With worship being canceled due to winter weather, this sermon was recorded in my living room on Sunday, March 10, 2019. As a result, if you choose to listen to it (at https://soundcloud.com/stacey-nalean-carlson ) you’ll hear my cell phone alerting me to an incoming text message and the dog giving up on my sermonizing and retreating to the upstairs bedroom. Spring can’t come fast enough!
Luke 4:1-13
1Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, 2where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. 3The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” 4Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’ ”
5Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. 6And the devil said to him, “To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. 7If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.” 8Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’ ”
9Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, 10for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,’ 11and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’ ”
12Jesus answered him, “It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’ ” 13When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.
In a sermon on the stewardship of pain, Frederick Buechner wrote: We are never more in touch with life than when life is painful, never more in touch with hope than we are then…At no time more than at a painful time do we live out of the depths of who we are instead of out of the shallows.1
I don’t know about you, but I resist this with every bit of my being. I don’t want it to be true, but I know it is. I remember telling a friend once, on the other side of an incredibly painful time, that I actually missed the strength, and conviction, and unparalleled connection with God that I experienced in the midst of that suffering. I knew, deep in my bones, what I needed and what I valued. When confronted with that profound heartache, I knew who I was. And more importantly, I knew who God was.
I wonder if Jesus didn’t’ experience something like this in the wilderness. He had just heard the voice from heaven at his baptism, You are my son, the Beloved. Couldn’t that have been enough? Instead, he is led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil.
What did those forty days of temptation look like? The dialogue we have between Jesus and the devil begins after those forty days have ended…when Jesus was famished from having eaten nothing at all during all those days. I wonder if Luke isn’t intentionally vague about that time in the wilderness. In a sense, then, it becomes every wilderness time, every painful season, every temptation, every test. We can locate ourselves in Jesus’ story. We can recall how those wilderness times have been for us—those times of grief, heartbreak, disillusionment, doubt. Those times that have left us famished—desperate for strength, for certainty, for wisdom, for peace.
When the devil speaks, he challenges Jesus’ identity. If you are the Son of God…or, better translated, since you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread. You’re the Son of God. Take care of yourself. Satisfy your own hunger. Why go around famished when you could eat your fill?
And just look, Jesus, at all the kingdoms of the world. I’ll gladly give them to you. No struggle needed. No ushering in God’s kingdom by way of your own rejection and suffering and death. Just worship me and all this is yours.
Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him, Jesus responds.
So, in one last temptation, the devil invites Jesus to make sure this God he worships, this God he serves, is actually trustworthy. The devil tells Jesus to throw himself down from the pinnacle of the temple. After all, God has promised to protect him. But again Jesus refuses, do not put the Lord your God to the test.
Every temptation is an opportunity for Jesus to live out of the depths of who he is, to better understand his work and his purpose, to grow in trust and hope.
By way of these tests, Jesus knows—and proclaims—that he will not use his status as God’s son to serve himself, that he will work only on behalf of God’s reign of peace and justice, that he is already safe and secure in the arms of his God. Could Jesus have known all this without the wilderness testing?
Jesus emerged from that wilderness, began his ministry, and shortly thereafter returned to his hometown of Nazareth. He stood without hesitation and placed himself squarely on the side of the poor, the captives, the oppressed, the outsiders, the ones beyond the borders, the ones dismissed, the ones in the wilderness. And the people of his hometown were so enraged they tried to hurl him off a cliff. Would he have been prepared for that without his own wilderness time? Would he have been so certain of his mission, so willing to become a target for fear and anger by standing up for all God’s beloved?
Toward the end of Luke’s gospel, when Jesus is hanging on the cross, the leaders scoff at him with words reminiscent of the devil’s temptations, He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one! The soldiers also mocked him, saying, If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself! And even one of the criminals hanging next to him said, Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us.
As his ministry began, so it ended: three temptations to use his power for himself. And on the cross, when it mattered most, Jesus was able to trust God completely for the sake of God’s beloved world, Father, into your hands I commend my spirit. Could Jesus have demonstrated such trust—even in death—without that time in the wilderness? Could he have withstood the temptation to save himself if he hadn’t already withstood the wilderness temptation to think only of himself?
I’m not saying the Spirit intentionally leads us into wilderness times of testing and pain. It’s clear the Spirit led Jesus there, but we’re not Jesus. Thank God. Still, I think we can claim some of Jesus’ story as our own. In the waters of baptism, we too have been named and claimed as God’s beloved. We, too, have been given gifts to use for the sake of one mission: declaring, in word and in deed, God’s love for all creation.
When the wilderness times come, and they surely will, maybe it just helps to know that they’re not solely about being famished, or hurting, or unbearably sad. They’re not without redemption. They’ve been redeemed by the one who has endured the wilderness himself and journeys beside us when we encounter those times that test us in every way.
With Jesus beside us, the wilderness times are the times when we are perhaps most empowered by God’s sustaining presence. They can, by God’s grace, be times in which we grow in compassion, and purpose, and hope. They are the times when we live out of the depths of who we are as God’s beloved.
I wish this wasn’t true. I wish there was an easier way.
This prayer that I read recently may need to be ever on my lips:
Let me learn by paradox that the way down is the way up, that to be low is to be high, that the broken heart is the healed heart.2
Amen.
1Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons by Frederick Buechner, pp.216-217.
2 This prayer was part of a recent Christian Century article by Katherine Willis Pershey. Read it here: https://www.christiancentury.org/.