"How do you want to use your power?": a seminary sermon on Matthew 4:1-11

Chapel -- March 6, 2014 -- 11am -- Olson Campus Center, Chapel of the Incarnation
Preacher:  Emmy Kegler, M.Div senior
Assisting Minister:  Ashley Osborn, M.Div senior
Pianist:  Emily Bruflat

* Gathering Hymn:  Softly and Tenderly, ELW #608

1 Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling,
calling for you and for me.
See, on the portals he's waiting and watching,
watching for you and for me.

Refrain
"Come home, (Come home,) come home! (come home!)
You who are weary, come home."
Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling,
calling, "O sinner, come home!"

2 Why should we tarry when Jesus is pleading,
pleading for you and for me?
Why should we linger and heed not his mercies,
mercies for you and for me?

3 Oh, for the wonderful love he has promised,
promised for you and for me!
Though we have sinned, he has mercy and pardon,
pardon for you and for me.

* Greeting

* Prayer

Scripture
1 Corinthians 1:26-31
Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, in order that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

Matthew 4:1-11
Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. He fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished. The tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” But he answered, “It is written,
‘One does not live by bread alone,
       but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”
Then the devil took him to the holy city and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written,
‘He will command his angels concerning you,’
   and ‘On their hands they will bear you up,
                   so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’”
Jesus said to him, “Again it is written,
‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’”
Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor; and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” Jesus said to him, “Away with you, Satan! for it is written,
‘Worship the Lord your God,
    and serve only him.’”
Then the devil left him, and suddenly angels came and waited on him.

Sermon

“This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

And immediately Jesus heads for the desert.  He comes out of the Jordan at the height of glory, with an astonished crowd watching as God’s spirit pours down on him, and the next move is to go alone into the wilderness and empty himself completely.  And at the end of forty days, alone and starving, Jesus hears the devil ask him:  How do you want to use your power?

Don’t you want, says the devil, picking up a smooth stone, to feed yourself?  To eat when you need to eat?  To not hunger, or thirst, or want for anything -- because you have the power, you know, the power to feed yourself.

Don’t you want, says the devil, peering down into the temple, for people to know your importance?  You have something important to say, Jesus.  Don’t you want to make sure they are listening?

Didn’t you come, says the devil, with the blue earth small under his feet, to have the whole world at your command?  Isn’t that your mission -- to bring all peoples together and unite the world?  The kingdom is coming, Jesus.  The quicker you do it, the better it will be.

How do you want to use your power?

I don’t know if we think about ourselves as having power.  I know for me it’s easy to forget. We get put on the bottom of this seminary system, you know.  We have to wait and hope for CPE and internships and scholarships and GRE scores and Ph.D programs and thesis defense and full-time jobs and first call assignment -- and I don’t feel a lot of power in that.

And yet the devil holds out a stone.  We are called, and people will hold out money and trust and themselves, to us.  And then we have a choice.

We can choose to feed ourselves.  We are hungry, after all.  The lives of pastors and professors and public leaders are draining ones.  We can neglect self-knowledge and self-reflection, and choose instead the unexamined life where we unwittingly expect our needs and wants to be filled first.  Sometimes it feels much easier to turn a stone into bread for myself than to feed the five thousand.

We can glorify ourselves.  We have something to say, after all.  In a world that is increasingly unsure of the value and purpose of this whole Jesus thing, we’ve been equipped to preach the gospel.  We can want people to listen, by any means necessary.  Sometimes it feels easier to throw myself off the top of the temple than to wander, poor and homeless, from little town to little town with this message of God’s kingdom.

And we trust in our own abilities to make the kingdom happen.  We’ve worked so hard, for so long.  Certainly we know about God’s grace and provision, but that doesn’t get papers written.  We can think we have the power to change the world, and quickly.  Sometimes it feels much easier to bow down fast and take full control now, than to work in small ways, one person or family or community at a time, to pray for the kingdom to come.

How do you want to use your power?  Because the devil holds out a stone.  And we are hungry.

And in that moment, the only hope we have is that we do all this for something more than ourselves.  That when we feed ourselves, we eat with many.  That when we stumble, it is not for attention.  That the world comes to wholeness only through the work of God.

When temptation and the easy way bear down on us, when we are hungry and tired and alone and frustrated, the only hope we have is that God is bigger.  When the pressure is on, the kind of pressure that turns us into either diamonds or dust, there is a God that holds us together.   That God is working in us to turn us away from the easy road and onto a path of integrity and vulnerability and compassion.

The only hope we have is that the way of Jesus is real.

The world will never tell us this.  We begin Lent knowing already the end of the story.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness hates it.  On Good Friday, the world will crucify a life of service, of compassion, of obedience.  Violently and viscerally the world will say to the way of Jesus:  No.

And on Easter Sunday God will say, with a voice so quiet that two thousand years later we still hear it:  Yes.  Yes.  Yes.

* Corporate Confession and Forgiveness

For self-centered living,
and for failing to walk with humility and gentleness:

For longing to have what is not ours,
and for hearts that are not at rest with ourselves:

For misuse of human relationships,
and for unwillingness to see the image of God in others:

For jealousies that divide families and nations,
and for rivalries that create strife and warfare:

For reluctance in sharing the gifts of God,
and for carelessness with the fruits of creation:

For hurtful words that condemn,
and for angry deeds that harm:

For idleness in witnessing to Jesus Christ,
and for squandering the gifts of love and grace:



God, who is rich in mercy,
loved us even when we were dead in sin,
and made us alive together with Christ.
By grace you have been saved.
In the name of + Jesus Christ,
your sins are forgiven.
Almighty God strengthen you with power through the Holy Spirit,
that Christ may live in your hearts through faith.
Amen.

* Hymn:  Jesu, Jesu, Fill Us With Your Love, ELW #708

Refrain
Jesu, Jesu,
fill us with your love,
show us how to serve
the neighbors we have from you.

1 Kneels at the feet of his friends,
silently washes their feet,
master who acts as a slave to them.  Refrain

2 Neighbors are wealthy and poor,
varied in color and race,
neighbors are near us and far away.  Refrain

3 These are the ones we will serve,
these are the ones we will love;
all these are neighbors to us and you.  Refrain

4 Kneel at the feet of our friends,
silently washing their feet:
this is the way we will live with you.  Refrain

* Peace

Preaching lab: Leadership in Crisis

For my senior preaching lab, I had the following prompt:

You are six months into a new call when a 24-year-old member of the congregation tells you that she was sexually abused by your predecessor when she was in the high school youth group. Over the next month, you hear of four other women who were also abused. Your predecessor, who served for 18 years in this congregation, retired and moved away from the region two years ago. To the best of your knowledge, few people in the congregation knew about this abuse, but word is now spreading fast and several people, including one of the victimized women, have asked you to speak about this from the pulpit.

Assumptions I made:  I am being asked to preach about the assault before it's been made publicly known.  In my opinion (and my classmates and preceptor agreed with me on this) the wrong place to make the first public announcement of this abuse would be from the pulpit, so I chose not to specifically address the issue, but to speak into and make a space for it.

I would expect the church to follow up on these accusations immediately and with the proper contacts made with the synod, legal counsel, psychological assistance for the victims, etc.

I received this prompt 72 hours before I was to preach.  I had already decided to prepare to preach on whatever the assigned text was for the day, since in a normal situation we would already have bulletins printed and so on.

And here is the result.

Lectionary gospel reading for November 17, 2013:  Luke 21:5-19

When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, Jesus said, “As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.”

They asked him, “Teacher, when will this be, and what will be the sign that this is about to take place?”

And Jesus said, “Beware that you are not led astray; for many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and, ‘The time is near!’ Do not go after them.  When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified; for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately.”

Then Jesus said to them, “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues; and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven. But before all this occurs, they will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name. This will give you an opportunity to testify. So make up your minds not to prepare your defence in advance; for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict. You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name. But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls.”


Sermon

When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, Jesus said, “As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.”

… again?

See, the temple of Jerusalem is a hard-won battle.  The First Temple was built by King Solomon only to be sacked a few decades later by an Egyptian Pharaoh.  It was rebuilt under King Jehoash in only to be stripped of its riches by the King of Assyria.  When the Jewish people were taken off to captivity in Babylon, it was completely destroyed.

But the Jewish people returned.  They built a second temple.  Alexander the Great nearly destroyed it, the Seleucids perverted it with pagan sacrifices and slaughtered pigs, Pompey desecrated the Holy of Holies, but it remained intact.  Herod the Great, about fifteen years before the birth of Jesus, renovated it.  Now it has stood for fifty years, under the thumb of Roman rule and yet still in control of the Jewish people.

It is the center of their life, their worship, their hope.  It is a symbol that God is still with them, that God has come and made a dwelling among the people of Israel.  It is their comfort.  And Jesus walks into it, looks at the marvelous stones and offerings, at this house of worship a thousand years in the making and restoring, the central hope of the whole Israelite nation, and says, “A day will come when all this will be destroyed.”

And this is true.  The temple of Jerusalem no longer stands.  It was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD, with only a few stones left upon the other -- the Western Wall, the Wailing Wall, where Jews continue to gather and pray and weep over another temple lost.

For Jesus to say that the Temple will one day, again, finally and totally be destroyed is to say, “Your hope will be lost.  Your trust will be broken, the world will be in disarray, and it will appear that God is gone.”

In too many ways we live there now.  The temple in Jerusalem has been destroyed.  Only a few stones are left upon another.  And just as painfully, our own lives are marked with destruction.  We fight sickness and pain.  We grieve the death of friends too young and family members so well loved.  We struggle with work, with school.  Some of us go to bed hungry.  Some of us go to bed weeping.  We fight despair, and depression, and fear.  There are those among us whose walls have been torn down.  There are those who have had their innocence torn from them, their trust destroyed by abuse or neglect or hatred.  There are earthquakes in our souls, and famines in our hearts, and there are wars and insurrections all around us.

And Jesus has the audacity to say “Not a hair of your head will perish.”  Your family will turn against you, your churches will throw you out, some of you will die -- but not a hair of your head will perish.

This is the stupid, audacious, arrogant promise of Jesus, that if we endure we will gain our souls.  And to those of us who are broken, who fall asleep with empty stomachs or hurting hearts, these words can break us again.

So much of what breaks us is hidden.  We put on a brave smile.  We pretend it didn’t happen.  We fear the accusations and condemnations of our friends and family, that we might hear that somehow our pain is our fault, that our suffering is part of God’s great plan.  So we bear our pain in silence, in what we might call endurance, because we fear the judgment of others.

Yet see what Jesus asks of us.  We are not to endure silently, our mouths closed, our heads bowed.  We are not to run, to hide, to lie.  We speak truth.  We speak of what has happened.  It is in that endurance, that pure and raw courage, that we regain our souls.  If we are wounded Jesus does not call us to bind ourselves up and pretend we can run.  If we are broken Jesus does not tell us to claim we are whole.  Jesus says, This is your opportunity to tell the truth.  Speak it.  Speak it before friends and family, before kings and governors.  Tell of what has happened, and hold fast, for it is in speaking the truth that you will find your soul.

This is the stupid, audacious, arrogant promise of Jesus, that God is on the side of the victim.  God does not run from the destruction of the temple.  God does not turn a blind eye to the tearing down of our own walls.  When all appears lost, God will have the final word.

And we, as the church, are called to endure.  We are called to be witnesses -- to testify but also to witness, to see and to hear and to know.  We of all places in the world are called to be a source of light.  When victims speak, we do not shut our ears.  When our children wail, we do not silence them.  When those we love declare that the temples of their hearts have been torn down, we do not shout “No!  It cannot be!  There must be an explanation, a reason, a flaw of your own.”  We cannot push the pain away.  We cannot extinguish the light of truth.

We are called to stand with Jesus, in the center of the temple, to see the day when no stone is left upon another and yet to believe that God is still here.

We have been commissioned, by Jesus, to stand in the midst of others’ destruction, in the face of hunger and poverty and abuse and neglect and all the ways that sin breaks the ones we love and say:  You are not alone.  We hear you.  We will fight for you.  And we will walk beside you while you heal.

Something new is coming.  For us.  For all that is broken and torn apart within us.  We will speak the truth, and the truth will give us our souls.

Amen.