Choose Your Menu Carefully
Luke 4: 1-13
Rev. John P. Wesley
February 21, 2010
If you have friends like I do who are biblical literalist, you may have some trouble explaining to them what Lent is all about. You see, the first question they are going to asked you is, “Where do you find the word Lent in the bible.” These literalist have this thing about the bible. They claim the whole of human experience is spelled out in this book called the bible and nothing should be accepted as good if it isn’t in the bible. Now these are the same people who drive cars, use computers and talk on cell phones, none of which are mentioned in the book. But somehow that seems different from organs in sanctuaries, women ministers and these seasons of the year like Lent. They aren’t in the bible, so why bother with them?
The Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor acknowledged there wasn’t a season of Lent mentioned in the New Testament because people in the early days of the church thought the end of time was upon them. They believed Jesus was going to return any day. They were living so close to the resurrection they didn’t have to take much time to think about it and what it meant. Some were so caught up in this new life of Christ that they refused to get married, they sold what they had and gave it away, and they left jobs just to become itinerant preachers with little or no support. Those were heady days for the church, like the days of one’s youth. But the church had to grow up in a few years as time passed and the sun was still shining and the moon had not turned to blood.
It seems important to remember that while the word Lent simply means springtime, there was a practice apparent in the church long before it was called Lent, a practice that included fasting and prayer in preparation for the celebration of Easter. In the first two centuries or so this fasting time may have lasted only from Good Friday until Easter. But by the fourth century some church fathers were suggesting a time of 40 days be spent in some form of fasting and prayer.
It’s good for us to understand why the church remembers this time called Lent. It is intended to be a spiritual discipline, a way of remembering the ultimate victory Christ experienced through his death and resurrection. Lent invites us to consider the life of Christ so that our own life of faith might better reflect his life in us.
Lent is marked by 40 days. Sundays aren’t really a part of the fast days of Lent. Some have called Sundays feast days. This year as we move through Lent I’m going to invite you to think about a table. This table is easily symbolized in the table of communion around which we gather each week. But remembering that Lent is not so much about feasting as it is fasting in preparation for the feast, I want us to think a little about the preparations that go into setting a table. Certainly before this table of communion could become a source of life for us, a guide into grateful living, Jesus would have to endure the cross and experience the resurrection. Without that, no life is given to the table.
But before the cross, what steps do we see Jesus taking to fulfill God’s will for his life? First there is a matter of his selecting from life’s menu only those things that were life-giving and life sustaining. In his wilderness experience he was tempted to take short cuts, to misinterpret the scriptures and to make demands of God. Jesus was able to set a table that continues to feed a hungry world two thousand years later because he chose from the menu of life carefully.
I’m not going to go through each of Jesus’ temptations this morning. I thought Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor was probably right when she wrote,” When it's our turn, none of us is going to get the Son of God test. We're going to get the regular old Adam and Eve test, which means that the devil won't need much more than an all-you-can-eat buffet and a tax refund to turn our heads.”
Few of us may be led into a wilderness of sand and hot sun and dried up eddies, but just about every person I know has spent some time in the wilderness. And if they haven’t they are going to do so. Our wilderness may come in the emergency room of a hospital where we wait for news about a loved one. It may come with a pink slip that leaves us out of work and out of money. Our wilderness may come at the end of a long night of drinking so much we don’t remember where we were last night or what we said. Our wilderness may come after spending three years in college thinking we knew exactly what we wanted to do and then learning that we don’t know at all what we want to do with our lives. Our wilderness may come when a relationship we’ve had and depended on ends and we are forced to be alone, forced to look at ourselves in ways that make us see the whole naked truth. All of us have been in those wildernesses, and we will be again. And what we may need to take from Jesus’ experience is the knowledge that temptation usually comes to us when we are hungry, not when we are full. And that temptation doesn’t always look like the evil it is. Someone wrote that the devil doesn’t entice us with evil things, but with good things for the wrong reasons. The wilderness is not a place most of us want to stay very long. We don’t like to be thirsty and we don’t like to be hungry, and when we are we are tempted to listen to the first good suggestion that comes along to get us out of the mess.
When Susan and I were in Taipei three years ago a couple of students from the university where my wife spoke took us on a tour of the town. I hadn’t slept very well and my head was hurting after a few hours of sightseeing. I thought a good meal might be just what I needed. So we stopped at a little restaurant. The menu was in Manchurian, so we told these two young ladies to just order what they would like and we would share.
I don’t remember how many dishes came out before we were through. The dish I remember most looked like a carp baked with everything attached. It tasted just like a carp with everything attached. I went away from the restaurant with another reason not to sleep that night.
When we are hungry, when we are in the midst of a wilderness, we need to think some about the voices we are listening to for guidance. It’s not enough that someone claims to know the way out of the wilderness. It’s not enough if they even sound sincere and religious. Luke lets us know that the devil knows scripture and is able to twist it just a little so that it sounds reasonable. It was the same kind of trick the serpent used in the garden of Eden. Start with something that is accepted as true, then add your own twist to it. Pretty soon you have a premise that sounds believable, almost godly. It may be wrong. If people were a little more aware of history or a little more aware of truth, they might not fall for these quick solutions. But some of us just want out of the wilderness and we are suckers for the first good line that comes our way. We don’t want to stay in this global warming wilderness too long, so we listen to those who take a little science and convince us we aren’t responsible and it’s all a hoax. We don’t want to be in this bad economy wilderness so we listen to those who tell us we can have the government provide everything that is needed for everyone’s good while cutting everyone’s taxes. Sounds good to me. And we want to believe that we can still live faithful lives to God without having to commit ourselves to the life-giving, sacrificial way of the cross. Better to listen to a good looking preacher tell us that what God wants for us is a large home, expensive cars and lots of money in the bank. Just name it and claim it.
Well, there’s a big difference between taking the time required to learn the truth and just taking anyone’s opinion for the truth. Lent invites us to stay in the wilderness longer, to put up with the discomfort until we recognize what is going on in us, and recognize the way God is leading us to go. To find that way we have to be willing to listen, willing to summit ourselves to study and to learning from others. We have to cultivate the ability to trust God in a new way with new things. Can it be that God can really keep us, even if we are facing humiliation, poverty or death?
My favorite movie this past year was entitled Julie and Julia starring Merle Streep and Amy Adams. I’m not sure whether the book is about Julia Childs, the well known TV Chef, or Julie Powell who, bored with her job, decided to spend a year preparing one Julia Child’s meal a day and writing a blog about it. It turns out in the move that Julia Child’s was once bored with her life. Her husband was a diplomat in France and she felt herself small and insignificant. The only thing she seemed to like to do was eat. But her enjoyment of food made her decide she wanted to become a chef. To do that she had to push herself into a male dominated kitchen to take classes and learn from the best. It was not an easy route, and in the midst of her studies life was a lot more difficult than it was when she was just bored. But she learned the chemistry of fine cooking and it allowed her to bless the world with her recipes for a long, long time.
I understand that Julie Powell made some money off the book she wrote, fixed some nice dinners. And now she is writing a book about slaughter houses and trying to put her marriage back together.
The path out of our wilderness is not always an easy one. But we need to be careful about choosing from the menu that’s offered to us. There are some good things on that menu that are not what is needed. And the only way to make a good judgment is to have spent some time getting to know the one who sets the table. Lent may not give us the answer we are looking for in life, but it reminds us of the importance of staying in a close relationship with the one who has made us, the one who has called us into life, the one who is keeper of things eternal. On Ash Wednesday we listened as that part of the sermon on the mount was read again, ‘19“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; 20but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.’
Maybe at some level we know what those treasures are, what things are worth our time, our energy, our commitment, our lives. Maybe we know, but my guess is there are so many items on the menu of life that we forget from time to time what is really the bread of life and what is the cup of blessing. We can copy what someone else has said or done. We can believe that if it was good enough for papa then its good enough for me. Or we can go into the wilderness for a short time determined to commit ourselves more fully to a relationship with Christ, the one who knows the difference between food that is fluff and food that can sustain us for eternity.
