The Sermons at Calvary
By Father Richard Humke
JESUS' TEMPTATION
March 9, 2003, 1 Lent B, Calvary
Church
The
beginning of Lent is dominated by the story of our Gospel today, the Temptation
of Jesus. As Lent continues on, the
symbol of the cross quickly overpowers that of the Temptation, until at last
the cross is at the center of our attention in all of its stark
simplicity. But at the beginning of
Lent it is the story of the Temptation of Jesus that dominates the Lenten
message.
What
I read to you in the Gospel today is the Scripture that is read, not only in
Episcopal churches, but in the vast majority of western Christian churches all
over the world today. And it is not
only in our own time that this is true. For more than a thousand years now it is this story that
has been the first Gospel of the Lenten Sundays. I do not look at that fact merely as a bit of trivial lore. In our day of disposable everything, it
means something -- at least it does to me -- to stand in a tradition that has
been ongoing for centuries -- to be hearing a Gospel today that I know someone
in the 12th C. in England or France or Italy was hearing in the very same
context on the very same day.
Today
is the Sunday of the Temptation. It is
the Sunday when we hear of the struggle Jesus had at the very beginning of his
public ministry, right after his Baptism as you heard in the Gospel, a deep and
difficult struggle to resist being popular, to resist being what people wanted
him to be, and to be instead what he knew he was meant to be and had to
be. The three particular temptations
are not enumerated for us this year in the Gospel because Mark does not have
them in his account of the Temptation, but we know them from other years when
we hear Matthew or Luke.
The
40 days of Jesus' fasting and temptation in the wilderness are the basis for
our 40 days of Lent, and so it makes all the sense in the world to have this
story at the beginning of this season.
In this story he went out to be by himself, to face right away the
temptations that would come to him as a charismatic religious figure.
As
an aside let me say that, though Mark's account of the temptation, which we
heard today, does not say that the devil took Jesus to a high mountain, Matthew's
account of this same event does say that. And so, if you go to the Holy Land today, there is a mountain
peak that you can see very easily when standing in the middle of Jericho, and
it is called the Mount of Temptation, the supposed site of one of the three
temptations of Jesus. There is a very
ancient Greek monastery there, with only a few monks left -- part of the sad
story of the declining Christian presence in Palestine and Israel.
But
all is not lost: near the monastery is
a casino -- called the Mount of Temptation Casino. What else would it be called?
If for some reason you don't want to take the cable car to the casino,
you can have a drink and a bite to eat in the Temptation Restaurant, which has
a good view of the Mount itself. And
I'll bet you thought that Dollywood was perhaps the tackiest thing there was,
didn't you?
We
had a long Litany today, and so we're going to have a shorter sermon than
usual. There is just one point I wish
to make.
If
we were only to read Mark's Gospel, we would not know what temptations Jesus
faced in those 40 days in the wilderness because, as I said, Mark does not
enumerate them; but I think we would have some idea of what they were, and that
would not be so different from what he actually faced. We would probably guess that he might be
tempted to choose to compromise himself for the sake of being a popular
religious leader; or to take the easy road as a religious leader and give
people what they want, not what they need; or to make the worship of Almighty
God easy and fun. Those are still
temptations of religion today, and Jesus, starting his public ministry, was
faced with those very things
They
haven't gone away. It is not only
religious leaders who are faced with such temptations, but religious
institutions as well. In our day, when
there is such competition for numbers in the religious sphere, the Episcopal
Church is not doing as well as the free churches -- and Calvary isn't doing so
well even within the family of the Episcopal Church. The temptation is to look at those churches that are booming and
to say, "Well, we ought to be more like them." That's a temptation to resist. And I am not judging them by saying
that. They have their traditions, and
they are doing very well, and they are bringing many people to a fuller
Christian life.
What
we need to do is to discern the particular gifts that we have as
Anglicans and then to build upon those gifts.
I am of the opinion that the Episcopal Church will never be a large
religious institution in America, but I'm also of the opinion that there will
always be a sizeable number of people who don't want what popular conservative
Christianity today is offering and who do want a more traditional,
worship-centered life, which is what we have to offer. Please don't misinterpret that by thinking
that I'm saying that worship on Sunday morning is all that a parish needs and
that it is not necessary for Calvary to develop a fuller parish life than I
have seen existing here because I am certainly not saying that. I am saying, "Resist the
temptation to try to be something other than who you are because who you are is
who God wants you to be. But you need
to be the best possible example of who you are."
The
challenge is not to try to do what some other Christian groups do so well,
because you will never be able to do those things as well as they do. The challenge is to resist that temptation
to look for easy answers in popularity.
That was one of Jesus' temptatons. It's a major temptation today. The hard challenge is to be the very best of
who God has called you to be, never comfortable with your deficits, but always
secure in your identity.
I
read this week some words of a Lutheran who has been attending Quaker meeting
for a number of weeks as part of his preparation for a book he is writing. As you may know, Quaker worship is
absolutely non-liturgical. The
congregation sits in silence until someone wishes to speak briefly as the
Spirit guides him to do. He tells how
an elderly woman got up to testify how much Quaker silence has fed her soul all
her life, but to worry as to whether the day may be coming when meetings will
cease for lack of Friends.
Then
another woman got up to tell about her experience in a regional gathering of
young Quakers who, she said, were deeply grounded in the Quaker tradition and
drew upon that tradition to speak out with clarity about the up-coming
war. (Quakers, you know, are
pacifists.) In other words, she was
saying, the Quaker tradition was alive and well and would not die despite its
relatively few numbers. They had a witness to make because of who they were. If
they tried to become like everyone else, what distinctive witness would they
have any longer? The writer said,
"The 'church growth' movement hasn't arrived here, and never
will." In other words, they know
who they are, and they are not giving in to the temptation to become something
else for the sake of numbers
Jesus
models for us the commitment to being who God has called him to be. Whatever temptations the Tempter gave to
him, he resisted them, but he resisted them not without cost, as we know. There is always a cost to resisting any
temptation, but there is a reward as well.
The reward is in the knowing that one has been faithful to one's integrity.
Richard
H. Humke