A Fourth Church Sermon by Alice M. Trowbridge

February 10, 2008 | 6:30 p.m. Vespers

Show Me the Way

Alice M. Trowbridge
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 32
Matthew 4:1–11

The desert always waits,
ready to let us know who we are—
the place of self-discovery.

And whilst we fear, and rightly,
the loneliness and emptiness and harshness,
we forget the angels,
whom we cannot see for our blindness,
but who come when God decides
that we need their help;
when we are ready
for what they can give us.

Ruth Burgess
“Bread of Tomorrow”

When we think of the word pilgrimage in the traditional sense, it might bring to mind a trip to the Holy Land, or the Hajj to Mecca, or a trip to the Western Wall, or the walk along the Camino de Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Pilgrimage can also take us on a journey up mountains or across oceans or to an ancient city. Pilgrimage can be a visit to a monastery or a trip to the Grand Canyon. It can be a walk around the neighborhood loop every morning or finding ten minutes daily to read a psalm and think about it quietly. Pilgrimage is a pathway set aside for self-discovery, and it is worth thinking about today because this is the first Sunday in Lent, the Sunday that begins a forty-day pilgrimage of sorts. And perhaps more so than any other time in our church calendar year, this is the season that invites the faithful to go on a journey to the crossroads where faith and culture meet and there to engage in a pilgrimage of our own.

Nobel Laureate T. S. Eliot wrote an essay called “The Idea of a Christian Society,” in which he examines the link between religion, politics, and economy. His premise is that we are all dissatisfied with the way in which the world is conducted: some believe that it is a misconduct in which we all have some complicity; some believe that if we trust ourselves entirely to politics, sociology, or economics, we shall only shuffle from one makeshift to another. Eliot says herein lies the perpetual message of the church: to affirm, to teach, and to apply true theology. We cannot be satisfied, he contends, to be Christians at our devotions and merely secular reformers all the rest of the week. There is one question that we need to ask ourselves every day and about whatever business we find ourselves in, and it is the church’s role in society to help answer that question: “To what purpose were we born? What is the end of man?” (Christianity and Culture, p. 77).

A similar question we know from our own confessional heritage as Presbyterians, from the Heidelberg Catechism, where questions on Christian doctrine are asked and then answers are given, questions and answers intended to be memorized. The very first question of Heidelberg begins with this: “What is the only comfort in life and death?” The answer, paraphrased: “That I, with body and soul, both in life and death, belong to God, who in Jesus Christ delivered me from sin by his sacrifice on the cross and who preserves me, so that not a hair can fall from my head without God’s knowing, and that by the Holy Spirit, I am assured eternal life, and that my greatest purpose in life is to come to know God and to live unto God and to bring glory to God.”

For millennia, deserts have provided important arenas for pilgrimage. After their exodus from slavery in Egypt, the people of Israel spent forty years wandering in deserts, seeking their promised land. John the Baptist taught and baptized followers in the deserts of Judea. After Jesus’ baptism by John, today’s text brings us to his own wilderness times, when the Spirit of God led Jesus into the desert where he was tempted by the devil for forty days and nights before beginning his earthly ministry (Way of the Mystics, p. 15). There is the tradition of the Desert fathers, who fled persecution by the Roman Empire beginning in the third century and went to Egypt as hermits, ascetics, and monks. Among them was Augustine of Hippo, one of the early church’s framers of the doctrine of sin. In fact it is said that he had the words of our psalm this morning, Psalm 32, written above his bed so that those words would be the first thing he saw every morning: ”I acknowledged my sin to you. . . . I confessed my transgressions . . . and you forgave me, by your steadfast love.”

Our scripture today is a parable about Jesus’ temptation in the desert, and this parable prepares us for our own pilgrimage throughout these forty days. In his time in the desert, Jesus did not avoid the devil. Nor did he defeat him: “the devil departed until an opportune time.” The devil’s always there.

And what are the three temptations Jesus contended with? The first, hunger, was at a basic survival level, a physical need. Hunger can drive a person to desperate lengths. So we learn that Jesus was hungry, famished is the word used, and the devil offers him bread. “If you are the Son of God, turn this stone to bread.” Amazingly composed, Jesus responds, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”

The second temptation is more subtle than the first, but just as basic to our humanness as the need for bread. It is about identity. We know that when our identity is questioned, it plays at something deeply sacred in us. It is human to want to prove who it is we are. And here the devil says, “If you are really who you think you are, prove it. Cast yourself down to the ground and surely the angels will save you.” No one likes to have his or her identity challenged or threatened, and yet Jesus resists again and tells the devil, in an unflappable tone, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”

The third temptation—just as ingenious as the other two—is perhaps the most dangerous of them all: the need for power. The tempter took Jesus to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and said, “Worship me and all this will be yours.” Our need for recognition and authority and prestige is in our human nature, too. And the devil knows it and plays on it. Again Jesus calmly and resolutely challenges the tempter and says, “It is written, Worship the Lord your God and serve only him.”

These are lessons about temptation. And when we look at how Jesus handled the devil, we learn something about confronting our own temptations. Jesus did not ignore his tempter. He confronted him. He persevered through these temptations. The devil appeals to our injured pride, our wounded ego, our fears of being underappreciated or passed by. These are our vulnerabilities. These are the times when we can succumb to temptation. But the message for us today and the example of Jesus is that the devil’s determination that we see in this text must be surpassed by our own determination to follow the way of Christ, and such perseverance in the spiritual desert is what we are invited to cultivate during Lent.

We are particularly aware today of our human need and the frailty of our souls, how subject we are to the sins of the world—pride, envy, anger, sloth, lust, greed, and gluttony. Yes, today is a day to recognize our sinful natures, but Lent is not “the bad news” for the next forty days that precedes the good news of Easter. Not at all. Lent “is a time of grace when the people of Christ reflect on their mortality and sin, as well as on the creative and re-creative power of God by which we are saved” (“First Sunday in Lent,” Texts for Preaching). This first Sunday in Lent is a bit like a rehearsal for our forty-day pilgrimage, and it is important today to review the places along the way, to map out the most important events associated with God’s activity as Savior of the world.

We don’t know the pilgrimage we will find ourselves on in the next forty days, but we do know where Lent ends and where it begins. It begins here, with the confession of our sins and our profession of our faith in God, who, by Gods’ wide mercy and steadfast love, is willing to forgive us and restore us.

We know that the way of Lent takes us past Jesus’ persecution and suffering and death on the cross. There are many routes to Easter, but none of them escape the shadow of the cross. And so we would do well to kneel before that cross today, to consider again, as we partake of the Lord’s Supper, all that was accomplished there: That the cup we drink is the cup of the new covenant, sealed in Christ’s blood for the forgiveness of our sins. And that beyond that cross lies the empty tomb and the promise of life together for eternity. We know that Jesus’ disciples recognized him in the breaking of bread, just as we will do together shortly.

The struggle with sin in the world begins with the struggle of sin in ourselves, and Lent is the time for such self-discovery. Just as Jesus prepared himself for the discipline of his ministry by spending forty days in the desert, we prepare ourselves for the ultimate renewal that Easter offers us by our own intentional living during these forty days.

One of the great spiritual pilgrims of the twentieth century, Thomas Merton, said that in a way our discovery of God is God’s discovery of us. God comes to us from heaven and finds us and looks into us and, seeing us, gives us a new being in which we may discover God (Seeds of Contemplation, p. 41) And author-poet Ruth Burgess, whose poem is on the cover of our worship bulletin, reminds us that the desert always waits, ready to let us know who we are; it is the place of self-discovery. It reminds us that the angels are waiting for us in our spiritual blindness to remember the cross of Christ that frees us from our sins, from all that separates us from God, and in place we are given renewal of life and hope.

Perhaps the angels will teach us to focus on that which is worthwhile. So much in life that consumes us here and now will be left behind when we die. The angels might teach us to pay attention to the things that are eternal and of great value in God’s sight—things like living with courage, standing for justice, and maintaining self-control; things like seeking to understand the person with whom we disagree, and easing our belief that we have the corner on the truth, and being gentle with each other; things like listening carefully and loving generously without counting the cost. Cultivating such values puts us into a different relationship with culture and with each other.

Paul compared the rigors of pursuing a life of faith to an athletic contest. In his letter to the Romans he wrote about an athletic event where runners are in a race: “Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training,” Paul writes. “They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last, forever. Therefore do not run like a person running aimlessly; do not fight like a person beating into the air. . . . Run in such a way as to get the prize.”

Jesus walked the path ahead of us and invites us to take these forty days as a kind of pilgrimage, to make it a time in the spiritual desert to reflect upon our lives and to make it a time for our self-discovery. In the meal we will share in a few moments, remember that today is an invitation for us to hear again the words of Jesus, who calls to us, “Follow me.” He assures us, “Do not be afraid.”

Remember the way of Jesus, all that he taught us, and all that he endured. Remember the cross, the ultimate sign of forgiveness, the ultimate sign of sacrifice and hope and love. And remember the empty tomb and what lies beyond the grave. Contemplate your place in this drama, and ask yourself where you fit into this drama of life that took place for you and for me. And then, right then, when you’ve got the whole sequence of events in mind and when you are aware of your own place in the story, listen for the angels, because that’s when God comes to us—in our emptiness, in our sense of unworthiness, in our humbleness—and it is then that we are filled with all the fullness of Christ. Amen.