March 1, Lent 1: Jesus Talks to the Devil

Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-78, Psalm 32, Romans 5:12-19, Matthew 4:1-11

In the Genesis story, I take the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as the gift of God for human freedom. The freedom was that the man and the woman were able to say No to good food—a freedom from nature that other animals do not exercise.

Every time they walked past that tree, by being able to say No to that good food, the two of them were maintaining their enjoyment of God’s gift to them of freedom from nature. They were able to maintain their freedom and their special status among the creatures by remembering God’s Word to them every time they walked past that tree. They got their freedom and, indeed, their distinctive humanity, from their loyalty to God’s Word.

I do not take the serpent as the devil in disguise. The serpent rather gives voice to the attraction of the natural world, to the appeal of creation in its compelling possibility. It is the lure of the flesh, the draw of our appetites, all innocent, that we could simply satisfy if we were just ordinary animals. But God has called our species to freedom, for that special relationship with God, for which we must resist the voice of the inevitable temptation of the natural world with its naive concupiscence.

So the Genesis story is always true. The point is not whether it actually happened, but that it’s always true. It’s paradigmatic, we keep repeating it. In the garden it was a serpent, today it is economic growth, or political necessity, or the free market, or sexual freedom, whatever, the “why not” of the world. It is beguiling and attractive, reasonable and convincing. It never actually tells a lie, just never the whole truth.

The Genesis story is always true because we cannot sort out good and evil from only within the world. It can’t be done. The only way to sort out good and evil is by reference to something outside the world, by reference to the Word of God, by reference to the will of God.

The Genesis story was true for Jesus. He had to sort out what was good and evil in his life, and even Jesus could not do it from within himself, he too had to sort it out by reference to the Word of God. Even Jesus. Our gospel story takes place just after his baptism, when that voice from heaven had called him the “Son of God.” Well, now what? How shall he figure out how to be the Son of God? Into a garden to contemplate? No, into the wilderness to fast and pray, in the desert to seek the will of God, and how to do this thing that no one had ever done before.

These temptations were not three easy choices. The temptations that most compel us are not to do what is sinful or evil, but to choose the wrong good, what might be good in other situations. Had Jesus not had these thoughts himself? If he is the Son of God, should he not act like a god? Twice the devil dares him to: “If you’re the Son of God, then act like it. Why not use your superpower? Just as your Father did for the Israelites in the wilderness, miraculous manna and water from a rock! If you saw five thousand hungry people and you had only five loaves and two fishes, wouldn’t you do a miracle?” The devil only asks him what we pray to him ourselves. “Use your power, O Son of God. We are suffering, O Lord, use your power, relieve our suffering.” What could be wrong with that?

As Jesus determines how to be the Son of God, he makes two choices. He will not do miracles to save himself, and he will not break the laws of nature to prove himself. Yes, he will do miracles, but he will prove himself as the Son of God by human obedience, by faithfulness to the Word of God, even at great cost. His superpower is his moral power, not in being superhuman or invulnerable, but in his faithfulness. So Jesus answers, “A human being does not live by bread alone—a fully-human human-being, like me—but by every word that comes out of the mouth of God.”

By refusing the first temptation he brings on the second. “Oh, every word of God? Well, how about this one: it is written, ‘He will give his angels charge of you.’ Live by that word, Jesus, give yourself in to God’s incredible promises, I dare you. Why aren’t you jumping? Do you doubt the promise of your Father to rescue you?” Where is your God? Where is your faith?

This test is artificial, even if it uses scripture verses. This is not a true-to-life example of how you have to put your trust in God. It’s not for getting rescued whenever you’re in a scrape or for having a nice and easy life. God’s special care for you has the specific purpose of enhancing your mission, it is your incentive to risk a life of love and service, the love and service that might well increase your suffering! The purpose of God’s special care for you is to get you through the suffering that is the by-product of your mission, not to keep you comfortable.

Jesus does not accept this artificial test. Three years later, in the Garden of Gethsemane, he will pass a harder test in the same subject. And he will take his final exam upon the cross, and enter the cold, dark tunnel of death instead of his Father’s warm and loving care. He will trust in a silent and distant God without resorting to his superpower. He will submit to all that we endure, and he will ask of God no miracle to exempt him from the burden of ordinary human existence.

Our Lord’s refusal of the second temptation brings on the third. “All right then, so you’re not going to resort to your superpower, you’re going keep yourself within the confines of nature, you’re going to be righteous within the limitations of humanity. Okay, that means you’re going to lose. Because our side has the power, we are in control. We will beat you and break you, and you won’t have a chance. But look, why not be realistic and work with the powers of the world? I’ll even make you Number Two, I’ll let you run the whole thing, like Joseph did in Egypt. He was Number Two to Pharaoh. That’s how God used him to save his people. I’ll be Pharaoh, you be Joseph.”

What would this have looked like? Jesus cutting deals with the Romans and the Sadducees? Or meeting halfway the scribes and Pharisees? Casting out some demons here but tolerating bondage over there? The devil represents the powers and principalities that effectively control the world. 

The devil is not a voice from hell, he doesn’t even live in hell. In the Bible the devil dwells upon the surface of the ground. The devil represents the powers of the world, the natural temptation of its possibilities, like the serpent in the garden, only no longer naive and innocent, but now corrupted by all the human sin and evil since Adam. It now has the pride of its misery, sophisticated doubt and well-developed deconstruction, angry ingenuity and bitter independence. It seems more real. Compared to this, obedience seems unglamourous, unheroic, unattractive. It feels that way to me. I don’t want to be out of it with the rest of the world. I want to get along, and I want to be included.

What are your temptations? Well, what’s your mission? You will be tempted there. Or this: what can’t you live without? What do you depend on? What do you need in order to be happy? What commitments have you made, what vows to yourself? What are you trying to demonstrate with your life? What are you trying to prove? Can you stop all that? Be nothing? Be nobody? Be a failure? Let go. Give up. Surrender. What does that feel like? What have you got left?

This Lenten season I’m not asking you to be more loving, or more obedient, or do more mission and service. I’m asking you to do less, to be less, and be still. I’m inviting you to listen to your temptations. Not to obey them but to learn from them. When you give in to them you silence them, you can’t hear all they have to tell you, nor can you learn about yourself from their pull on you. Don’t be afraid of your temptations, so that you feel you must give in to them, rather resist them in order to keep on hearing them.

Feel your hunger, keep feeling it, and discover how hungry you are and all you hunger for. Feel your thirst, don’t satisfy it, don’t fear it either, as if you must give in to it. Feel your fear, don’t fear your fear, and don’t give in to it in order to get rid of it.

Yes, let your temptations be your guide. Let them show you the tunnel you must enter and keep on going through. The tunnel is Lent. At the other end of it is Easter. The journey through the tunnel is how you learn the will of God, the Word of God, it’s how you recover your power for being loving and obedient. Don’t rush it. For the next five Sundays don’t try to be happy, nor solve the problems of our suffering, but sit with your hunger and thirst and fear, and not be afraid of them, and I invite you to believe that even way down here it is God’s love that is carrying us.

Copyright © 2020, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

February 16, Epiphany 6, A Hard Talk with Jesus

Deuteronomy 30:15-20, Psalm 119:1-8, 1 Corinthians 3:1-9, Matthew 5:21-37

Dear Lord Jesus, you’re making it hard. We want to hear you, we want to follow you, but when you say things like this you make it hard. We like so much else that you say in the Sermon on the Mount, and then you say things like this. It’s good we got this lesson on the Sunday of school break.

Lord Jesus, I thought I understood you last week, in the Gospel lesson, with the verses right before this morning’s lesson, when you said that unless our righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees we’ll never enter the Kingdom of Heaven, I figured you meant a different kind of righteousness, a kind not measured by rules and regulations, but today you make it even stricter and more rigorous than the scribes and Pharisees. At least their regulations made some allowances.

Lord Jesus, I don’t want to go back to those days of the church making divorced and remarried people feel guilty and excluded. I know this was the practice of the church for most of history, and it still is for Roman Catholics, but I don’t want to go back there as a pastor. Yes, I want to be faithful as a preacher, but you make it hard when you say things like this.

I could appeal to the context and say that marriage was different back then. It wasn’t about vows between two lovers, but an exchange of property, of whom the bride belonged to and the goods and the kids. It was a contract between two men, the father and the groom, in which the woman had no say. And I could point out that when a woman with no say ends up committing adultery you make it totally the man’s fault, not the woman’s. But that also negates the woman’s agency, which is not so good, and then in other places in the gospels you do implicate the woman as well.

You make it hard when you say that if I call someone a fool, I’m in for hell. I could say that you didn’t actually say “hell,” and the translation is wrong, and what you really said was “gehenna,” which does not mean eternal punishment. It’s the garbage dump of Jerusalem, in which a dead body would get consumed by the constant fire, so this is your metaphor for a very shameful death. I’m sure that when you say to cut off my right hand or cut out my right eye and throw it in the dump, it is an exaggerated metaphor. But still, just being angry with my brother is morally tantamount to murder?

You make it hard with what you say about committing adultery in my heart. I remember how much trouble President Jimmy Carter got in from that interview in Playboy Magazine when he confessed to having committed adultery in his heart. Should I feel guilty about my feelings of sexual attraction? I could say that comparing Presidents reveals the value in what you say here, Lord Jesus, that once we give free rein to these feelings we end up with a self-admitted, boasting sexual predator in the White House.

And I could point out that once again the Lord Jesus blames the male, and not the woman. It’s not about how the woman dresses but how the man eyes her, which in terms of women’s rights is very advanced, but still, even when we keep our sexual feelings tight inside, should we feel guilty when we have them? Are we then all adulterers? Lord Jesus, you make it very hard. Can I believe you when you call this Good News, and that you don’t intend to impose on us some new legalism?

I get what the scribes and Pharisees were doing with their legalistic righteousness. They were trying to keep the people pure, and maintain a moral fence between them and the dominant Roman culture of casual exploitation and big money and violence, in which the powerful could manipulate the laws for their own interests and their friends, and take whatever sex they wanted, and Caesar could practice adultery and corruption with impunity. We have this today, so I can understand the scribes and Pharisees.

But their system of righteousness could achieve no more than social control, and only deal with external actions, and it therefor consisted of regulations and exemptions. It was righteousness as social management, to keep holding on, until the Kingdom of Heaven might someday return.

But you told them, Lord Jesus, that the Kingdom of Heaven is already among us when you are with us. So you must mean that your difficult message is for our salvation, for our comfort and our liberation. Obedience, yes, holiness, yes, devotion and challenge, yes, a higher standard of ethics and bearing our crosses and self-examination, yes, yes, yes, but also for comfort. You mean this to save us, to help us. And in the middle of your Kingdom you offer us yourself.

So, then, Lord Jesus, I imagine myself standing before you, and as you look at me, slowly I look back at myself. I lower my head, I close my eyes, I touch my chest, I breathe. Yes, Yes, and No, No. Yes, and No. Why isn’t that always enough? Why do I feel the need to make an oath? What is my general nervousness or my fear inside that requires me to say more than just a simple Yes or No? Why do I have to amplify my words to make myself believable, and why do I need to electrify my speech to make me impressive? Is this just a matter of rhetoric, or style, or class, or even maturity, or is it more ethical than that, a matter of holiness, that I don’t have to amplify my speech?

Why am I sexually restless? What does my eye keep looking for? What from myself am I projecting? What do I crave that I imagine someone else will satisfy? What is empty in me and continually unsatisfied? Is it also from an inner emptiness that I insult other people? What do I get out of putting other people down, of making them feel bad, of making sure other people know they’re wrong?

I do like social control. I do like laws and regulations. I don’t like people parking in the bike lane or making u-turns in the street, which is when I call them jerks. I like not to split infinitives. I like to be right and I like my people to get things right. But I know that getting things right is not what you mean by righteousness, Lord Jesus.

One of the hardest things you say here is that when I’m offering my gift at the altar, and I might remember that someone I’m close to has something against me, you want me to put my gift down, and go be reconciled to that person, and then come back and offer my gift. That’s hard. It’s always on me? Shouldn’t they be responsible to come to me? This is an invitation to all kinds of projection. My therapist would not agree with you. I’m going to be running around the country trying to make up to people and never get back to church. What are you asking of me, O Lord?

One of our elders pointed to this verse at our meeting on Tuesday night and saw Good News in it. I forget exactly how he said it, but my take on it is that it’s about the same projecting energy, but channeled in love to your neighbor instead of anger or insult or lust or adultery. You desire that person, but your desire is not to put that person beneath you socially or physically but above you. So maybe this is another way of illustrating how you love your neighbor as yourself.

Lord Jesus, is that what you mean by all this, that you are giving illustrations of what it looks like and extreme examples of what it feels like for me to love my neighbor as myself? Is the law of love such a challenging law that I need to hear you lay it out like this? Is this loving kind of righteousness so contradictory to my flesh that it feels like chemotherapy? Like plucking out my eye? Is this the kind of love I have to end my sermon on this week? How hard is love? Why is love so hard?

Lord Jesus, if your Kingdom has come then you are my judge. I get that. You judge me by waiting on me to judge myself. You examine me by my use of your words by which I examine myself. You call me to truth in my heart and you wait for me to explore that truth. When I protest with my allowances and plead my exemptions, you wait for me to be done with them.

Lord Jesus, I can feel this as your strange strategy for my freedom, mostly from myself. I can sense this as your method for my choosing life, life for myself and life for the world. I can feel this as your alarming way of converting me in how I love myself, that I can say No to myself and also Yes to myself, and love myself in such a way that I can also say Yes to my neighbor and love my neighbor as you love me. Lord Jesus, I want to believe that this is all about your love.

Copyright © 2020, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

February 9, Epiphany 5: Salt and Light

Isaiah 58:1-12, Psalm 112, 1 Corinthians 2:1-16, Matthew 5:13-20

What shall we do with these lessons? How shall we understand them? I’m going to take the Isaiah lesson first, and then the Gospel lesson, and then say just a few words about First Corinthians.

We start with the prophet Isaiah, and we hear him rebuke his people. He says that if they want their worship to be true to God they have to match it with a communal ethic of justice and generosity; they have to express their devotion with an outward energy of sharing their blessings. Otherwise don’t bother God. Your fasting is useless unless you address injustice in the world. Look after the poor, and your light will rise like the dawn. Do that, and God will be present when you call on God.

And then in the Gospel we hear the Lord Jesus saying something similar. He calls on his people to the salt of the earth and the light of the world. This was not some general ideal but a challenge in the spirit of Isaiah. He was telling his people that they had a mission that had an outward purpose beyond themselves. Salt is for using, not for keeping packed up by itself. Your light is for the world, not for you to keep under a basket to protect its flame from blowing out. You are a people chosen by God for the mission of demonstrating God’s mercy and justice to the other nations of the world. You are a city on a hill, unable to be hidden, where the nations will stream to learn God’s law.

But God’s people were refusing this vocation in both Isaiah’s time and Jesus’ time. Of course there were many individual Jews who were devout and generous, but the nation as a whole was taking an inward course of self-preservation. Their take was not to bring God’s light to the world but that God should swiftly judge the Gentiles with righteous retribution and revenge. You can understand their stance, considering the casual brutality of the Roman Empire upon them. But even if it was understandable, it was still unfaithful to their special calling and their mission.

The Lord Jesus was appealing to his people to reclaim their special mission while there was still time. Here he was, the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand, right there with him, and the time had come that the law and the prophets were pointing to, the time is fulfilled, the Kingdom is now!

The scribes and Pharisees don’t believe it. For them the Kingdom of Heaven was not at hand. It was far off, and God would not send it unless the nation first proved its worthiness by a rigorous, legalistic righteousness. Their strategy was the opposite of Jesus’. Circle the wagons, build the walls, close the gates, preserve, protect. Preserve our salt and keep it in a jar. Protect our flame within a basket. Forget about justice in the world, our only mission is to keep ourselves pure so that someday God will save us and reward us by punishing our enemies.

The Lord Jesus is contesting this. So he’s got his positive teaching and his negative teaching. The positive is for the mission rightly understood, and the negative is against the mission as taught and practiced by the scribes and Pharisees. He has to say, No, that’s not the purpose of God’s law, to build a wall around yourselves. The purpose of God’s law is for the life of the world. He has to say, No, I’m not against the law, I’m against the paranoid application of the law. We have to apply the law in mission for the world, we have to apply it in ways of generosity for the nations and justice for the poor. That’s how God will bless us, just by our doing that, and I’m calling us to do that, now.

In one sense, Jesus’ call was unsuccessful. His summons did not sway the leadership. The people in the leading towns of Galilee resisted his challenge. But for himself the Lord Jesus followed his own program. He was the salt in the culture around him. He was the light. He became the city on a hill that could not be hid, he embodied what Jerusalem was meant to be as he drew all nations to himself. His teaching was his own agenda, and he lived out what he preached.

And yet he was not successful, when the people that he preached to eventually rejected him. The powers put him out. Would they have done that if they were wise to what they were doing, that in condemning him they condemned themselves, and in defeating him they spelled their own defeat?

The powers were not wise to it, but after his death and resurrection his disciples saw it, and St. Paul wrote of it in our second lesson, that there was a greater power than the powers of the world and a deeper wisdom than the wisdom of the world. He saw that true power comes into the world in the weakness of the gospel of Christ and the deepest wisdom is the foolishness of him crucified. He also saw that the Holy Spirit was using this gospel to bring the law and the prophets out into the world to fulfill their mission of justice, healing, and peace.

We have this mission too. And shall we express it as salt or as light? Blending in or standing out? Mercy or justice? Sheltering the poor or contesting against poverty? Feeding the hungry or fighting for a just economy? Cooking or marching? Serving or protesting? Embracing or advocating? Priestly or prophetic? Salt or light? Both, of course. Our mission means both blending in and standing out.

Sometimes one thing can be both, depending on who is judging it. Nineteen years ago the Consistory decided to declare ourselves as fully open and affirming on sexual orientation. Soon I heard criticism of this by some of my colleagues who said that we were just trying to blend in with the liberal social ethics of Park Slope. Well, if that were the case we would just stop naming Jesus Christ as Lord, and him crucified, which is the really weird thing to be doing in Park Slope, so I did not bother to defend what we had done. And at the same time we were taking a stand within our denomination that has been a costly one for us. So I would say we were both salt and light.

Yesterday Steve Lappert led his group of volunteers in cooking for CHiPS, as he’s been doing for years. That is both salt and light. It’s salt for the people who are being fed, and it’s light for the rest of us in this congregation. It’s salt for the hungry and light for the church. Our summer respite shelter is salt for our guests and light for us who serve. Letting James sleep on our front stoop is salt for him and light for our community, as some of our neighbors tell me they don’t like it that he’s there, and others tell me that it’s a real credit to our church and what we stand for.

It’s not like we have some grand strategy. It’s not that we have this great wisdom of how to deal with homeless men or solve the problems of hunger, it’s more like all we know is Jesus Christ and him crucified, and that’s enough to tell us how to treat the man on our stoop. And if the prophecy of Isaiah is right, that yields a kind of righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees.

It’s a responsive kind of righteousness, even a kind of giving-in. It’s not that we are trying build the Kingdom of God, it’s rather that the Kingdom of God is already here, on our stoop, and in our kitchen, and in the whole new world of sexual orientation and gender identity. It’s a receptive righteousness and therefore a risky righteousness, which is why it takes faith and hope and love to do it.

The mission is a challenge and it’s also fulfilling. It’s an obligation that’s a blessing. It’s always a challenge for any congregation, and we’re always tempted to retreat from it towards preservation and protection. But this congregation is blessed with leaders who get the mission, you are blessed with people who welcome its challenge and sign up for its obligations.

You have elected elders and deacons who get the mission, and you will install them onto consistory to keep this congregation on mission for the next three years. They will do that. You are blessed, Old First, you are blessed. You are blessed because God loves you, so you love them as a way of loving God back.

(Disclosure: this sermon restates and quotes the interpretation of N. T. Wright, particularly in his Twelve Months of Sundays: Reflections on Bible Readings, Year A, SPCK, p. 28.)

Copyright © 2020, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.