"Said to him"-Sermon for Lent 1, Luke 4:1-13
One of the many great gifts of having Tony Baker as Theologian in Residence at St. Julian’s, beyond the deeply engaging and substantive spiritual formation he offers on Sunday mornings for adults, is that it allows me to teach and be with our middle and high school students on most Sunday mornings. Our children are more than our future…they are very much our present…actively participating in God’s work of shaping us into who we uniquely are and what we uniquely offer to the world, right now. Their energy, joy and wisdom fill my sails, and I am always learning from them. And, this semester, specifically, we are thinking together about relationships…about how to navigate and form healthy relationships…friendship, familial relationships, romantic relationships, and our most essential relationship of all…with God in Christ…whose love sits at the center of all of our relationships and is that which binds us all together.
Now, I did an exercise with them recently to specifically think about what the many and varied voices that surround us on all sides have to say to us about our relationships. So, we created four quadrants to consider, each representing a category of voices that are deeply impactful in shaping our understanding of relationships…how we form them, what we expect of them, and how we ourselves choose to live in them. I took a picture of our work (please forward the slide), you can see it on the screen now. I have permission to share it. I want to thank Juliette Warfield who did a wonderful job as our scribe…her handwriting is infinitely better than my own. And, you will notice that the four categories of voices in our lives that we considered were our families, our church, the media and our friends. By media, we considered how relationships are portrayed in social media, movies, tv, etc…. And, their responses, as anticipated, where both wise and insightful. I will not go through them all…for I promise this is a sermon for the first Sunday in Lent…but under family they noted things like unconditional support, space to explore and make mistakes, and that our families “got our back”. They also used the word controlling, which I felt was fair, as I know I sometimes want to control who my own daughters spend much of their time with. Overall, our teens and tweens had very positive things to say about the feedback and advice that our families share with us about the relationships that are most important to us…so well-done parents and siblings. Under the category of church, they suggested words like trust and honesty…both as values to seek in healthy relationships and that they trust the honest teaching and advice that comes from their peers and the adults who help form our young people in this church. They also noted that they have learned in church that God made us for relationship and that relationships are to be a mutual blessing for all those involved. And, I will note I have done this exercise in other communities of young people, like schools, and the words that fill this quadrant are often less affirming and much more skeptical…so well-done church. Now, to push the ball forward, in the categories of media and friends, the voices described here were a little more mixed…though certainly not all negative, especially with friends, still some of the voices in these two categories were being met by our kiddos with what I would describe as appropriate, even wise, caution. In fact, they said specifically, as you can see, “mixed advice” for both categories. Further, they added words like manipulative, unrealistic, consumer, archaic, fantasy, shaming, social capital, peer pressure, and lacking seriousness. And, again, I found in such responses a wise understanding of the nuances and complexities of what those voices might suggest to us about what healthy, life-giving relationships look like and are lived out…so well-done youth.
Now, the whole point of the exercise was to say to our young people…and I say this to all of us grow-ups as well…that there are so many voices that surround us on all sides offering invited and uninvited advice on just about every topic we can possibly imagine, many of which, are vitally important for who we choose to be and how we choose to live, move and have our being in this world…like who we choose to love…how we choose to love…how we spend our time and money…how we vote…what careers or vocations we choose…where we serve…who we serve…what is beautiful and good and worthy…who is valuable…who is not…who we should be listening to…who we should ignore...and the list marches on. Some of these voices are genuinely helpful, life-giving advice from people who have earned our trust through their genuine love for us, their wisdom and experience, and some are very much the opposite…voices that seek to use us to their own ends…if not trying to destroy us…at least get something valuable out of us….make us more consumers than creators…and please always remember that we were made by and in the likeness and image of a creator, the Creator, not a consumer. These sorts of voices often intend to make us feel small, unimportant, and, most of all, dependent on them…even when our values don’t align. And, such voices, especially online, are often quite affective, nuanced and attractive…impacting our choices and thinking…even when we don’t realize it.
On the first Sunday of Lent each year, when we return to the story of Jesus being tempted during his 40-day pilgrimage in the wilderness, I am always reminded that even the devil can quote scripture…can manipulate scripture to achieve his own ends…use scripture to tempt Jesus into his own death-dealing plans with the three biggies…material gain, power and fame…an alluring, seductive voice, indeed. And, I note, further, that the devil arrives on the scene and proffers his three temptations, lacing scripture throughout, at the end of Jesus’ time in the wilderness…that is when Jesus is in weakest moment…demonstrating further the devil’s twisted wisdom. For, when we are in moments of weakness, we are most in need of others and, therefore, most susceptible to the many voices that surround us, whatever their intention, for good or for ill.
Now, returning to my work with our youth, I again noted that the purpose of the exercise we did together was to notice and name the many voices that surround us on all sides that often greatly influence how we think and even who we choose to be…in our relationships and in life writ large. But, further, the point is, once we recognize that fact…recognize the influence that all the voices we are exposed to have on us…sometimes without even realizing it…these voices that temp us to good and, at times, to bad…these voices that tempt us to a Christ-like other-directed, selfless love that helps us discover a life that matters and is full of meaning…and the voices that tempt us to self-interest…to achieving our own glorification at the diminishment of others…to feeling powerful while really serving the interests of those who are more powerful than we…once we recognize the power and influence, for good or ill, that all these voices have on us…the true point of the exercise is to lead us to the real work that must then follow. The prayerful and holy work of discerning between these voices…to make wise and loving choices about who we listen to and who we don’t…whose voices we invite into our hearts and minds to converse with…and whose we keep as far from our hearts as possible. For, it is in the deep places in the heart, where God’s Spirit and our own spirit dwell, that we allow other voices to enter in to help shape and form us more and more into the life-givers and love-spreaders we were created by God from the beginning to be. And this prayerful and holy work of engaging with the love, wisdom and experience of others is so vitally important…for no person is an island unto themselves…we need to learn from and lean on each other…I need you and you need me…to live a joyful, meaningful, fully alive sort of life that brings glory to God and betters the lives of others…in this confusing, complex and upside-down world. Thus, our children need conversation partners and so do we…so whose voice shall we let in? And, if that seems obvious, I will say often it is not.
Matthew, Mark and Luke, all contain within their gospels a version of the story that sits before us today…the story of Jesus entering the wilderness for 40 days following his baptism…that is at the very beginning of his healing and love-spreading ministry that leads to nothing less than the defeat of sin, evil and death. And, that evil that Jesus defeats at the culmination of his earthly ministry, through his death and resurrection, is synonymous with the devil…for the devil is simply said the personification of evil…those voices which tempted him and us to follow death-dealing ways, rather than, the voices that lead us to following God’s life-creating, life-giving ways. And, though the Gospel writers tell us that Jesus enters the wilderness at the beginning of his ministry to fast and pray, they don’t tell us expressly to what end…what the fasting and praying was to specifically achieve. But, as I think about that, I beleive that at least part of the answer to the purpose for Jesus’ time in the wilderness was to discern what voice or voices he would choose to follow…to converse with in the deep places of his heart, as he lived out his one unique and precious life. Would it be the devil’s voice…a voice tempting Jesus toward an all-consuming and complete power that would completely corrupt him…or would it be another voice, also, present in the lonely and confusing wilderness. A voice that I imagine only became louder in Jesus’ moments of greatest weakness.
The story before us, of course, tells us the answer. Jesus also knew bible by heart, and, as he confronted evil’s temptation, I imagine he heard echoes of the good and Godly voices who first opened the scriptures to him and shaped him over the 30 years or so that preceded his 40-days in the wilderness. Mary’s voice and Joseph’s voice, his earthly parents, perhaps his rabbi in Nazareth, his uncle Zachariah the priest and Elizabeth his aunt, his brother James, his, as I imagine it, many dear friends and mentors, who spoke to him of God’s voice…who helped him tune his spiritual ears to hear the most precious voice of all…the voice of Love…God’s own voice…such that in his own wilderness moment in life…he recognized it immediately…knowing the difference between good and evil and choosing the good…for himself and for the very life of the world.
Friends, we are at the beginning of our own 40-day Lenten journey…our invitation to spend some time like and with Jesus wandering and praying in the spiritual wilderness. Perhaps following our children’s example, we might use some of this time to pay attention to the many and varied voices that have influence in our own lives…to note and name them in quadrants of our own making. And, then consider to whom shall we listen…and who needs to hear our lovely voices…who are the partners we need to invite into conversation in the deep places of our hearts…voices, others and our own, empowered by and always pointing to the voice of Love…God’s own voice...crying out to us in the wilderness. Amen.