don't eat alone

The way the story unfolds in John’s gospel, I think the disciples got increasingly nervous every time Jesus went to Jerusalem because each trip seemed to up the ante, as far as those in power were concerned. As long as he stayed in Galilee, the crowds didn’t matter so much. But when he came to Jerusalem he was right in the face of those intent on control and oppression. They couldn’t ignore him. It also appears that most all of them were beginning to realize that things were escalating, as far as the official response to Jesus’ words and actions. I mean, he had always talked about dying, but it began to feel more real. In John 11, the chapter just before our passage for today, Jesus gets word that his friend Lazarus had died and decides to go to Bethany, which is walking distance from Jerusalem, and Thomas says to the other disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”

Death was in the air.

As I mentioned, Jesus had been in Bethany–at this same house that belonged to his friends Mary, Martha, and Lazarus–because Lazarus had died. Actually, the sisters sent word that their brother was sick, but by the time Jesus go there he had already been buried. When Jesus asked them to open the tomb, they were quick to say, “He’s been in there four days; he is going to stink!” (This is one of the places I still love the King James Version: “He stinketh!”) But Jesus was undaunted. He called Lazarus by name and Lazarus walked out of the tomb, still wrapped in the cloth they used to cover bodies.

The incident created publicity, which set the authorities on edge, so Jesus and the disciples left town for a while (we don’t know how long), but the next thing it says in the gospel is that it was time for Passover, so they returned to Bethany so they were close to all that was going on in Jerusalem. This time Mary, Martha, and Lazarus hosted a dinner for him and the disciples. Based on this and other stories, their house must have been known as a place of hospitality because they seemed to always have a crowd gathered there.

We might even assume the last time a crowd was there was when Jesus called Lazarus back to life. Several commentators I read this week noted that if Lazarus had been in the tomb for four days he would have already started to decompose and there is nothing in the story that alludes to Jesus healing those scars, so he would have looked like he had been, well, to hell and back.

As I said, death was in the air.

In the middle of it all, Mary came in with a big clay jar of perfume, broke it open, and washed Jesus’ feet in it. The Roman measure used means she poured about twelve ounces of perfume on his feet. To say the smell went everywhere would be an understatement. It brings to mind the lesson I had to learn as a teenager about how much cologne it took to make me smell good. And then she let her hair down and used it like a towel to wipe his feet, which means that she probably carried that aroma for several days after this happened.

My guess is the room got quiet as people caught wind of the perfume and began to realize what was happening. Then Judas critiqued the whole scene by saying she would have done better to spend the money feeding poor people than pouring a Costco-sized bottle of perfume on Jesus’ feet, and Jesus responds by saying, “You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”

In the next verse, John moves on to people gathering palms to wave at Jesus as he entered Jerusalem. He doesn’t wrap up the story or tell us what anyone else said, he just moves on.

On the surface, Jesus’ words sound almost callous, as though he is saying, “You can help poor people any day you want,” but there’s more going on here. Those gathered would have been familiar with Deuteronomy 15, which talks about the year of jubilee when all debts were forgiven–every seven years. God said, “Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.’”

Jesus was saying the two expressions of compassion were not mutually exclusive. Generosity is not an either-or proposition, but a pervasive way of life. Extravagance is God’s calling card. What Mary did resonated with the three hundred bottles of wine Jesus made from water for the wedding, or the parable the four hundred cups of flour that were transformed by the yeast that Jesus told to illustrate the extravagance of God’s presence, or the prodigal love of the father we saw in last week’s parable of the two lost sons.

Mary got it. The proper way might have been to wash Jesus’ feet and then put a light rub of perfume on them afterwards, but she poured it all over him and her. Evidence of her compassion ran across the floor and got on everyone’s sandals. The aroma filled everyone’s nostrils. She had prepared herself to respond to the moment when she saw the chance.

To celebrate her eighty-fifth birthday this year, Rachel, my mother-in-law, decided to put together bags to hand out to those experiencing homelessness. As she and Ginger planned what to do, they thought about more than handing out a bottle of water or a snack. They really thought about things people need. They got some large Ziplock bags and filled them with granola bars and other healthy snacks, but also a wash cloth, a pair of socks, toothbrush and toothpaste, and a bottle of Gatorade.

Thursday, I was coming out of the Big Y parking lot and a man was standing at the traffic light holding a cardboard sign. Because of Rachel’s preparation and compassion, I had something to offer him. I was ready for the moment.

What Judas was talking about was hypothetical: “Well you know what you could have done . . .” To follow his logic means that neither Jesus nor the poor people around them would have been taken care of.

One other things strikes me in this story. Our passage this morning was the first twelve verses of John 12. The first twelve verses of chapter 13 are John’s account of Jesus’ last night with his disciples before his execution. Instead of the last supper, John says that Jesus got up from the table, much like Mary had done a few nights before, wrapped a towel around his waist, and washed the feet of his disciples–even Judas; and then he asked, “Do you know what I have done to you?”

Mary’s actions did more than just make Jesus cared for, more than foreshadow his death. We have no idea how much Jesus had that last evening planned out, but I wonder if what she did affected how he thought about the ways he would show his love for his followers that last night as, once again, the smell of death was in the air.

We seem to end up here each week, reminding each other that life is temporary and death is sure. At the start of Lent we talked about “practicing resurrection” as our theme for the season, and the reality is resurrection requires death. We can’t have one without the other.

One of the benedictions I have heard often in UCC services is attributed to a French philosopher named Henri-Frédéric Amiel who said, “Life is short. We don’t have much time to gladden the hearts of those who walk this way with us. So, be swift to love and make haste to be kind.” I will admit that I have heard it so many times that it has started to sound more like something on a greeting card rather than a benediction, but Mary’s extravagant generosity gave me fresh ears for those words.

Death is in the air. We don’t have much time. But to be able to respond to the moments where we have a chance to show our love, we must prepare to be generous, to be extravagant, whether we are caring for friends or helping strangers. We will not always have each other. Let’s not miss our chances to love one another. Amen.

Comedian Steve Martin had a routine in his early days where he talked about how much names matter. He said, for instance, you wanted you bank to be named First Amalgamated Federal National Bank so you felt like your money was safe. If it was called Bob’s Bank you would be less likely to invest because it sounded like you were going to keep their money in your pocket.

When I was in high school, my mother was reading a novel called Christy and she was sure I would like it, but I wasn’t willing to give it a chance. In frustration, she said, “I’ll bet if it was called Joe Fang and His Gang you would read it.” I laughed and said, “I probably would.” When I got home from school that day, there was the book with a handmade cover titled Joe Fang and His Gang.

And she was right: I loved it—once I got past the name.

Jesus never named his parables. The titles were added later by translators and preachers. I’m not actually sure when the names were added. Our passage today is part of three “lost and found” parables that are all named after the thing that was lost and found: the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the prodigal son.

I’ll come back to that word prodigal later.

The names set our vision before we even start reading. We are led to believe that the stories are about the sheep, the coin, and the son, but we need to work hard to see past that filter because it’s not that simple; there’s so much more going on.

Our passage started with some religious leaders, who were people of privilege, criticizing Jesus for welcoming “sinners.” Well, actually, the chapter starts with Luke saying that “tax collectors and sinners” kept coming to Jesus. Even Luke had a hard time grasping Jesus’ love for all humanity, perhaps.

And Jesus did not ignore or shun people of privilege. He hung out with them as well. In Luke 14, the chapter just before our passage, he is eating dinner at one of their houses, which happened quite often. But they couldn’t figure him out, and when they asked questions, he answered in parables, which, as we know, don’t explain anything.

A shepherd loses one of his hundred sheep and doesn’t sleep until he finds it, and then wakes up all the neighbors to celebrate with him. A woman loses one of ten coins and tears up the house looking for it, and then spends who knows how much to throw a party to celebrate. And then, a son asks for his inheritance way ahead of schedule, while his older brother keeps doing what he thinks his father wants so he will get all that is coming to him and maybe more. The younger sibling takes off with his fortune and blows it so badly that he ends up feeding pigs.

The young man then plots a scheme to come home and play humble—just let me be one of your servants; I know I don’t deserve to be a son—because he imagines his father has been angry at him since he left and that’s the only way to get back in the house. But the dad has been watching the road every day, hoping he would come home. As soon as he sees his boy, he welcomes him home without waiting for an explanation.

Before we go on, I want to notice two key difference between this parable and the two that preceded it.

The first two started with questions: Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it?—which inclined the readers to see themselves as the shepherd and the woman—sort of a “if you were in this situation . . .”

Then our parable begins, not with a question, but with, “Once there was a man who had two sons . . . ,” which was a familiar way to start a story, sort of the Aramaic equivalent of “A priest, a rabbi, and a minister walk into a bar . . .” But Jesus doesn’t point them to which role to play.

The second thing is that the father doesn’t go looking for the boy the way the shepherd and the woman went looking for what they lost. And the boy was not really lost, for that matter, at least not like the sheep and the coin. He left on purpose and lost sight of himself.

That points me to a third difference. This parable has two lost boys. The older brother might have never left home, but he certainly didn’t feel found. While his brother was away, the older son went to the field every day, made sure things were done right, and worked hard to stay in his father’s favor. When he saw his dad go so completely overboard with his brother came home, he couldn’t take it.

Much like the father had gone out the front door to embrace his youngest son, he went out the back door to find the oldest one when he didn’t show at the party.

The older son had his own ways of trying to manipulate the father: “I’ve been here the whole time and you never let me have a barbeque with my friends.” And the father said, “This is not about you. This about us. Your brother came back. Why wouldn’t we throw a party?”

And that brings me back to the word prodigal. It means “given to extravagance, wasteful, giving on a lavish scale, spending recklessly.”

The word gets attached to the younger son who wastes his life and his fortune, but I think the father is the real prodigal in this story. He is the one who offers extravagant, we might even say reckless love.

Because of the names we have given these parables, we often read them as though they were fables or analogies: the shepherd, the woman, and the father all symbolize God–and God is recklessly extravagant in the way God loves us–but if we look at the context of Jesus telling the stories in response to questions about why he hung out with tax collectors and sinners, I think he wanted us to imagine what life would be like if we were the prodigals: if we were the ones who loved extravagantly.

When we put ourselves in the story—well, I’ll speak for myself. When I try to put myself in the story, the most attractive roles are those of the sheep, the coin, and the kid who got to run wild and then was welcomed back because they are on the receiving end of that crazy kind of love. In real life, I am an older brother, though I was the more experimental one in some ways, but in others I have been true to the role working hard to earn love, to earn a sense of self-worth instead of trusting I was worthy of being loved because I was breathing.

That said, I will make a we statement now.

I think for most, we want to picture ourselves as the younger boy at the end of the story, but
we are, more likely, the older one. I don’t mean that we all wish we would run off and do anything we want until we run out of money. I mean we picture ourselves as the one someone is waiting for, the one who gets celebrated no matter what, but we live like the older brother, acting as though the truth is that love is earned.

But the truth is God’s love is not earned. Real love is not earned.

That is great news that is sometimes hard to take because we work hard and we would like all that work to mean something—and it does mean a great deal, but it doesn’t earn us love.

The parable reminds us that life is not about getting our due. The younger son wanted his inheritance and the older one wanted his recognition. If we direct our gaze away from the brothers to the father, we see that he went out to both. He went out the front to meet the wanderer and he went out the back to find the dutiful one. He was pouring out love, regardless of circumstance.

Jesus’ response to those who questioned the kind of people he cared about was to tell parables about a shepherd who dropped everything to find the lost lamb, or the woman who spent half her budget celebrating the change she found in the couch cushions, and a father who loved his children with reckless abandon. That is where we are invited to find ourselves in these stories: as the one who is looking for every reason to love prodigally, to welcome outlandishly, to drop everything to look for those waiting to be found.

In that sense, to be a prodigal sounds like a pretty good way to live. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

To reference the Mark Knofler song that shows up at the end of this week’s sermon, this has been a week when I felt like the bug rather than the windshield. I’m hanging in there, and I found helpful insights in Jesus’ parable about the fig tree (Luke 13:1-9). Perhaps they will help you, too.

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One of the persistent questions that followed Jesus had to do with who was responsible for the bad things that happened. When the disciples saw a man who had been blind from birth, they asked Jesus, “Who sinned that this man should be born blind?” In our passage this morning, people wanted to know what certain Galileans had done that caused great tragedy to befall them.

Jesus responded by asking them if they thought the world really worked that way. Then he said, “Repent,” which is one of those words that doesn’t sit easily on our ears. What it means is to “turn around:” to intentionally change your mind, your actions, your heart.

Though I’m sure if we went around the room most of us would say that we do not think that suffering is some kind of judgment, that notion lives all around us. Do you remember the fundamentalist preachers who said AIDS was God’s judgement on gay people? That’s not just crazy talk, it’s damaging and destructive. We don’t live in a cause-and-effect world when it comes to tragedy and difficulty, or even when it comes to blessing and good fortune.

Maybe our experience of the pandemic is the chance to put that kind of damaging thinking out of our minds for good. COVID is not a result of someone’s sin. Let’s let that ripple out a bit more. People are not poor because they did something wrong and God is punishing them. Suffering is not payback. Bad storms are not indicators of God’s disdain. Being rich doesn’t mean we are Jesus’ favorite.

As I said, the human tendency to want to explain suffering by blaming or shaming someone–usually someone else–comes through in this passage. It’s a hard habit to break. The folks around Jesus were talking about some Galileans who were victims of Pilate’s power. The assumption of the non-Galileans was that those folks must have done something to incur his wrath. Jesus stepped in to say that we don’t make meaning out of suffering by blaming or gossiping. What is worth talking about, rather than who is at fault, is how we can participate in grace, so repent: change your heart.

Then he said, basically, “Face it: you are all going to die just like the Galileans did.”

After that rather startling truth-telling, he told a parable about a fig tree that had not grown any figs for three years. The landowner saw the tree as useless and told the gardener to cut it down. The gardener asked him to let the tree grow for another year and he would tend to it. And that’s where the story ends. We don’t know the landowner’s response or if the tree finally grew figs.

When Ginger and I first moved to New England, I wanted to plant a fig tree, mostly because we had one in our yard in North Carolina and I love figs. I talked to gardeners who either said it a fig tree couldn’t survive the winter or gave me a detailed list of the things I would have to do to help it survive. We had friends in Guilford who lived down by the water and they had one, but the problem was the summer here is so short that the figs never had a chance to ripen. Nevertheless, I planted a fig tree our first spring here and did some of the things people told me to do to help it survive the winter, but it died.

One day, I will, too. And so will all of you. Like Mavis Staples sings, “Death is slow, but death is sure. Allelu, allelu.

Aren’t you glad you came to church today?

What can I say? How about: since life is short, let’s use some of the time we have left to look a little more at the parable. One of the ways to look at a story like this is to imagine ourselves as each of the characters in the story.

Let’s start with the fig tree. It was alive. It was growing. But it wasn’t producing figs. It wasn’t that old of a tree, so perhaps it was still getting settled in. Maybe it had dealt with some sort of disease. My fig tree in North Carolina grew big and had lots of figs and for five summers the squirrels came the night before I was going to pick them and took all the fruit off the branches.

In the parable, the landowner was frustrated that the tree was not bearing fruit. He had expectations and things didn’t turn out like he planned, so he told the gardener to chop the tree down. His perspective is not unwarranted. Sometimes we need to let things die; we need to move on–to clear the ground and plant something else. It is healthy to remember that nothing lasts forever–not even us. We are all going to die. The man had waited three years for the tree to bear figs and it had not. He was ready to dig it up and plant something else.

The gardener said, “Give it one more year.” He said he would tend to the tree–fertilize it, work the soil, take care of it. “Let’s see what happens.” The way the parable unfolds, it doesn’t appear that the gardener is new, so he would have been a part of planting the tree and would have been the one caring for it. While the owner was ready to do away with it, the gardener still had hope.

Jesus ends the story without a resolution. We don’t know what happened a year later. Perhaps the tree was laden with figs. Maybe it died like mine did. We aren’t told if the landowner’s heart was softer a year later, or if he had the day marked on his calendar to show up with his saw. The gardener didn’t offer a cause-and-effect solution or make any promisers of figs. All he knew was the only way the tree had a chance was for someone to care for it. We don’t know what happened. We aren’t told how to feel about the characters in the story or what to do as a result of hearing about them, only to repent, maybe to replant.

Where then, can we find ourselves in the parable?

Maybe you feel like the tree. You feel rooted and you’re doing the best you can, but you are not bearing the fruit you feel expected to bear. You keep doing what you are doing, you keep working to do what you think is right, and life isn’t turning out like you thought.

Maybe you feel like the landowner. You’ve had enough of things not going like you expected, so you’re cutting your losses. Time to shed the things and the people who have let you down. Time to dig things up and plant something else. Life is not working the way it is. It’s time to make drastic changes.

Or maybe you feel like the gardener. Life isn’t what you hoped, but you don’t want to give up. If you keep trying and helping and taking care of those around you, there’s always a chance things will start to grow.

The reality is we are all the characters in the parable, depending on the day or the situation–sort of like the Mark Knofler song that says,

sometimes you’re the windshield
sometimes you’re the bug
sometimes it all comes together
sometimes you’re just a fool in love
sometimes you’re the Louisville slugger
sometimes you’re the ball
sometimes it all comes together
sometimes you’re gonna lose it all

Yup. Someday we’re going to lose it all. The fact that life is short is not anyone’s fault. In fact, the reality that life is temporary is what infuses it with meaning. Rather than look for someone to blame (including ourselves) let us repent—turn in a new direction, change course, trust God. We are not defined or trapped by our circumstances. By the grace of God, life is full of surprises. Grow. Replant. Nurture and hope.

Because anything can happen. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

Barely a week into my Lenten Journal and I am already missing days.

One of the reasons is good. A longtime friend came to town for a few days and I spent the evenings talking with him instead of writing. But he’s been gone a couple of days and my depression took over responsibility for my absence. These are heavy days for a number of reasons, work in particular, and I am doing what I can.

I am grateful for my interim pastorate in Westbrook for several reasons, but today I am grateful because it gets me back to writing since I have to have a sermon for tomorrow. None of the lectionary passages inspired me so I chose a passage from Luke between last week and next week that is not included in the lectionary cycle: the parables of the mustard seed and the yeast (Luke 13:18-21).

It ended up being a helpful journey for me.

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One of the things I love to do is dig around in our vegetable garden. When I say “our,” I’m talking about the plot behind our house, which is adjacent to the church parking lot, where a group from First Church Guilford dig and plant and harvest in our communal garden, which is available for anyone who either wants to work or needs some of what we are growing. Last summer we shared close to three hundred pounds of vegetables with folks fr/om our community and local food banks. And we ate well ourselves. We also grow flowers in the middle of the vegetables not only because they are pretty but also because they are necessary to attract the pollinators that help keep the garden healthy because the garden is a lot like our lives: it is never about one plant; the health of everything depends on everything else. The garden is an incredible web of relationships–just like life.

Tom has been my gardening buddy for the last five summers. My standard line is I put things in the ground and hope for the best, but Tom actually knows what we are doing. I’ve learned a great deal from him over the years. One of the things I’ve learned is that creative is better than perfect. We have beds marked out and we think about where and what we plant from season to season, but it’s not pristine. If a volunteer tomato plant comes up in the middle of the green beans, we just stake it and let it grow. Three or four years ago, he carried around a little container of morning glory seeds and planted them here and there. Each summer since, more and more of them have shown up without us having to plant anything new. They are everywhere.

I thought about those morning glories as I pondered our passage for today.

Right before Jesus told these two parables, people were questioning both his method and his motives. He wasn’t playing by the rules. He didn’t pay attention to the things that good holy people should be doing. To return to my gardening example, they seemed more concerned that the beds were clean and weed free than they were about what was growing in them. Finally, Jesus said, when it comes to the way God works in the world, think of a mustard seed. It’s small, but it grows into something big that gives birds a place to land. Or think about yeast. It only takes a little to leaven “three measures” of flour. (By our measurements today, that would be over four hundred cups of flour. I’m not sure what the woman was baking.)

In both examples, something small has huge implications.

I can’t tell you how many sermons and commentaries on this passage that stayed right there: one small act of kindness (or one seemingly small insult) can make a huge difference. And that’s an important word to live by, but Jesus is never that straightforward in his parables, and he didn’t tell these two stories in response to someone saying the details didn’t matter. In fact, he was responding to people who were incredibly picky about the details. They didn’t think he should have healed a little girl because it was the sabbath and healing counted as working.

Which brings me back to the morning glories in our garden.

The mustard plant Jesus was talking about was as invasive as the morning glories. It didn’t stay in nice neat rows. It blew with the wind. It traveled with the birds who perched on it when it was grown. It persisted in the soil and showed up wherever it wanted to. Though it had some medicinal uses, it was not an essential plant to the people of Jesus’ time. As much as I love seeing the morning glories, I will confess that after three or four summers of their being in the garden they come up in lots of places where we don’t want them to be, and no matter how much we pull them up, they just keep coming.

Jesus’ use of yeast as an example of how the realm of God spreads in the world is the same kind of story. The woman in the story wasn’t tearing open a little package like we get at the grocery store. She had a little mess of fermentation that she added to the flour. The difference in this story is she meant to put the yeast in the flour, whereas no one was planting mustard.

But in the Hebrew scripture, yeast is a symbol of sin. That’s why at Passover Jewish people remove it from their houses and eat unleavened bread. Perhaps Jesus imagined the yeast affecting such a large amount of flour not because the woman ran a bakery or something, but because, once again, he was saying that the Spirit of God runs over, spills out, goes all over the place.

My first memory of the power of yeast happened when I was a boy. As I have told you, I grew up in Africa. My mother decided she was going to make hamburgers, but they didn’t sell hamburger buns in the grocery store in Lusaka, Zambia. So she decided she would make them. She found a recipe in one of her cookbooks and made the dough, but the detail she missed was how much the dough would rise. She made each bun the size she wanted them to be when they were finished cooking. Instead, she ended up with four really big hamburger buns–big enough that she was able to cut one of them into quarters to make the burgers for her, my dad, my brother, and me. What she thought would make four buns fed us for days, which was not something she was expecting.

But then, we are getting a good bit of practice living with the unexpected.

After two years of the pandemic and some hint that we may be coming out from under the worst of it, one of the unexpected things is that we have a lot of reasons to be despondent about the future of the church right now. And when I say we I am speaking about a much larger group than the folks in this room or the members of this congregation. As we look at the days ahead, congregations across this country are unsure of what is going to happen. Many are wondering if they will survive for much longer or wondering if they will recognize themselves in a year or two.

The difficult reality is we don’t know the answers to those questions.

What the parables offer us is hope—an uncomfortable hope, but still hope—and that is that God’s presence in the world will keep showing up like yeast and mustard and morning glories. That presence may not be in the places where we have always found it, and God may not show up in ways that are comfortable. It may mean some things that we value and love will have to run their course for us to see where God is leading us. That’s another way of saying death has to come before resurrection. Sometimes God’s presence will feel nourishing like fresh-baked bread, and sometimes it will feel challenging, like uninvited morning glories, but what these parables say is that the realm of God is coming up all over the place. And Jesus said it as though it was good news and hard news all at the same time.

After he told these parables, one of the disciples asked him how many people would be saved and Jesus told another parable about the wide road and the narrow gate and how few people would choose the narrow gate, as if to say that even though they were drawing big crowds only a few folks would be the ones to catch on to the way God was at work in the world. His analogy makes me think of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s words:

Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God. But only [those] who [see take] off [their] shoes; The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

God is at work in wonderful, imaginative, and subversive ways. We must choose if we will perceive God’s presence as invasive or invitational. We have to choose if we will be those who disrupt our world like mustard plants and yeast, whether we will be those willing to let the Spirit of God to catch us by surprise.

Maybe this is a better way to say it: let us choose to be morning glories. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

As I say in the opening paragraph of my sermon for the first Sunday in Lent, to preach about the temptations made me want to listen to the Temptations.

so, round and around and around we go
where the world’s headed, nobody knows
oh, great googa-looga, can’t you hear me talking to you
just a ball of confusion
oh yeah, that’s what the world is today

I’m not sure I cleared up much of the confusion, but here’s the sermon.

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One of the great things about working on a sermon about the temptations of Jesus is that just about any time I sat down to read or think about it, I had a sudden urge to listen to Motown music. The Temptations have played in my head all week: “My Girl,” “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” “Ball of Confusion,” and “Papa Was a Rolling Stone.” I had an image of Jesus in the wilderness with backup singers.

It’s not how it actually went down in the desert, but it was a fun trip for me.

Luke says, “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan (from his baptism) and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil.”

It’s an odd sequence of events: the Spirit led him into the desert to be tempted by the devil. The word “tempted” can also be translated as “put to the test” or “put through a trial.” That helps me because “tempted” sends my mind thinking about how much I think about getting an ice cream cone whenever I shop at Bishop’s Orchards, or how I can hear the Salt and Vinegar potato chips calling me when I’m in the supermarket.

Jesus has more at stake in this text than blowing his calories for the day.

We have talked several times about how often Jesus seems to be trying to get away from the crowds to pray. Perhaps that desire came from these days in the desert. On the heels of his baptism, he went off by himself to be with God and, in the process, he had to come to terms with himself.

The genius of the temptations is not that they offered Jesus a whole different life, or even a chance to run away from responsibility. What they offered was a different version of himself–a lesser version. Instead of one who would use his miracles to heal and to teach, he could use them for personal gain. Instead of speaking truth to power, he could ally with those in charge to gain power for himself. Instead of facing suffering, he could use his privilege to avoid it and be on easy street.

And the temptations were not a one-time occurrence. It was not as though Jesus never had to stare down these options again once he returned to town. We might stay the temptations stayed with him for the whole tour. The tests he faced in the wilderness were examples of what he faced almost every day: to use who he was and what he could do as a way to make his life more comfortable and powerful.

And, though we may not be able to make bread out of rocks, they are temptations we face as well because they are invitations to live as though life doesn’t cost us anything.

One of the shows I like to watch is Top Chef. It is a reality shows that brings young chefs from all over the country and they go through various cooking challenges to see who can come out on top. At the end of every episode, one chef is eliminated until only one is left standing. Each episode starts with a “Quickfire Challenge” that focuses on a particular skill or ingredient. The winner of that challenge gets immunity in the following “Elimination Challenge,” which usually involves preparing a larger dish.

It’s a big deal to have immunity, I’m sure. But here’s what I have noticed: the chef who has immunity rarely does well in the Elimination Challenge. Either they just kind of coast along or they decide to risk so much that they lose their sense of who they are. The chefs that shine are those who have something at stake.

We are truer to God and to ourselves when we live as though something is at stake.

Because something is at stake. The temptation to think otherwise is a lie.

After he came out of the wilderness, Jesus went to Nazareth, his hometown—another place where people had ideas about who he should be—and read these verses from Isaiah:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
God has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

By the time the service was over, they ran him out of town because he was not who they wanted him to be. Jesus went back to Galilee and, as the crowds gathered again and again, kept trying to get off by himself to pray.

He had to keep listening to the Spirit to remember who he was and what he was called to do.

I was talking with a friend this week because we are both facing challenges at work that are leaving us with some tough decisions. He quoted wisdom from another friend who said, “We either choose our losses or we lose our choices,” which resonates with Jesus’ words that we have to lose our lives to find them. When we are willing to risk beyond what feels safe or comfortable, we see things in ourselves and in our world that we did not see before. We create possibilities. One of the ways we plot the resurrection is by letting things die so something new can come to life.

That sounds simple and it’s not. To choose our losses is messy and painful and hopeful and scary. But it is also true and beautiful and hard. The forty days of Lent are symbolic of Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness. May these days define us as much as those days defined him. Amen.

Peace,
Milton