Deuteronomy 26:1-11 and Luke 4: 1-13. Lent 1C 2022
We’re at the beginning of Lent: a season which, I have to say, we don’t really know what to do with. Oh, we have special Bible studies (sometimes), some of us change the colours in our churches, and we have a few extra possible services that we may or may not use. Given the attendance at some of these, they are treated as optional extras. And we have a set of readings that take us through the 40 days – and with some of these we struggle to find our way into them for our time and place. Today’s readings, at first hearing, don’t seem to be related. One is a defining narrative for the understanding of the covenant between God and Israel. It’s the climax of the Exodus story. The other is familiar to anyone who has grown up in the Christian faith. So – where to start? At the beginning!
The last chapter of Deuteronomy comes at the end of the Exodus journey – the story of the difficult journey from slavery to a promise of freedom. It’s a call to remember, and to celebrate. In my lifetime there have been several times when I felt that remembering something significant for the whole community was important. WE celebrated the centennial of Women’s Suffrage. Why do we need to take remember this? Well, it impacted on much more than simply the right to vote every few years. Back in the 70’s I wrote the Girls’ High centennial history. Did you know that ChCh Girls’ High and ChCh Boys’ High started out as attachments to Canterbury College (Now CU of course)? I read through their Board minutes. All the board members were men of course. An argument went on for years about pay rates for the teachers. The male teachers at CBHS were paid twice as much as the women as CGHS – and the women had equal or better qualifications. The women weren’t permitted to have their own housing. They either had to board with a ‘respectable family’, or live in a boarding house, such as the one on the corner of Cranmer Square. Can you imagine what it was like spending your entire professional life with all your possessions in one bedroom, and sharing all your meals in the dining room? The struggles of those 19th century women are part of our story. It’s important to remember where we’ve come from.
And a quirky little memory came back to me when I was thinking about this. I remembered sitting in Durham St one Sunday morning – I think I was 14 or 15 at the time – and thinking to myself, what a pity there were so few men in the congregation. How would all the committees manage. You will recall what the composition of most ‘important’ committees was – finance, property, parish stewards etc etc!
There have been books remembering our earthquake. We’ve all lived through that. What to do with the buildings? How to cope with the loss of personal belongings and the memories that went with them? What to preserve and what to demolish? I remember a meeting where we were discussing how to furnish Durham St’s new chapel. Would we use our brass lectern that was one of the few pieces we saved from old Durham St, or would we go totally modern and new? (We use the old one.) It’s true that our new city will have a 21st century style in the way that Napier has the Art Deco that fitted with the 1920s, but it’s also true that we need some of our heritage buildings – like the Art Centre – to remind us where we, the settlers, came from. And perhaps our Red Zone may remind us of where our first peoples came from. The earthquake is now part of our story. It’s important to remember where we’ve come from. The Mosque murders will become part of our history. They also have changed the journey we’re on. As will the Covid pandemic.
There’s something else in our reading that we might notice. The Israelites were told to include the aliens amongst them in their festival. There’s never a time when there aren’t aliens, and most of us have been, or are descended from people who have been thought of as aliens at some time or another. Excluding people is never an option.
The extra dimension that we have in our reading is that it reminds us of the foundations we stand on. The Israelites were heirs to God’s enduring faithfulness. So are we. The Israelites were called to celebrate in gratitude for God’s grace by the act of giving the first-fruits of the harvest. We are also called to remember and celebrate. And so we tell the stories in our liturgies and in our celebrations.
I wonder if our ancestors had celebrations of thanksgiving after they came to this promised land? And did the story of their journey get passed down? I don’t recall my grandparents on either side talking about their history, and I think that is my loss. How was it for you? It’s always important to remember why we give thanks.
The Gospel passage tells the familiar story of the temptation of Jesus. It’s easy to think, well, this is something that happened to Jesus, it’s not our story. Even though we say, over and over again ‘save us from the time of trial’ – whatever words we may use.
We don’t know what happened to Jesus between his baptism and the beginning of his public ministry. The gospel writers had to imagine what Jesus was doing, out there, alone in the desert. But something happened to Jesus in that empty time, and he must have talked it over with his followers afterwards – why wouldn’t he, when he lived so intimately among them during his ministry?
The story we have is what Judaism calls a haggadah – a re-telling or re-imagining of a story. It parallels the story of the tempting of Moses and Israel in the wilderness (with 40 years compressed into 40 days). Jesus has a rabbinical competition about Biblical knowledge with the Devil – they both quote from the Exodus story. It’s an old story – but what comes out of it is something entirely new.
In our gospels, the temptation follows baptism – that moment of revelation for Jesus. And we know, from our own experience, that the uplift of a high point is often followed by a dry time that may seem even drier when we recall the brightness of the vision. And, as a result, we are often ‘tempted’ to fall back into the old ways of thinking and doing.
I think Jesus took time out to find his true ministry – I don’t think it all came to him in one blinding flash at his baptism. I don’t think the temptation story is a literal one. But I do think this story is hugely important for our understanding of the person and ministry of Jesus. It’s significant for us today.
Jesus wasn’t afraid to be alone and confront his shadow side. What might happen for us if we could take time to see what’s behind our bright public faces? What would happen if we took ourselves out of the public view for a while? What would we learn about ourselves? Lent is exactly the season in the Christian tradition for this kind of taking time out.
The temptations that Luke describes so vividly tap into three enduring aspects of our human nature. There’s the desire for material security – food, clothing and shelter; the desire to find a quick and easy solution to fulfil a need; the desire to be appreciated and applauded. Quite apart from the rather different plane that Jesus occupied, we know all about these temptations.
Those basic needs for security are so easy to corrupt with the desire for more and better. Upgrade your house, get a new outfit, buy the best – you, personally, deserve it. And ‘best’ often means ‘most expensive.’ Advertising pressure is all round us, all the time. When do I stop? What’s enough?
And as for quick and easy solutions – well, we all dream sometimes of an easy way, and a permanent way to get everything we need or want. A smooth path to success. This is where the gambling industry makes its huge profits – and justifies these by saying, ah yes, but look at the money we give back to the community. I doubt if it comes anywhere near what they have milked from the poorest in our communities.
The third temptation is really a double one. It’s the temptation to manipulate other people so that I get what I want. Not just the big, visible stuff of manipulation that we see in the politics of government, clubs, societies, and churches, or the industry of advertising. It’s also the more subtle stuff – manipulating mood and emotion. It’s the games we play. The way we can hook people into patterns of caring and being cared for. It’s the game of standing on the edge of disaster and threatening to jump, so that someone else will say ‘Don’t do it,’ or ‘I’ll save you.’ There are all sorts of ways of tricking people into doing what we want – doing things for our benefit. It can even get between us and true charity. That’s the temptation of being generous to the needy – and then letting people know that we’re being generous. ‘Look at me – I do so much good.’
If we let these ways of thinking take over – and let’s face it, the pressures around us encourage us to take these paths – then there’s a cost; the cost of never confronting our own demons, and never exploring our own calling to ministry, and never moving into new territory, and a new relationship with God. Jesus came out of that desert experience filled with life and love – filled with the Spirit – equipped for his ministry on earth. He lived an authentic life of engagement and action. A life filled with compassion, and a life lived in loving relationship with God. And he shared and shares with us a new understanding of the nature of God.
It wasn’t the only time the demons of temptation visited him. In Luke’s account the text reads that the devil departed from him ‘until an opportune time.’ There would be other times when he faced the shadowside. The clearest example is, of course, Gethsemane. But every time, he came out of the shadows and moved forward.
We will walk in the desert over and over again. This story reminds us of the hope that we’re called to proclaim. And it’s not just the season of Lent, but coming to worship, Sunday by Sunday, that gives us the opportunity to pause, reflect, and face our demons.
Lent is a time for expressing gratitude. It’s a time to remember undeserved good and be sorry for the times when we went wrong. It’s a time to remember the ancestors who shaped our lives, and to give thanks for their love and faith. And it’s a time to remember that we need to learn from the past in order to move forward. Or, to put this more strongly still, unless we remember where we have come from – remember the past – and learn from it, we won’t move forward. We’ll simply go on round the old treadmill all over again.
Remember that despite all the side paths we have wandered down, God has remained faithful. We are the inheritors of grace through Christ’s love. All of us, including the aliens in our midst – are the subjects of God’s continual care and creative love. What remembering might we do, and how will it shape our ministry? How will we shine at Easter? Will we be a resurrection people? Or will we go on wandering in the wilderness, complaining about the unfairness of everything and everybody? The gospel story tells us clearly that the choice is ours to make, and we have the power to choose. Amen. – Rev Dr Barbara Peddie