Readings for the First Sunday in Lent (Year A)
This sermon was preached at Christ Episcopal Church Eureka on Sunday February 26, 2023.
Last December, I invited Fr. David Shewmaker to preach on this First Sunday in Lent and he said he would be happy to do so. Although he later told me that regrettably his heart condition would prevent him from preaching, he still prepared his homily notes. So, I asked him to send them to me for us to publish in the Chronicle and he ended up sending them to me two weeks before he died. When I looked at his sermon notes more carefully after he died, it felt like his words were coming to me from the other side and I felt an invitation to preach this sermon based on his outline of notes, of which we have copies for those who want to read them. I argued with him a bit while writing this but tried to remain faithful to his message. So, this is Fr. Shewmaker’s last sermon. May we receive it as his hope-filled message to us from the other side.
When the devil tempts Jesus in the desert, he first tries to undermine Jesus’s identity by saying, “If you are the Son of God, turn these stones into bread.” The devil attempts to make Jesus doubt his foundational identity as a beloved child of God so that Jesus feels compelled to prove himself. However, Jesus’s reply demonstrates that his identity remains deeply rooted in a relationship of trust and obedience to God, a relationship that refuses to compete with God for power or glory. So, when the devil tempts Jesus with authority over all the kingdoms of the world, Jesus resists this temptation as well by highlighting his relationship with God as one that is undistorted by selfish greed and grasping.
All the things that the devil dangles before Jesus are gifts that Jesus will eventually receive, but the devil is trying to attack his relationship with God by influencing the way Jesus receives these gifts. Jesus receives all these gifts in God’s time, in a relationship of trust and humble obedience. So, the devil represents a distortion of desire, making gifts that should be received humbly from God become obstacles that can potentially put Jesus into conflict with God. The devil tempts us in the same way by pointing out those good gifts that we desire and then suggesting that we could have them right now if only we just had the courage to reach out and grasp for them rather than wait humbly to receive them in God’s good time.
Eventually, Jesus does miraculously make bread and miraculously overcome death and, according to Revelation, receive power and dominion over all the earth (Rev 5:13). Moreover, by trusting and obeying God and allowing God to constitute his consciousness, “Jesus is, in fact, enabled to become the bread by which men can live because it is the same Word which comes out of God’s mouth [and] he is able to become the Temple from which he refused to cast himself down.”[1] All this comes about as something he receives the hard way, through obedience to his Father, not something he grabs via a short cut, through allowing his desire to be distorted by Satan’s world of constant craving for more and more. The temptations are Satan’s attempts to seduce Jesus into imitating Satan by grasping and grabbing out of envy and greed. But in each case, Jesus decides to allow God to constitute his consciousness and identity and entire being, and therein lays Jesus’ sinlessness.
What does this have to do with Lent? Well, in Lent, we are given the opportunity to self-examine, to see which of our behaviors, thoughts, & feelings are caught up in Satan’s world of
constant craving and greedy grasping. Instead of imitating Satan, we are invited to imitate and emulate Christ, who did not consider equality with God as something to be grasped but emptied himself, taking on the form of a humble servant, willing to walk the way of the Cross before receiving and even becoming the good gifts of God. When we sing, “I want to walk as a child of the light, I want to follow Jesus,” we are expressing our whole-some desire to imitate Christ and to walk with him along the way of humble obedience, which is often the way of the Cross. So, giving up something for Lent is giving up that which is diabolically imitative and choosing to fill the space left by it prayerfully with Christ-imitation.
Blaise Pascal, the 17th century French philosopher and theologian said that each of us has a God-shaped hole in us, and, until we fill that hole with God, we will feel incomplete. Jesus modeled for us how to let God fill that hole, that hole which we often try to fill with garbage that we accumulate through greedy grasping. Lent is for clearing out the garbage that has accumulated in our hearts and lives and to make room for God to fill us. And so, we pray, “Create in me a clean heart.” We pray that God clean out all the garbage so that God can fill us and constitute our consciousness and identity and entire being the way God constituted and filled Christ’s entire being.
Paul’s prayer in his letter to the Romans is my prayer for us: May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Joy – Peace – Believing – Holy Spirit Power – Abounding in Hope! AMEN!
[1] James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes (Crossroads: New York, 1998), 159. http://girardianlectionary.net/res/satan_jbw.htm
Fr. Shewmaker’s Homily Notes:
DANIEL DeFOREST LONDON 