First Sunday of Lent
I remember the first Lenten thing I ever did. I was in college and my mom wanted to participate in a 48 hour fast and didn’t want to do it all by herself. So, we both went hungry for 48 hours and then went to a soup supper at our church after. By the way, that was about as spiritual as it was for me: “Okay, I was hungry for a couple of days for my mom’s sake and now I’m not.”
Fast forward to this past Wednesday: as I was officiating our Ash Wednesday service, I blurted out, “I’m getting really good at drawing ash crosses on people’s foreheads.” I mean, if I had a resume, “forehead ash-crosses” would certainly be on it. They looked good. And of course they’re made of locally sourced, artisanal, Palm Sunday palms.
Somewhere along my life’s journey, I became a person who observes Lent. I can’t tell you exactly when that happened, and maybe there’s a lesson just in that: if nothing else, Lent is a journey. Beyond the fasts and practices, Lent is a pathway that leads us somewhere. Where it leads is different for each of us, but it goes somewhere if we follow it.
Today we witness the journey Jesus took—a forty-day journey that I would, frankly, not recommend—but maybe there’s something there for us too. Maybe there’s something in his journey that might help lead us down our journeys as well.
Once upon a time, on a First-Sunday-of-Lent much like this one, a Sunday school teacher was telling the children the story of the temptation of Jesus. Things got very serious when the conversation turned to the fact that everyone gets tempted from time to time; that we all need to be ready and know how to respond when the devil shows up to tempt us.
The teacher put forth a scenario: “Say you’re at the grocery store and you are in the candy isle, but your parents are in a different isle. So no one is watching; no one can see what you’re doing. And you hear the devil say, ‘You should take some candy.’” The teacher paused a moment so that everyone could fully imagine themselves in this scene and then she asked, “What would you say to the devil?”
Mary’s hand shot right up; she was always the most thoughtful obedient child; clearly she knew the answer. So the teacher called on Mary and Mary said, “If the devil offered me candy, I’d say, ‘Thank you;’ because you’re supposed to say ‘Thank you’ when someone offers you something.”
Temptation is fascinating to me. What fascinates me most is that it is both universal and strangely specific it is. We all face temptation, but the devil knows what we like. What is tempting to you may not be tempting to me… and vice versa.
And yet, as Jesus shows us in our lesson today, the answer to temptation is always the same: as Jesus shows us through the Scriptures, the answer to being tempted with the things we want is to remember what God wants. The answer to life’s temptations is to realign our lives, again and again, to the priorities of God and not simply of ourselves.
The nice thing—for me at least—with our lesson today is that we’ve heard this story before. This Lenten season begins the same way every year: with the story of Jesus going out into the wilderness for forty days, to be tempted. So the nice thing for me is that I can skip some of the story’s details; what I don’t get to today, we’ll get to some other time.
In fact, if we intentionally ignore some of the smaller details and just look at the temptation of Jesus in a more general way, we see that there are some similarities between our temptations and the temptations of Jesus. When Jesus was tempted—with satisfying his own hunger, with gaining power for himself, with avoiding the pain that his faithfulness would cause—we see a common theme: just like our temptations, the temptation of Jesus was all about Jesus. Frankly, at its heart, I think that’s all that temptation is: to make our lives just about us; to fulfill our hungers and passions; to get our way at any cost; to ignore God’s call to love our neighbor and instead of our desire to love only ourselves. So even though the specific temptations of Jesus were different from ours, they were rooted in the same self-serving place ours come from: to make our lives only about us.
And so, Jesus’ answer to temptation can be our answer as well: Jesus uses Scripture to point away from the things he might be desiring and back to the promises and priorities of God. So in a sense, the answer to temptations is simple: do what you know God wants you to do; obey God’s will as it’s been revealed in Scripture. Love God and love what God loves: which is humanity itself. Simple! If only it were that simple.
I noticed a kind of theme in the Scripture lessons leading us through Lent this year: they seem to have a traveling theme. Granted, in the Gospels, Jesus and the disciples are always on their way somewhere. But there may be a deeper lesson here for the season leading us to Easter. Maybe the goal of becoming the people God calls us to be isn’t so much about the destination; maybe it’s more about the journey. Maybe the disciplines and practices that we take up are valuable, not because they make us perfect, but because they move us in a direction toward making our lives less about us and more about God.
I was talking with a friend of mine the other day. He was telling me about how he got cut off while driving, but he couldn’t yell or honk or anything because his nine year-old daughter was in the car. I joked, “What if that’s all spiritual growth is? What if it’s just remembering that you’re not in the proverbial car alone? Can you still take pride in the fact that you didn’t scream and honk? Yeah, I think you can. It’s called growth!”
As we enter this Lenten season, let us follow in the example of our Savior. Let us recognize the nature of temptation to make our lives only about us. Let us recognize the nature of Scripture, which returns our thoughts and minds back to God. And most of all, let us remember the God that goes with us when we succeed and when we fail.
God only knows what this Lenten journey will bring for each of us; God only knows the temptations we’ll face; but God will not leave us, especially when things get tough. As we walk through this wilderness, as we face the temptation of making this life all about us, let us remember that we are not alone. Let us take comfort in knowing that our Savior walks with us every step.
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