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Buying the Church Off Luke 4: 1 - 13 |
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Summary
Buying the Church Off Cleaning up someone else’s mess is usually a thankless job. Repairmen and mechanics hate working on something that a do-it-yourselfer has mangled. Pastors warily step into a pulpit after a predecessor’s scandal. We didn’t break it, but someone has to fix it. Jesus didn’t break the relationship with God, but Jesus had to fix it. Jesus had to clean up the mess left behind by the people of God. God led our spiritual ancestors out of Egypt through the Exodus. Freedom! A new start! God led them in the wilderness by pillars of fire and smoke. Presence! Power! Then after getting them safely on their way and meeting their needs for water and food, God tested them. God tested Israel to see if they would obey a simple command. Behind following the simple command was the question of whether they trusted God. God would provide enough food for only one day at a time. Would they trust God enough to live day by day? They were supposed to trust God because they were to be God’s messengers to the world. Israel had a mission. They were to bless all the families of the world. If you know the story of Exodus, you know that the people of God did not trust. They complained. They begged to go back to Egypt to serve as slaves again. When Moses came down the mountain with the Ten Commandments, the people were partying around the golden calf. They didn’t trust, and so they couldn’t bless. Jesus has to fix this broken relationship. Jesus has to clean up the mess. Jesus ends up in the wilderness just like the people of God did. Like the people of God, Jesus experiences grace first, before the big test. At his baptism, God’s voice booms out clearly, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” With both Jesus and Israel, God takes a great risk. In both cases, everything hangs in the balance. It is almost as if God experimented with Israel. Could they become the means of God’s blessing to the rest of the world? Would they convey God’s love and God’s teaching to everyone? God hung in there with them through the murmuring and through the golden calf (with Moses’ help). God still hangs in there with the nation of Israel through the Jewish faith. But Jesus represented a kind of new tactic, a way to redeem God’s original plan. If Jesus fails this test in the wilderness, then what? If Jesus succumbs to temptation, who could clean it up? Did God watch this scene unfold on the edge of his seat? The wilderness The three temptations Jesus faces in the wilderness seem surreal. After a long fast, Jesus is beyond hungry. A loaf of bread may not tempt us when we’re trying to lose weight anyway, but when we are starving any food looks good. Still, we will never face the temptation to turn a stone into bread. Jesus passes the first test with no trouble. What can we make of the second test? Jesus can claim the glory of all the kingdoms of the world!? Jesus can put mighty Rome in his back pocket? Such a temptation lies beyond anything we can imagine. Most of us would settle simply for power over our own lives, the power to make all of our own choices. We might think only a crazy person would fall for the last temptation. Swan-dive off the temple and see what happens! Jesus may be hungry and tired, but he hasn’t lost it yet, has he? Jesus passes the tests. If everything hung in the balance, Jesus doesn’t upset the scale. If God was holding his divine breath, he can exhale now. Jesus comes out of the wilderness with his integrity and mission intact. If we can know what to do with our own wilderness experiences, we must come to a good understanding of what this wilderness represents. Where is Jesus when he is in the wilderness? Not physically, but spiritually and emotionally, where is Jesus? We get a clue about where this wilderness is when we see that the Spirit led Jesus there. Jesus needs to be in the wilderness. He didn’t stumble into the wilderness; he didn’t take a wrong turn. He has come to the right place. We often talk about our bad luck as a wilderness experience. If we are in grief, we think of that as a wilderness. If we are fearful, we think of that as a wilderness. Surely those kinds of experiences qualify as a time in the wilderness. On a deeper level, however, the wilderness is where we as Christians and the church need to be. The wilderness represents, first, the place where we test what is inside us. We hate tests, but tests tell us something about ourselves. Tests let us know where we stand, how much we know, where we need to improve. In the wilderness we find out just how deep our faith goes. The wilderness can be a place where we discover where we need to shore up our faith. We can strengthen our faith in the wilderness. If we push even deeper than that, we can see the wilderness as the mission of the church. God calls the church to the wilderness. The Spirit leads us there. We can understand why the Spirit leads us into the wilderness when we reflect on whom Jesus meets there. What should we make of this devil who pops up in verse 2? We cannot find a consistent answer to this question in the church today. We should take the teaching about devils, demons and unclean spirits in the New Testament seriously. Perhaps the understanding we can come closest to agreeing upon is the affirmation that evil has a spiritual dimension. The spiritual dimension of evil explains why evil seems so stubborn, so intractable. Evil defies our best efforts to wipe it out. It always seems to fight back. The Spirit leads Jesus into the wilderness because Jesus has to face evil. Jesus has to confront the spiritual side of evil. The wilderness where we need to be If Jesus allowed the Spirit to lead him into the wilderness, the church should hold out its hand for the Spirit to lead it to the same place. We sometimes find ourselves in a wilderness — of grief, of trouble — but more often we should let the Spirit lead us to the wilderness. We in the church need to march right into the wilderness of poverty, suffering, hurt and loneliness. Edmund Steimle, the Lutheran preacher and teacher of preachers of a generation ago, tells of one of his students who decided to move into the wilderness of East Harlem in New York. In this neighborhood of poverty and despair, the student sought to bring hope and grace. At first he simply tried to work in the neighborhood as best he could, one on one with the people. Muggers attacked him. Thugs ransacked his apartment. He thought he was making no progress, so he took a job with a welfare agency, hoping to work through official channels. In the welfare office, he encountered bureaucracy and red tape. He decided he wasn’t helping anyone. Frustrated, he fought off the bitterness and dejection, but he still wouldn’t give up. He told his professor that God had called him to this ministry. God calls the church to a wilderness ministry. God calls the church to confront the evil, devilish powers of hate, grief, hopelessness and brokenness. Yet in different forms, we also face the temptations Jesus faced. These temptations are evil’s way of trying to buy the church off. · We face the temptation to feed our appetites, using the church more for self-indulgence and personal uplift and comfort while paying scant attention to the work of ministry to others. · We face the temptation of prestige, of wanting to be important, noticed and highly regarded. The church catches itself in the trap of worshiping numbers and influence; the bigger the church, the more influence, the more we pat ourselves on the back. · We face the temptation of wanting to stay safe and protected. We let our government get away with anything as long as it dangles our “national security” as the rationale. Temptations such as these distract us from the hard work of ministry in the wilderness of evil to which God calls us. The Spirit that leads us into this wilderness will give us the strength to keep going, to overcome, to be the church. We do not need anyone to tell us what a mess the world has become. We can see the violence, the greed, the selfishness. God calls us into this wilderness to be a blessing, to shine God’s light in the darkness. If we can put away the distractions and the temptations, we can begin the long, never-finished task of bearing witness to how God is working to clean up the mess. |
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