Everything Old Has Passed Away

Scripture Lessons: 2 Corinthians 5: 16-21 and Luke 15: 1-3 and 11b-32 Sermon Title: Everything Old Has Passed Away Preached on March 31, 2019 We call this room a Sanctuary. That’s a good word. It’s a word that disassociates this room from places like a court house or an exam room. Do you know what I mean? The word “sanctuary” connotates safety. This is meant to be a place of refuge and forgiveness, which is something that we all need because in so many other places we’re being poked and prodded, feeling examined or exposed. I remember how much I feared the summer time, not because I feared getting out of school. No. What I feared was going to the pool and taking my shirt off in public. The swimming pool can be a scary place that way. Putting yourself out there without the protection of being fully clothed isn’t easy to do, and so the doctor’s office is worse. You have to get on a scale. I don’t like that. Then you have to answer a bunch of questions. A doctor once told me that whatever I told him, he multiplied by three. “How often do you eat fast food?” he’d ask. I’d tell him about twice a week, which he’d multiply by three to get six, which was closer to the truth. The doctor’s office is a place of healing, but it can feel like a place of shame, and sometimes it starts before you even get into the exam room. I once was in the waiting room reading a preacher book, a Bible commentary. The guy next to me noticed, which I assumed was bad, because he just looked like one of those guys I didn’t want to engage in a religious conversation. He started telling me about how he reads the Bible every day. Hearing him say that made me a little nervous, so just as I was preparing to tell him “yes, I have been saved,” he said, “I read the Bible every day because it tells me what God is like and how I should be.” Now there’s something valuable that I might have missed. Many of us read the Bible. We all do, but what are we looking for? Getting to our Second Scripture Lesson for this morning from the Gospel of Luke, according to the great reformer, Martin Luther, we have here “the Gospel in miniature.” The parable of the prodigal son reduces the Gospel to its most essential message, for it tells us succinctly: 1. What God is like. 2. How we should be. First, what God is like. You’ve heard it before, that God is Our Father, Who Art in Heaven. Father can be a perfectly appropriate metaphor for God, so long as we pick the right kind of father. It’s been said that among major league baseball players, when asked, “what part of playing baseball as a kid did you dread the most,” a majority answered, “the ride home with my dad.” The other day I saw a great sign put up at a little league field. It was a set of rules for parents: 1. Remember that they are just kids. 2. And that the coaches are volunteers. 3. Recognize that this is meant to be fun. 4. Leave the umpires alone, and remember that your kids can hear what you say to them. 5. And win or lose, buy your child some ice cream. I like those rules, because I remember standing in Left Field out at Oregon Park, and some dad yelled to his son, “hit it to the kid in left field, it looks like he’s asleep.” If you’re wondering how that made me feel, know that this happened at least 30 years ago, but I still remember exactly what this dad said. The idea of a sanctuary is nice then, because so many places are not like what this place is meant to be. And the idea of having a father in heaven, well, whether you think that sounds great or terrifying depends on what kind of father we are talking about. My dad was most always kind, which I now know is truly a gift, because there are all kinds of different dads. I’ve heard of a father who disowned one of his daughters. Another who returned the letters sent by his son with no response, other than sending back the son’s letter with the grammar corrected. If this is a place focused on a Father in heaven, is it any wonder that some people see this room, not as a Sanctuary where they are safe and protected, but as an exam room where they are judged and condemned? Last Tuesday we were planning for this worship service, debating whether or not it’s best to sit or stand during the prayer of confession. You wonder what your church staff does the week. Well, there you have it. We decided that sitting during the Prayer of Confession was the best, because to sit with your head bowed is a more penitential position than standing, but then we wondered when and how to invite you to stand again. Joe Brice suggested that after confessing our sins he might just say, “Would the defendant please rise.” He won’t ever do that, but this idea gets us to the heart of the matter. If we hear this story of the Prodigal Son, with the guilty young man who asked for his inheritance early, basically saying, “Dad, I wish you were dead, so I could have what you’re leaving me in the will,” then took the money and squandered it all on loose living and so lost track of himself and the standards by which he was raised that he found himself looking longingly at the sloop the pigs were eating, and then in desperation went back to his Father in the hopes of being brought on as one of the hired hands, what do we expect after confessing our sins and hearing the words: would the defendant please rise? Condemnation? Some received that from their fathers. Shame? In some family’s shame was never in short supply. What were punishments like in your house? After wreaking the car at 16 did they ever let you forget it? Did you ever feel like there was reconciliation again? If your earthly father has inspired in you a distrust or fear of God, then hear what God is like, for while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. That’s what God is like. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. That’s what God is like. But how should we be? That’s in this story too. Now his elder son was in the field; and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing. He called one of the slaves and asked what was going on. When he found out that his prodigal brother had returned, rather than welcome him like the Father, this older son did what so often we do. He became angry and refused to go to the party. His father came out and began to plead with him. But he answered his father, “Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!” If we go to the Bible to learn what God is like and how we should be, in this older brother, we hear a warning about how we too often are. We don’t always open the doors of this church wide enough. Too often we accept God’s grace, while failing to pass it on. We take pride in our moral fiber, while failing to recognize that the ones we’ve left out, fenced in, turned our back on, lashed out at, or sent an angry email to is our brother or sister. This is a parable of Jesus that not only tells us what God is like, but how we should be, and how we should be is not like the older brother, for the older brother is more focused on what his brother is getting than what he has received according to the father’s mercy. Sometimes the grass appears so green on the other side, that we fail to see what’s underneath our own feet. Sometimes we focus so on our neighbors’ sin, that we fail to see how we need forgiveness. Sometimes we are so angry that our brother has crossed a finish line that we fail to see how we’ve won the race. Within us all is a prodigal son who needs forgiveness, and an older brother who forgets about grace. The Cherokee said that within us all are two wolves: One is evil. He is envy, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, and false pride. But the other is good. He is love, hope, humility, kindness, and compassion. As they fight within us all, the question is, which one will win? The old Cherokee teachers said, “The one we feed.” That poor older brother. Refusing the good feast of the father to feed on his own resentment. Refusing to drink from the cup of salvation that he might drink his fill of inferiority and false pride. He’s not so unlike us, for the Father would welcome many into this house, that we would look down our noses at. The Father would welcome with open arms many who we still resent, holding close the memory of how they squandered their inheritance and left us to hold things together. But what kind of God do we honor with such behavior? Not the God of Scripture. Not the God of Grace and Redemption. No. When we act so entitled, we are blind to the truth of the Gospel, for in God’s Kingdom Spring has come again, so we must not allow winter to linger on in our hearts. From now on, regard no one from a human point of view; [for] anyone who is in Christ is a new creation; everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! Amen.

Listen, so that you may live

Scripture Lessons: Isaiah 55: 1-9 and Luke 13: 1-9 Sermon Title: “Listen, so that you may live” Preached on March 24, 2019 My family has now been glad to call Marietta home for about a year and a half. It will be two years in July, which isn’t that long, so people are still kind to ask us how we’re settling in and what we think about the place. Of course, I grew up here, but it’s still new, so Dr. Sam Matthews, newly retired pastor of First United Methodist Church, asked me about it over lunch last Monday. “What is it like? How is your family settling in?” he asked. I told him how fortunate I felt to be living in a place and serving a church like this one, and he responded, “you’ll be asked to preach the funeral of a lot of people who made it that way.” He’s right about that. I’ve already preached the funeral of some people who have made this place great, whose legacy benefits me and my family. Already, I’ve preached the funeral of some who made this community and this church what it is. When that’s the case, the funeral becomes a chance for us to celebrate the life of saints who ran their race well. Even in the midst of grief, we take time to thank God for the life of those who have gone on. We don’t think so much about why they died or take their death as some kind of warning, instead we focus on how they lived. But that’s not how people always deal with death. Someone dies, and the first question some people ask is: “was he sick?” “Was it cancer?” “Did she smoke?” This may be a natural way to be. Someone dies, and we want to know why. Human beings can’t help but ask the question, “why,” especially when trying to understand the great tragedies of life. That being the case, you can understand why it sounds like it was just accepted knowledge that those who died when the tower of Siloam fell had it coming. Many just assumed that the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices must have done something to deserve it. That’s just the way we deal with death sometimes. We hear about a tragedy and we ask, “why?” Before you think we’re not still like that, consider all the people you know who still take the paper just for the obituaries? People think a lot about death. We’d talk a lot about obituaries back in Tennessee. A woman back in Tennessee named Wanda Turner used to criticize people if their obituary was too long. She showed me one that she was disgusted with and said, “it’s an obituary, not a resume! Do these people think God’s reading these things to decide who gets into heaven?” We all knew not to die and let our obituary be too long or Wanda Turner would talk bad about us. That woman was incredible. I could tell Wanda Turner stories all day. She was in her 90’s, still coming to church every Sunday, and one morning she was standing by the coffee pot outside the Sanctuary before the service started. “Miss Wanda, how are you?” I asked. She said, “Pastor, I’m doing pretty well. At my age there’s not much sin that even tempts me, much less that I could follow through on.” Wanda Turner was something else. But she gets us to an important point. Like death, sin can become an obsession, especially other people’s sin. We want to make sense out of death, and so we blame the victims, but Jesus won’t stand for that: At that very time there were some present who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. [But] He asked them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?” Jesus responds with this question because those present who told him about the dead Galileans were thinking that their death must be a punishment for their sin. That because they died, they must have done something worse than what everyone else was doing. This is a human tendency. Sometimes we revel in the sin of the deceased to assure ourselves that we won’t be next, though death is largely out of our control. We don’t like that, so we come up with little algorithms: I don’t smoke so I won’t get cancer. I don’t eat red meat, so I won’t have a heart attack. I won’t have my kids vaccinated and they won’t get autism. The ones who died must have done something to deserve it. Only, sometimes bad things just happen. Now, no one wants to hear that. We like to hear about what we can control, so, this week The New York Times reported that doctors are wondering whether or not we should be eating eggs. I wouldn’t worry too much about it, though. We won’t be throwing out our eggs. Tomorrow it will just be something different, but some pay attention to these things because we all want to avoid death and suffering. We try to avoid sin, cigarettes, cholesterol, and a bunch of other stuff, only avoiding death and really living aren’t the same thing To help us really live, Jesus tells a parable: A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting soil?’ [But the gardener] replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year.’” What’s the point of the parable? Well, we are the fig tree, the gardener is Jesus, and if your name wasn’t in the obituaries this morning than he’s bought you a little more time. What are you going to do with it? That’s a good question, isn’t it? And it’s the right one to ask, because we can’t fear death wondering if we might be next. No. We must wake up each morning knowing we might be, for the only thing that separates us who are alive and them who have passed on is that for some reason the Good Lord saw fit to give us a little bit more time. What will we do with it? Jane Sullivan told me that she heard about a 104-year-old woman whose friends asked her what she wanted to be sure and do before she died. The woman said, “I’ve never been arrested, and I think I’d like that.” Isn’t that incredible? Along those same lines I saw a CS Lewis quote: “You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” There’s more to living than not dying. And there’s more to today than the fact that you and I woke up on this side of the grave because today we have a chance to change how we’ve been living that we might live more abundantly. Back in 2016 I had the honor of officiating at the funeral of a 102-year-old woman. She didn’t want me to preach. I was the same age as her great-grandchildren, so she never really saw me as her pastor, and even though I went to visit her often she always just kind of saw me as a kid. That was OK. The man who preached was a long-time friend of hers. They met when she was 80, so that means they had more than 20 years to solidify their relationship. She gave this man instructions for what to say at her funeral, and so she told him not to make his part in the funeral a eulogy about the deceased. “Don’t talk about me,” she told him, “because if they don’t know me by now than they’ve missed their chance. Talk instead about Jesus, because they haven’t missed their chance to get to know him.” If we are all fig trees, fruitless fig trees, we have been spared by the Gardener who can change us. Who sees in us the potential to bear fruit, and desires to fertilize and work our soil so that we might do just that. Now this charge to bear fruit is also a gift. Today, we can’t go back and change the beginning of our story, but we can start where we are and change the ending. I want to say that this is a good message for our church, right now and in this moment. You might know, possibly because I’ve talked about it a lot, that three years ago our church found herself in the midst of a big conflict. The stories in the news about the United Methodist Church recently may be giving you flash backs. As a result of decisions made to keep our Presbyterian doors open wide to the children of God who love someone of the same gender, there were many who left this church to start another one. The paper got a hold of our dirty laundry, so right there in the Marietta Daily Journal were stories about us, full of discord and conflict. That’s true. That’s what happened, and we can’t go back and change it. But let me tell you something more important. This morning that same paper announced which church was voted as the Best Place to Worship in Cobb County, and we are it. They told us last Thursday, and all weekend I’ve been wishing I could tell Harris Hines about it. All weekend I’ve been wishing I could call up Bob Stephens and so many others to let them know how far we’ve come, but while they helped us get here, they aren’t here to see it. We are though. We are. And we can’t change the past, but we can change the ending. We can live today, right now, with a new focus and a new future. We can focus on the power of the Good News and the love of God rather than debate who is in and who is out. We can lift our voices in praise to the God of all creation rather the wring our hands, worried, anxious and afraid. Today: Let us lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. Today, let us do so, for we have fruit to bear. Amen.

The Love We Resist

Scripture Lessons: Genesis 15: 1-15 and Luke 13: 31-35 Sermon Title: The Love We Resist Preached on March 17, 2019 On April 28th, more than nine years ago, my life changed forever when I held our oldest daughter Lily for the first time. I looked at her, so perfectly tiny and helpless and suddenly came to the realization that I could become one of those people who puts their kid on a leash. You know who I’m talking about? Now the people who put their dog in a stroller? I still don’t get that, but I had also judged those parents who put their kids on leashes until I held that baby girl and understood. Becoming a parent changes you. It just does. There’s a new TV show called Workin’ Moms about mothers who also work fulltime. The main characters are always conflicted about whether they should be staying home with their children instead of going back to work. It’s a show that’s very easy for many modern parents to relate to, but my favorite scene is when a mother is jogging through the woods with her infant son in a stroller. You can imagine. It’s as though she’s running on one of the Kennesaw Mountain Trails, and she comes face to face what many of us who run on those trails fear most, if irrationally. She’s running through the woods and comes upon the Kodiak Bear who’d recently escaped from the zoo. She was running, thinking about work, she had her headphones in her ears, so she didn’t notice the bear until she was right up on it. The bear had been eating garbage and he reared up on his back legs and roared at this mother, who took her stand between her baby and the bear to roar even louder right back. The bear knew not to mess with this lady, and turned around. It was incredible, but such is love. That’s what love looks like. Parents want to protect their children. If they made baby Björn baby carriers big enough to hold a 7 and a 9-year-old I’d have our girls strapped to my chest right now. Once they have cell phones, I’ll have those things tapped in a second. They better lock their diaries. I’m not kidding. Only, I’ve heard that that’s not what a parent is supposed to do. You have to give a child a little bit of space and freedom, but still in this father’s heart is the desire to protect his children from the world. I want to protect them from what’s out there, especially the parts that they are determined not to talk with me about. Jesus said it like this: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how I long to gather you under my wings like a mother hen, but you were not willing.” Unlike Abraham in our First Scripture Lesson, who feels darkness descend at the thought of his descendants suffering, Jesus knows that he could help his people through all their hardship, “but they were not willing,” he said. This morning Jesus is talking about that very real feeling of watching the ones who we love resist accepting the help that they need. He’s talking about resisting the urge to scoop a child up, even if she’s 20, to protect her from the whole wide world. He’s holding back, knowing that there is no need for a child to keep secrets or face daemons alone, if only they would ask for help. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how I long to gather you under my wings like a mother hen, but you were not willing.” And why not? You wouldn’t ask that if you could remember what it was like to be a teenager. Sometimes parents are the last to know. On April 20, 1999, Sue Klebold’s son Dylan and his friend Eric killed 13, wounded more than 20, before taking their own lives in a murder suicide. Dylan’s mother, Sue, gave a speech a couple years ago, trying to explain what it feels like to have raised a child who would do such a thing, to now feel like the paramount example of failed parenting, to constantly apologize for the pain that her son caused, and to still love him despite what he did. She said that so often people will ask her, “how could you not have known,” and every time it feels like a punch to the gut, because it was only after her son’s death that she learned about his pain, hatred, and depression. She knew neither that he had been buying guns or had been bullied. He had never told her about his hurt over not feeling accepted, nor his determination to have vengeance on those who had the acceptance that he wanted. She had to learn about her son as the nation was learning about him, for there were all these secrets that he kept from her. In the dark days that followed her son’s death, she reached the conclusion, that “if love were enough to stop someone who is suicidal [from hurting themselves or other people], suicides would hardly happen.” For love is there, but when someone is unwilling to talk or ask for help, love is not always enough. Having heard what Jesus says in the Gospel of Luke, I say that finding what or who is to blame for the rash of pointless violence that continues in our nation and our world is difficult. Obviously, the violence is inexcusable, but what the church must also be prepared to fight are the secrets and the shame. The Lord calls us out of our hidden lives, to stand before him in truth and to take shelter under his wings, while the message we learned this week that some parents send to their children is that who they truly are must be covered up by fake college applications and photoshopped athletic histories. The Roman Catholic Church is in trouble today too, not just for atrocities committed against children, but that the atrocities were covered up and the victims told to be quiet. Can you imagine? Can you imagine encouraging silence, when we are already so good at hiding who we really are. I heard a friend say, “I have come to the conclusion that buying craft supplies and actually using them are two separate hobbies.” That’s the case with a lot of us. We hide our reality behind our aspirations and we just put a fresh coat of paint on our pain. We cover up our broken hearts with our church clothes, because even we Christians must be reminded that we are safe in his arms and protected under his wings, no matter what we’ve done or where we’ve been. It’s hard to accept, but we must accept it, and we must be bold to trust His love enough to reveal our brokenness or we’ll never heal. I remember so well a couple sent to see a marriage counselor against their will. “We don’t need marriage counseling,” the husband said in the first session, and so the counselor responded, “then you may as well go, because if you aren’t willing than I can’t help you.” “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how I long to gather you under my wings like a mother hen, but you were not willing!” I wonder if that sounds like your mother. In some ways it sounds like mine, very much like mine. I remembered this past week how years ago she wanted to protect me from cigarettes, and not only was she on my case, but I am confident that she enlisted the help of my doctor who told me during an appointment when I was 13 or 14 years old that my asthma was so bad that if I ever so much as tried a puff of a cigarette I might just die there on the spot. Regardless of whether or not that was true, I don’t know because I’m still too scared to try. That’s not entirely true, but she was successful overall. I never really smoked, just chewed tobacco. But the moment of parenting that I’ll always remember best was when I failed Spanish. It’s true. I did. That’s what happens if you never study or pay attention in class. My parents would ask me how Spanish was going. I’d tell them it was going fine, but then the report card came home, and the cat was out of the bag. A real live F. I would have hidden it under the bed if I could have. I would have gladly accepted my parents offers to fake my transcripts had they offered. Unfortunately, they saw it and weren’t about to cover it up, so I started packing my bags for military school. That’s not what happened. They were angry, but once the dust cleared my mother went to a drawer in the china cabinet and she brought out one of her old report cards. “Read it,” she said. Her grades were lower than I expected, plus there was a note from the teacher. I don’t remember it exactly, but it said something like, “Cathy never stops talking. She is a nuisance in class and it’s no wonder her grades need such improvement.” I couldn’t believe it. I looked at my mother, who, after reading this note and seeing those grades, looked a little bit different. It’s like I’d never noticed before that she was a real person. And I think about this experience now. How important it was for me to know that she needs a savior too. A friend back in Tennessee once brought home a report card with three F’s and a D in History. His father shook it in his face and said, “What do you have to say for yourself?” My friend responded, “Looks like I need to stop spending all my time focused on History.” Or maybe we all need to focus a little more on history. Maybe we all need to do a better job of remembering that we were all once wretched, once lost, once blind. That we were all once young, angry, and foolish. For it is not by pretending that we were ever perfect that we will encourage anyone to make their way under the wings of his mercy. We can only show them the way, by turning towards him ourselves. Repent and be forgiven. Leave behind what weighs you down and confines you to the shadow. Speak and be heard. Listen and be saved. Be gathered under the mighty wings of mercy, for His is a wonderous love that none of us deserve but that all of us need. Amen.

And the Devil Said

Scripture Lessons: Deuteronomy 26: 1-11 and Luke 4: 1-13 Sermon Title: And the devil said Preached on March 10, 2019 There’s something very special about being in a church like this one. Personally, for me there’s something very special about returning to the church I grew up in. Our church has changed of course since I was a kid, but there are parts of this church that still smell the same. I don’t mean to say that we have a mold or mildew problem. What I mean is that there’s something about the stairwell that leads down to the room we call Track 25 where our kids have their Sunday School. That stairwell smells exactly the same way it did when I was a kid going down to have Sunday School in that same room, and every time I walk down those stairs I am overcome by the power of memory. When some of you walk into this room (or the Sanctuary), I imagine that the same thing happens. Memories come rushing back. Maybe you see your mother singing in the choir or your father serving communion. You might remember your children, now grown, being baptized, or how you felt to walk down the aisle on your wedding day. What I’m talking about is a bit like time travel, but it really happens, and so we know that the words of Faulkner are true: the past isn’t gone; it isn’t even past. Such an understanding of the past, strange as it may seem, embodies the Hebrew word for remember. You know that when words are translated from one language to another, sometimes part of the true essence of the word gets lost. That’s just the way it is with language. Any language. Were we to translate a phrase like, “Well, bless your heart” into Spanish, a literal translation wouldn’t do it justice. Likewise, when Jesus said at the table with his disciples, the first time he broke the bread and poured the wine, thereby serving the first communion, he said, “Do this in remembrance of me.” We have to be careful about our English translation, because by saying that, he didn’t mean, “When you do this 2,000 year from now, remember me, think of me, or don’t forget my name.” Instead what he meant was, “When you do this 2,000 years or 10,000 years from now, it’s a chance for you to recognize that I am present with you still.” That’s a different thing. It’s a bit of a time collapse, only when God is eternal what is time anyway? So, our religion is full of these rituals that connect the great, historic, deeds of God with our present. That’s what’s happening in our First Scripture Lesson. This is one of my favorite passages in the whole Bible, Deuteronomy 26: 1-11. Deuteronomy can be boring, but Jesus quotes this book often, so we are wise to pay attention to it. In the passage that I read the people bring forth their offerings, their first fruits, but once they’ve done it, they say something. They participate in a short liturgy: A wandering Aramean was my ancestor, they said. He went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous (that was all a historically accurate statement). Only then they said: When the Egyptians treated us harshly. That wasn’t technically true. And afflicted us, (the people who said it hadn’t technically been afflicted). By imposing hard labor on us, not technically true either, because the people who said these words had never been in Egypt. The personal pronoun “us” is, in a sense a fabrication, for everyone who had personally been enslaved in Egypt by the time Deuteronomy was written or this liturgy would have been used was already dead. But still they say: When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil and our oppression. While none of this is historically accurate, for remember back in Sunday School when you learned that before anyone entered the Promised Land where this liturgy was used, the generation who knew slavery in Egypt had to die, what Deuteronomy calls each consecutive generation to do, is to make their history present again. Deuteronomy calls each generation to make the suffering of their ancestors real once more. And this liturgy calls each generation, ours included, to make the mighty power of God who liberates people, not a memory, but a present reality possible now as it was then. If any of that sounds strange, know that this isn’t a strange, new idea. That’s what happens in here all the time. We don’t remember Jesus as historical fact. We evoke his memory and are reminded that not only did he live among us, he still does. We don’t just think about the mighty deeds of God, studying them like we do ancient history. When we remember, the memory becomes a current reality. Lent is the same. We give something up, chocolate maybe, but Lent’s not a diet. It’s more than that. When we observe a Lenten Discipline, we join Jesus on his journey through the Desert, or, we remember that he joins us on ours. This is important. It’s important to know that Jesus is with us, for Satan is not confined to ancient history either. He also whispers in our ears today. “Command this stone to become bread,” the devil said to Jesus, but he didn’t just say that to Jesus. He says that to us. “Eat drink and be merry,” he urged. I ask you, could there be a more persistent temptation in our 21st Century than this? Constantly we too are told to drink, because “It’s 5:00 somewhere.” Or to eat, because “You’re not you when you’re hungry.” We are so constantly bombarded by the voice of temptation urging us to satisfy our cravings, as though satisfying physical desire could bring true satisfaction, though it cannot. Scripture and the hymns tell us that again and again. There’s a hymn that I love, but it’s probably one that no one but me likes to sing. It’s called “God Marked a Line and Told the Sea.” It’s so bad they left it out of our new hymnals, which says something, because they put a lot of hymns that only a preacher could love in there. In this hymn, the 5th stanza it goes: We are not free when we’re confined, to every whish that sweeps the mind, But free when freely we accept, the sacred bounds that must be kept. You hear that? I won’t sing it, and I won’t ask you to, but I want you to know it because these words are true. The devil’s knocking on our door, day in and day out, saying: “Command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” “Come on,” he says, “just use that credit card. You can pay for it later.” “Have a bite. It’s delicious. And maybe it’s bad for you but live a little.” Now I’m not trying to advocate for suffering through Lent or denying yourself for the sake of denying. My grandmother was on a diet, pretty much for her entire life. Tab was all she’d drink, and I always wanted her to eat, drink, and be merry a little bit more than she did. On the other hand, the point I’m trying to make is that trying to satisfy the desires of the flesh is like trying to fill up a bottomless pit. Constantly searching for physical pleasure is a slavery all its own. At some point we all have to say, “Enough.” I have enough. I’ve eaten enough. My one spouse, she’s enough. But on TV and our computer is the constant temptation, not to be satisfied with what you have. That’s why, you and I, we must call on Jesus. We must see him present with us, providing us encouragement as we face the same temptation that he did. We need him. For the devil has more to say. The devil also led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, “To you I will give their glory and all this authority. If you will worship me, it will all be yours.” Do you know anyone who would take him up on this offer? Do you know anyone who already has? The human desire for power is so great, that constantly in the headlines is the story of some tyrant who oversteps decency, manipulates the democratic process, abandons his moral character, for what? To put himself in the place of God. This is a temptation that too many face and too many fall prey to. So, in Venezuela there are two presidents. In North Korea there’s a dictator with a nuclear arsenal. And here there is a news story every day about an attorney, a campaign manager, or somebody who took the devil up on his offer. In a quest to gain power at any cost, even for the price of his own soul, too many fall prey to the devil. What are we to say about these things? What are we to do? When we hear the tempter’s whisper, we must call on the King of Kings and Lord of Lord, who refused to step beyond the limit of his power. Even he bowed before somebody. Even he was always mindful that God was in control. So, we must join him in worship of the God who rules heaven and the earth, constantly mindful that he doesn’t need our help or advice, and that when we take on too much power or authority it rots our souls. The devil still speaks. He’s speaking now and too many are listening, but he has more to say. For then Satan said, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here.” How strong is the desire for self-preservation in the human heart? So strong, that we will compromise the truth to go on living. So strong, that we will turn our back on those who we love to save our own skin. So strong, that we won’t change our ways even if our ways are holding us back from joy. “Save yourself,” the devil says, but we must listen instead to the one who says, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.” Lent is a gift we’ve been given. And we’ve been given it because we are all the time living these unexamined lives. We even defend our unexamined lives, mindful only of what we stand to lose, blind to what we stand to gain if we would leave our broken ways behind. Let us be bold not to save ourselves. Let us die to the ways of sin, leaving behind our broken ways, that we might rise with Christ. Let ignore the persistent lies of Satan, to follow the one who still walks beside us and still leads to Eternal Life. Amen.