17 February 2013

“Making the Sign of the Cross … when we’re tempted”
First Sunday in Lent
17 February 2013


In the name of the Father, and of the +Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Making the Sign of the Cross.
On Wednesday, Ash Wednesday, we introduced this theme, for us, this Lent, Making the Sign of the Cross.
We learned of how this sign is neither magical nor mysterious. Martin Luther valued this sign, this symbol; how for him it was a tangible way to begin, continue through, and end each day in the name of Jesus.
We remembered that it is a remembrance of our baptism; a visible statement that we are not God, but there is One who has staked a claim on us; we are a marked people, sealed by the Holy Spirit and signed with the Cross of Christ forever, on our heads and over our hearts.
And we felt it traced on our heads in ashes; ashes for repentance, for sorrow, for sin, for things done and left undone; as a reminder that we are dust, and to dust we shall return; but a cross of ashes, to further cross-mark on us that death is not the end, not our end … but instead, life.
So how shall we use this gift of life, for us, here and now, these forty days of Lent? This season, this time, into which we are called each year, for a time of introspection, of silence, of space, for finding of place, Our Place, in God’s great Place for us?
I hope that you will use it, in your own lives, for clearing space for Place for and with God. Taking time, slowing down, marking the season, keeping a good Lent, a holy season, a time to go longer and go deeper in your faith journey.
This isn’t to be a sour, dour time. That’s what the pundits have made of Lent; not what Must Be. In your bulletin this morning we’ve once again placed “Forty Ideas for Keeping a Holy Lent,” from Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber of our sister ELCA parish the House for all Sinners and Saints in downtown Denver. It’s a light-hearted way of de-centering from ourselves for these forty days. I recommend you try it in your lives away from this place.
As for our lives in this place, each Sunday for the next five, we will be exploring what it means to Make the Sign of the Cross in different Places in our lives … where those Places cross the texts for the day.
Today, we begin the First Sunday in Lent where we always begin … backtracking some, before the stories we’ve already heard this church year ...
before Jesus’ appearing and speaking in the Nazareth synagogue among his hometown friends …
well before his Transfiguration on the mountaintop ...
today, we are with Jesus immediately after his baptism; in those days when he walked wet, drenched in the Holy Spirit, walked into the desert, the dry and deserted place Luke calls “the wilderness,” to be tempted.
So why do we have this text, every year, as we begin the season of Lent?
If we take the Word for this season seriously, and clear some space, some space in our lives for Place, Place with God, well, the answer will come soon enough.
And that answer is … we need it, because on our own, we don’t do Lent well.
Oh, we might try … try to block out time, space, make an effort, give up something for Lent, but, then along come, in the words of Marge Simpson, “Oh, yeah, the SINS.”
WE get in the way of keeping a good and holy Lent.
We’re tempted away from it.
Tempted by distractions, mostly.
Distracted by the desire for the physical, material stuff of this world.
Distracted by thoughts about ourselves, and how we might get to be better than others.
Distracted by thoughts about how we might just like to be the center of own lives, and not have to deal with pesty people always wanting something from us, our time, our money, our selves … God, why can’t we just be left alone for a while?
Three universal temptations, for all of us.
And they come to Jesus, too.
He’s been fasting for 40 days … so there’s an offer of bread.
He’s been put in a position, a place, of power and authority … so there’s an offer to get more of it.
He’s been called “my Son, the beloved” … and so there’s a temptation now to make it all about him, for him to show off and be the Lord who Lords it over all.
The tempter with his offers, he comes to Jesus when Jesus is at his weakest … 40 days alone and apart in the wilderness. No one … not friends, nor family, nor disciples … no one’s around to help and comfort him … there’s no community of caring people to help bring him through ... in Luke’s account, there are not even any angels who come afterwards to tend him. Here, it’s just him and the tempter.
Now, yes, it’s true, we don’t know if the temptations came through one who was in bodily form … or if it was just a voice Jesus heard in his ear. And really, it doesn’t matter. I think we can put too much emphasis on the thought of “The Devil” leading Jesus around physically in this text, when the text certainly is not crystal clear that this is what is going on anyway. That’s not to say the devil wasn’t there ... not at all. It’s just that, too often, when we personalize the one the text calls “diabolos” … adversary, slanderer … it makes it that much easier for us to demonize other people, through whom temptations come for, to us, as well.
Well, he made me do it.
She gave me that drink.
They left all that stuff just laying out there.
When, in reality, the temptation is not about them, so much as it’s about us, and the choices we make in either giving in, or turning away.
Jesus, for his part, does not give in … to the Tempter before him, or the voices he hears calling him to “just do it.” Well, of course, we say, he’s God, what else would you expect. It would be a pretty short Gospel of Luke if he had. Duh.
OK. Fine. Just … don’t stop there.
Because what likely enters our minds next, after Duh!, is that same old voice Jesus heard … saying to us ... indeed, you’re so far from God it’s ridiculous. You are useless and worthless and powerless in trying to stand up and resist … you just can’t do it … so why even bother trying.
Ah. Yes. Our Master’s Voice. At least, that’s what he’d like us to believe.
But he’s wrong. Just as he was wrong with Jesus.
Because we have … The Sign of the Cross.
Not a magical making of a religious motion … no … we have the Sign of the Cross which Christ has made over us … in our Baptism … child of God, you have been sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked with the Cross of Christ forever.
Jesus had been sealed by the Holy Spirit, too, and sent forth in the Spirit from his baptism, led by the Spirit during his time in the wilderness. And that same Holy Spirit is with us, too; for us in our wilderness times, our times of temptation, to give us the same strength and power Jesus was given.
The Sign of the Cross is also a storied sign.
The storied sign gave Jesus such courage, and strength, when he heard the devil’s voice whispering a story of lies in his ear. Because he had another story, a true story which he’d heard all his life, a story of God, God’s faithfulness, to and for his people, through the ages.

A wandering Aramean was my father; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number … we cried to the Lord, the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction; the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm …

Jesus knew that the devil’s story he was hearing in his ear was not the real, true story for him … this false story was singular and individual … but Jesus had heard The Story, God’s Story, a story of God and people together, a community of faith, which had been passed down through the ages and told to him, told to him in the community of the faithful ones, who clung to God’s promises for them, that one day, they would be rescued from all that oppressed them; as God had done with the Israelites in Egypt, so God would do again, for them.
And so the same story is for us, too, we who are grafted into Jesus’ family through the waters of baptism, made one with him through the Sign of the Cross.
This story which is told in community and passed down in community … for the sake of those who hear it … and tell it … into the ages:

God is faithful.
Jesus is Lord, for God’s good and gracious will, for US.
And everything else … everything else … follows from that, for US, in him.

This story has been given to us, poured over and into us … so that when the tempter tells us another story, we’ve got resistance, built in, to draw upon.
A story, in our ears and on our hearts.
A story, made over us in the Sign of the Cross,
A story, told to us in community ... faith companions on which to lean, for strength, for support, for love and care, people to ask, friends who care, on those days when the tempter’s false, sham, garbage story, the story he’s trying to make all about ME, when that story comes whispering in my ear … well, here we can run, run for refuge and strength, hope and health and life, and cry to each other “please, tell me the story, tell me my story, again, and again, so I can hear it, and take it in, and believe it, believe it again, believe it new, once more.
Our story.
The Sign of the Cross.
Poured over and into us.
Traced upon us.
We eat, we drink it, for us.
This is our strength, our hope, together, bringing each other through, because the Spirit does not live alone, but in each other. This faith, this life, it’s not individual, as the tempter would have us believe, it’s not all up to us, and you are not your own. In Jesus, you and you and you and I are part of each other.
The body of Christ, together. For a purpose, for a reason.
To stand up to the tempter.
And let me tell you something … in the face of the body of Christ … in the face of the Body of Christ … HE IS POWERLESS.
For in the body of Christ, Jesus withstood temptation.
And in the body of Christ, we will withstand and stand together, Making the Sign of the Cross in love with and for each other, for the sake of the world God loves, in Jesus’ name.
Amen.