a real choice lent 1 (c) Luke
4.1-13
Every human being has a real choice to make that will change everything. It is the choice between living a God-centered life or a self-centered life. The God-centered life is hard because it makes demands on us. The self-centered life is easy because it doesn't. The God-centered life requires trusting the unseen and taking responsibility for others. The self-centered life requires nothing, trusting what we already happen to know and taking into account no one else. The temptation, it seems to me, and it is reflected in the temptations of Jesus in the wilderness, is to choose the easiest way. A difficult situation is offered an easy solution. Jesus seems to show in his responses that the easy way is not the way he will choose and this proves to be the case. The choice is a serious one, though we may want to deny it, it is a choice between life and death, between truth and lies. The biggest lie of all is the one the misfit offered in the O'Connor story. Remember? When asked why he didn't ask for Jesus' help, he said, I don't want no hep. I'm doing all right by myself. The truth is that we need God, more than we even know. Only the truth can save us.
When we make the wrong choices and call them right simply because they are our choices there are consequences. When we assume that everything is Ok as long as we are Ok we turn our back on the world and on God. We refuse to hear the truth. For that there are consequences also. The truth will have the final word one day.
Why do babies starve
When there's enough
food to feed the world
Why when there're so
many of us
Are there people still
alone
why are the missiles called peace keepers
When they're aimed to
kill
why is a woman still not safe
When she's in her home
Love is hate
War is peace
No is yes
And we're all free
But somebody's gonna have to answer
The time is coming
soon
Amidst all these
questions and contradictions
There're some who seek
the truth
but somebody's gonna
have to answer
the time is coming soon
When the blind remove
their blinders
and the speechless speak the truth (Tracy Chapman, contemporary prophet and singer)
Wow. D.T. Niles gave me the title for this sermon:
The
choice between God and every other god is a real choice. Both make promises,
both demand loyalty. It is possible to live by both. If there were no real
alternative to God, all humanity would choose God. Indeed God is the more
difficult choice to justify in terms of provable results.
The chief difficulty is that God demands of
us that we live by faith: faith in (God), (God's)sovereignty over the future,
(God's) sufficiency for the present; while, on the other hand, the various
other gods whom we can serve appeal to us in terms of the things which we can
see and the forces which we can calculate. The choice between the life of faith
and the life of sight is a choice between a God whom only faith can apprehend
and gods whom one has only to see to understand. (D.T. Niles, The Bible Through Asian Eyes)
I am not sure what D.T. Niles refers to when he says other gods but I can tell you what I think the other gods might be. They might be anything that we trust for our life, anything that we believe gives life meaning, anything that we count on to see us through the wilderness and the long night of human suffering, anything that we rely on to justify our existence and to secure our own place in the universe at any cost.
To give them a name these are the gods of money, of power, of fame and glory, of status, of work, of righteousness, of happiness, of beauty, the list could go on. The gods of this list have one thing in common. They appear to serve the self while actually enslaving the self. There is something else that is interesting I think. In each case the little gods are not themselves anything necessarily bad. They may even be good things making them all the more tempting until they take the place of God in our hearts as that which we depend upon for our life. When something good is something bad we are again in the presence of the lie. Things are not as they seem. It is so easy to believe the wrong thing.
Jesus was hungry. Why not feed himself? What would it hurt? People all over the world were hungry, still are. Why not feed them? What could be wrong with that? Jesus' answer is that we do not live by bread alone. No, we live by justice and by the love of God. If all the world loved God and were reconciled to God there would be no one who was hungry. The hard way is to reconcile the world to God, to struggle with human sin, to sacrifice one's self for justice and love. The easy way is to turn the stones into bread. It is also a lie. Turning the stones to bread will not satisfy the hungry for long. They will be hungry again.
I think God makes
it hard for us because God wants us to grow, to learn, to become critical and
aware. Oscar Romero, in The Violence of Love writes, The rich must be critical amid their own surroundings of affluence: why
they are wealthy and why next door there are so many poor. A wealthy Christian
will find there the beginning of conversion, in a personal questioning: Why am
I rich and all around me so many that hunger?"
Such questions lead us to the truth. The truth is important because the sins of the world, our sin, cannot be redeemed until we know what it is. The temptation is to believe the lie that we are doing the best we can to know the truth. (To be fair, Oscar Romero himself was killed for getting to close to the truth as was Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. among others we will never even know). The truth will set you free. It might also get you killed. The temptation is to avoid the danger and know just enough to get by. It is easier and safer not to know too much.
Jesus was offered power. He could rule the world with love. He could publish the truth to every corner of the earth. He could end evil and wrong-doing forever. What could be wrong with that? But Jesus knew it was all a lie for he knew that love must be chosen, truth must be learned, evil must be resisted with faith and love. He also knew that love and truth and goodness come from God and one can't get there except through God. The appearance of power and glory means nothing without the true authority that only God can give. The emperor has no clothes. Jesus knew that the power offered him in the wilderness was empty. Real power he would show us resides in those who serve not in those who dominate.
Why are we humans so easily corrupted by power? Why does it change us so? In Tolkien's Trilogy The Lord of the Rings the ring gives power to the one who possesses it but it also begins to possess the possessor increasingly so as the possessor of the ring yields to using its power. In the end and the point of the story is that the ring of power must itself be destroyed before it destroys the holder of power and everyone and everything else. It is revealing I think that Jesus not only resists the temptation to take this power to rule but in fact redefines the nature of power itself. We still don't get it and until we do the human community will continue to suffer untold pain. Real power resides in the truth and in love. These are what will be left when the empires of this world lie in ruin. At a very personal level the move from a self-centered existence to a God-centered existence is a power shift where we give up the illusion that our own power is sufficient to see us through and surrender to God's power to save us. The catch is that we have to recognize the terrible truth about our very real powerlessness before the ultimate realities of life and death and then trust the power of God to save us. This is a pretty big dose of truth to have to swallow.
Jesus was offered
the opportunity to prove God's love and protection once and for all. Why let
people wonder if they are loved? Why leave doubts in their minds? Prove God's love. This is the same test as
the one we hear again and again in the words that say :
If God is all powerful and all-loving why is there suffering in God's world?
Prove to me that God loves the world, pastor. Is it possible that this test is
a preview of what faces Jesus later in
Jesus was faithful. It is hard to say if it was easy for him to be faithful in the wilderness. If it was easy it surely got harder later. Of this it would seem to me there is no doubt. I think we would all agree, in any case, that it will not be easy for us to be faithful at any level. It is possible of course. God does not ask of us more than we can do. What would be the point of that? It is possible to be faithful but not without cost and not without many failures. That we fail does not mean that we stop. By the grace of God the choice is always before us. God will show us our salvation and we can choose the way of life. It's a real choice.
