understanding of the riches hidden in Christ and, by worthy contact, pursue their effects.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen. 

Probably nothing is more reflected upon than the temptations of Jesus in the desert, and in this particular passage, we’re reminded that it happened.  There’s an image there that he was in this place of conflict, I suppose.  There were wild beasts there, and there were angels there.  There was good; there was evil.  And what is interesting to me about this moment in Jesus’ life is that it teaches us something about who he was when he began his ministry and perhaps not who he was when he was born and how he grew up exactly, but the most fascinating thing about Jesus is the years that he spent, 30 years, getting ready to understand enough, to know enough, to believe enough in what it is that God wanted him to do.  And you say, “Well, wait a minute.  He was God.  He knew everything.”  Well, yes and no.  It seems clear that what we see in Jesus, and it’s the most important thing to understand the teaching of Jesus, when he came and lived on this earth, is he was like us in everything.  He sort of didn’t use the divine card very much.  He used it mostly because he was such a compassionate man that, when somebody was broken and needed healing, he knew he could heal, and so he would do it, even though it was a real detriment to his ministry, because he couldn’t then preach in towns.  He couldn’t be in a public place without being mobbed with people who wanted nothing more than a fix and not necessarily what Jesus came to offer. 

So we learn in these temptations the first and foremost thing about this God/man Jesus is he had one primary focus.  I would say he had it from the time he was old enough to think, “I would like to know.  I want to know the truth.”  If you understand him as a human being struggling to understand that, he had to study the scriptures.  He had to wonder, ask questions, pray, all those things that we do, and it brought him to a point where he realized, if there’s anything in life worth anything, it is to find what is true.  That was his passion.  That was his longing, and when you think about that, you say, “Well, what is it about this very core issue?  Why is it so important?”  Well, because there is this plan of God.  There is this thing called life.  We’re not in charge of it.  We don’t have much to do at all about how we’re born and how we grow up and the process we go through.  It’s all, in a sense, outside of our control.  So if there is this life that has meaning and purpose, and that’s the second temptation that Jesus endured, which is, “How do I even know this is true?  How do I even believe?  What do I base this on?”  Trust in the one who created him, trust in God.  Two of the biggest things that we learn from the temptations of Jesus is to believe that there is a truth, that when we find it, when we understand it, when we surrender to it, it brings life to us and to the world.  And we have this conviction there is someone who knows that truth who is communicating to us that the essence of it and the work of life is to be engaged in this work of pursuing, over and over again, “What does this mean?  What is this for?” And what those two things empower us to do is the third temptation.  He was shown the world in all of its magnificence, all of its power, all of its glory and genius and all that, and he just looked at that when he realized that that isn’t necessarily in any way, shape or form, the world that God has created for you and for me, and it’s not even attractive.  And he knows that if you do it, you’re worshiping, you’re giving your life over to a lie.  That’s one of the best ways to describe the devil.  He lies over and over and over and over again to you and to me about what is, who we are, who God is.  So nothing seems more important than these things. 

So if we want to look then at this journey each of us is on and how it unfolds, I think it’s interesting that scripture is the one core thing we go to, but it’s also a story that happened in history, and it’s a way of understanding what’s happened up until this point, how God worked, how he evolved, how he changed, how he grew, how we have grown and changed.  But there’s something more that is more than scripture, and that is the indwelling presence of God.  He answers our prayers.  He doesn’t just say, “If you want an answer, go to scripture.”  Scripture will give you answers, but more — the thing about scripture to me is it’s the truth.  It has truth all through it, but it has to be read as it was intended to be read, and it’s a story of a God who grew and changed and evolved and developed and about human beings who are going through the same process.  Isn’t it interesting that God reveals himself as a God who changes?  In a way, well, that doesn’t make any sense, does it?  God is everything.  Well, the God in scripture is not necessarily the God who is in that moment, because what you’re looking at is a story of a relationship, God relating to human beings.  And when you think about that, all right, how would you do that?  He could do a miracle thing and just make everybody understand and puff.  That’s just not the plan.  He wants us to discover him.  He wants us to understand him.  He wants us to surrender to what it is that he’s calling us into, because it’s so rich and full if we can see it for what it is.  So there’s a problem, I think, with going to scripture to understand who especially God the Father is, because the fullness of God the Father is in Jesus the Son.  That’s the fullness of God the Father.  What we had before that is God, but it’s a God who is trying to convince a group of people that he is one of the gods, and if he’s going to convince people that he’s a God they’ve never heard of  — Yahweh,  who’s that — then he has to sort of explain himself and say, “This is what I do.”  So he has to do the same things that the other gods do.  So he’s powerful.  That’s the biggest thing about gods.  They were always the ones who could do anything, and they had a kind of temperament that they get easily angered, and if they didn’t like what human beings were doing, they would destroy them, or they would punish them.  And God reveals himself as that kind of God in the Old Testament, and probably the strangest thing, in a way, when you think about the God who we now know, that was revealed in Jesus, for that God to look at human beings and say, “They are just a bunch of nobody’s.  I so regret making the world, this beautiful world.”  He said, “I just hate it.  I’m just going to destroy everybody.”  Well, that’s a typical god statement to people that gets their attention, that says, “Oh my gosh, I’ve got to do what he’s saying.  I’ve got to please this God.  I’ve got to please him by my performance.  Otherwise I’ll be destroyed.”  That image comes up over and over and over again in scripture. 

Look at the time when — the story that’s in the first reading, of Noah.   He looked at everybody that he created, animals, beautiful — even the earth.  He said, “I’m going to destroy everything I’ve made.  I just regret doing it.  I feel awful.”  Does that make any logical sense that the God who created this world, and it’s all very good, that would look at it and say, “It’s all very bad, and I’m going to destroy it”?  So what’s the story about?  It’s about a tiny seed in people’s imaginations, that this God, who is like all the other gods, has a weakness, a kind of Achilles’ heel.  He can’t stand, in a way, to be a destructive God.  He is that, but then at the same time, he kind of melts when somebody presents to him some other alternative, like, “Maybe you should trust in what you created more.  Maybe you should be a nicer God.”  The other story that’s so powerful and so effective is when Moses had gone up to Mount Sinai to get the Ten Commandments, the core of what is in the Old Testament.  That’s the heart of the Old Testament, these laws that reveal God’s nature and our nature and what we have to do in order to live in harmony with God and one another.  We have to acknowledge God, who he is, and use him for what he wants us to use him for, not for pain, not for punishment but for goodness.  He wants us to not have any other God but him.  He wants us to be compassionate and caring for one another.  So three commandments about how we relate to God, seven commandments how we relate to one another: that’s the wisdom.  And he gives this great gift, and the Israelites have been irritating him anyway all along, which is interesting.  He called them stiff-necked, but basically, when he came down, he was so furious that he decided — he told Moses, “Well, I’m going to destroy all the Israelites.  They’re disgusting.  I hate it when they don’t do what I tell them to do, and my hate turns to vengeance, and my vengeance turns to destruction, and I’m going to kill them.”  That’s the God that reveals himself in the Old Testament, and it lingers as a bad smell in people’s imaginations of God.  They really fear that that is who he is.  And you can take any natural tragedy, anything, and people will say, “I think God is punishing us for doing something that we shouldn’t have done.  He’s upset.  He’s angry.  We’d better shape up.”  That’s the antithesis of the relationship God ultimately has planned for you and me and God, God the Father, God the Son, God the Spirit, the creator, the revealer and the empowerer.  But that wasn’t there in the Old Testament.  It couldn’t be there, because people weren’t ready.

I think it’s so important to understand something about human nature.  When I used to think about people like Abraham and Adam and Eve, whatever, you think about these creatures.  You think they’re kind of like us.  They would be pretty intelligent, and so therefore, everybody back then must have been pretty intelligent and evolved.  Five thousand years ago?  What do you think the basic understanding of human beings was toward things like love and forgiveness and patience and forgiveness and all?  They were more primitive, and primitive man may seem like then man is evil.  But primitive human beings were just primitive.  That’s what they are.  They were just growing out of chimpanzees, and a lot of people don’t like that idea that we came, naturally evolved from nature.  It doesn’t mean that God didn’t do it.  God created us.  Everything that is, is created by God, but the fact that he did it in a way that implies that there’s a need for time and effort and work in order to grow and evolve into who we ultimately were meant to be — we were made good.  God says that in Genesis, but the goodness in human beings is like a seed, like a tiny seed, and it can be overshadowed by anything that is more primitive.  You look at some of the things that human beings have done in the past, genocide or even racism, anything, people that murder, sociopaths.  What is that?  It’s a constant reminder that human beings without understanding who they are and surrendering to a power greater than then are not going to be able to evolve into who they were intended to be.  We were never meant to be without God in us.  That was never the plan, but it took 3,000 years before the call of — well, before, let’s say, the story of Adam and Eve, the call of Abraham 2,000 years before Christ.  It took thousands of years to get people ready for the fullness of who God is, and the God who is, is irresistible when you see him, believe in him, know who he is.  He is so much on your side and my side and wants so much for us to be freed of that lower nature within us, and we are all engaged in this work.  In fact, to me it seems like that is the work of human beings, to grow and evolve and help each other to grow and evolve into the creatures that God intended us to be.  And if we want to know what that creature looks like, look at Christ.  Look at the man filled with patience and the capacity to suffer what is necessary in order to do the work that we’re called to do.  It’s our choice to surrender to that.

We talk about understanding and knowing the truth.  Well, I don't know that we’ll ever know the truth in the sense of understanding exactly why it’s this way and exactly what’s going on all the time.  That’s not — to know the truth is more to surrender to the way things are.  The truth is reality, the reality of your life right now, what’s going on.  That’s real, and 90 percent of that is there for — all of it, in a sense, is there for you.  And so do you understand why or how it’s going to end up and all that?  No, it’s just a knowing deep inside that — there is truth in reality and what’s unfolding.  And what’s unfolding is for us, always for us, and it brings us into a place of greater awareness and consciousness.  That’s the reason we exist, and when one person grows in consciousness, everyone else around them is lifted up.  There’s always been a small group of people who have got the message.  It’ll probably always be that way.  They’ll be the ones that are far, far above everybody else.  They’re called mystics and the saints and great philosophers and physicists and all that.  They’re gifted with insight into the way things are, and those are the unique people that God uses like avatars.  They’re there, and they lift the whole human race up.  And none was more powerful than Jesus.  He was the one that lifted up people more than anyone else as he described God who is in us as we are and the world as it’s intended to be.  Without him, we would still be living under a frightening, judgmental and angry God, but God slowly, not all of a sudden in Jesus, but slowly revealed himself in story after story after story.  And there was always this hope in Isaiah that was so unbelievably important.  The God who is, is not a tyrant.  The God who is, is a servant God, and that’s what we find in Jesus, God the servant. 

 Father, you have a longing in your heart for union, communion with each of us. So many things are hard for us to understand. So many things are hard for us to surrender to, and yet you ask us to do this for you and for us, for one another. So bless us with that grace that is there that we will long for it. It’s our wanting it that is so crucial and so important; our believing that it’s there to be found. Bless us with this kind of faith and trust and the ability to decide and to live a life that is not in any way, shape, or form a lie. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.