ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT
SERMON PREACHED BY THE VICAR AT ST. CYPRIAN'S, CLARENCE GATE

Readings: Deuteronomy 26.1-11; Psalm 91; Romans 10.8b-13; Luke 4.1-13

The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart." Romans 10.8b

When I was a child growing up in Teesdale, in the North of England, one of our family rituals was to walk on a Sunday afternoon to my grandparents' house in the next village. My grandmother would lay on an old-fashioned high tea with lots of home-baking. Often there was jelly and tinned fruit but it was thought necessary in those days when food rationing was still a recent memory to eat slices of bread and butter with this. This was a combination I never much liked and one day when I was being difficult I indulged in my first recorded instance of quoting scripture, saying, "Man shall not live on bread alone".

Years later, when I was at theological college, we had to sit an exam called "Use of the Bible"; popularly known as "Abuse of the Bible". I suppose my "use of the Bible" on that occasion could be called abuse; although it did at least demonstrate that I had been listening during the daily worship at the church school in our village.

We live in an age which has grown suspicious of words and how they are used or abused. Political propaganda and commercial advertising have helped to make us suspicious. Influential thinkers have taught that words have no objective meaning; only that we choose to give them. They cannot be vehicles of truth and knowledge.

That is not what we find in the Bible. From the beginning, we read that God speaks. He creates the world by speaking: "And God said, 'Let there be light and there was light'"; and so on. He calls a people by addressing Abraham, he rescues them and teaches them his purposes for them through words addressed to Moses in the wilderness. He recalls them to their allegiance through the words of the prophets. They learn wisdom through the words of scholars and priests. They worship in the words of the psalms.

Jesus is, St. John tells us at the very beginning of his Gospel, echoing the beginning of Genesis, the Word made flesh, God's word addressed to us. And the Jesus of the Gospel is someone who is a master of words; teaching the people in parable and discourse.

In today's Gospel, we find Jesus after his Baptism when he had heard the voice of the Father, "You are my Son the Beloved, with you I am well-pleased" (Luke 3.22). He is led by the Spirit into the wilderness and there we see him sorting out what those words mean for him. This story is part of Luke's theological portrait of Jesus. It is presented as a real deliberation in which the devil pushes Jesus to look at three possibilities his religious tradition offers to interpret God's word to him. These would have been possibilities that his disciples and the early Church would have wondered about as they struggled to find ways of understanding Jesus.

Luke assures us that Jesus is not separated from God's love, for the Holy Spirit fills him at the end of this episode as well as at the beginning, even in this moment of encounter with the devil. The account is set in the wilderness, a place where prophets like Moses and Elijah also began their ministries. It was the place where Israel had been formed as a people on their forty year trek to the promised land.

Jesus' time there was one of fasting and prayer. It is as time of testing. These are not temptations as we often think of such things: temptations to do something which is desirable but we know is not good for us. These are tests to see whether even good things can lure Jesus from a focus on God's will - or can lure his disciples into following a more comfortable Messiah. In two of the three temptations, the devil's hook is the challenge to Jesus, "If you are the Son of God...". Does Jesus really believe what he has heard? Will God make good on the implied commitment?

The devil's challenges to Jesus are not to do bad things. The first, to turn a stone into a loaf of bread, would assuage his hunger after his fast. If he can do that, then surely he can turn the abundant stones of Israel's landscape into food for the many hungry people in a land often wracked by famine. The challenge is to be a new Moses for the people. Jesus replies by drawing on Moses himself, by citing Deuteronomy 8.3. Bread is good, but not enough to define Jesus' ministry.

The second test portrays the devil as "ruler of this world". For the price of "worshipping" or honouring that authority, the devil will hand it all to Jesus. Most of the known world under the heavy-handed control of Rome, so "regime change" would surely be a good thing. Yet again Jesus' answer is no. The price, acknowledging the devil's power in the political arena is too high to pay. Jesus' reply also comes from Deuteronomy (6.4ff); from the She'ma Israel, recited every day by devout Jews: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead; and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates."

All authority belongs only to God. Even playing the world's game for a good purpose would be to risk serving something less than God.

Luke's arrangement of the tests ends in Jerusalem, where Jesus' ministry will culminate in his passion and resurrection, and where the Church will begin. The devil's challenge quotes Psalm 91 which promises God's protection to the righteous. The temple is the place where the most righteous - the priests- carry out their work. But many of these professionally righteous men were living out their role in collaboration with Rome, and growing rich to the detriment of Israel's poor. This surely was a place in need of reform. Again, Jesus takes his reply from Deuteronomy: "Do not put the Lord your God to the test" (Deut. 6.16).

Jesus' resistance to the tests sends the devil packing until the "opportune time" when he enters Judas to launch the events of the passion. In Luke's account of that passion and of Jesus' earthly ministry, the meaning of Jesus' baptismal commission unfolds, recalling the three tests he has under . Though he refused to turn stones in to bread, he does feed the hungry. Though he refused political power, the proclamation n of God's reign of justice and peace is the focus of his preaching and teaching. Though he refused to leap from the pinnacle of the temple to see if God would send angels to catch him, he goes to the cross in confidence that God's will for life will triumph over the world's decision to kill him.

So Jesus uses scripture to resist testing and to understand the true nature of his commission. If that is true of him, it must then be true of his disciples. Jesus quotes repeatedly from Deuteronomy, and on this First Sunday in Lent, the Church gives us another passage from that book of the Law to read. They look forward to the time when the people have reached the Promised Land. They speak of a sort of a harvest festival in which the first fruits of the crops these former desert dwellers can now grow are to be presented to the Lord in thanksgiving. 'When the priest takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before the altar of the Lord your God, you shall make this response before the Lord your God: "A wandering Aramean was my father, he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous." And so on through a recitation of God's dealings with them; what we would call a creed, a statement of faith.

So here we are, a community of God's people, "few in number", but we too have been called together by God's word to the world in Jesus; words which we constantly hear and recite in our worship; in readings and sermons, prayers and creeds, psalms and hymns. These are words in which we hear and learn the truth of God's love for his world and for us. These are words which taken to heart, help us see our calling and what it means. And so the Church recalls us in Lent to the vital role which hearing and meditating on God's word has in the life of the Church and the disciple.

Here we come to make our thank-offering to God for all that he has done for us in Jesus Christ as we bring our gifts of bread and wine, the symbols of our life and labour, to put into the hands of the priest so that they may be presented at his altar and that we might be presented with them.