From the Pulpit:

 
Happy Lent! Oh, does that seem so wrong to you? We came together on Wednesday to more or less grovel in the face of death,
to hear those gloomy words about how we are dust and to dust will return. I’m reminded of the words of the general confession that made me cringe as a child. Basically it said I am unclean and there is no health in me. Ick. I have to tell you that at seven years old
my logic was that I had taken a bath and scrubbed my fingernails and I did not feel dirty or sick, but the church told me I was.

I have to admit that I really don’t like putting the ashes on your foreheads. I want every single one of you alive and well this time
next year, and there was a precious baby with us, and what I really wanted to do was to say, Oh, no, sweetheart, not you, you are not going to die. But we’re not allowed to sugarcoat Ash Wednesday, and we’re really not allowed to sugarcoat Lent either.

I remember a friend’s child who said that what he wanted to be when he grew up was a garbage man -- but only in the winter. Maybe I’d rather be a preacher only for Easter and Christmas. But that’s not how it works.

We – well, those of us who are here today  – are not Christians just on Christmas and Easter. And those who are, well, we’ll welcome them with open arms and hope that in time they will come to realize that the good stuff comes in the more difficult times.
This is where there is transformation, here in the wilderness where we would never go on our own but where the Spirit leads us
for our own good.

I’d like us to get over calling this the temptation of Christ. It is nothing like the bag of greasy sea salt and vinegar chips in the pantry, the stray twenty dollar bill somebody left on the counter or whatever might have made Tiger Woods think that he was somehow entitled to do all that he did. No, temptation, at least the way we understand it, was a teensy little indiscretion compared to what Jesus was up against.

This was a test. It served a whole different purpose than those videos we see where a child is left alone in a room with a plate full of doughnuts and told not to touch them until the grownup returns. He looks around – a hidden the camera catches it all – he sniffs them, he waves his fingers in the air and sings a silly song to distract himself and reaches out a finger to get just a taste of the icing – maybe he eats it and maybe he doesn’t. We’ve all been there, but not a one of us has been where Jesus was.

Lent, in the early church -- and by that I mean during the very earliest times, when to become a Christian was a radical thing to do, something that could sever you from your family, something that could get you killed if the wrong people found out -- then Lent was the time for intense instruction for the people who were about to be baptized.

For forty days they breathed, ate, and slept the basics of Christianity. They learned not only scripture but also theology and ritual, they confessed over and over again so that at the Great Vigil of Easter they could literally strip themselves to what we in Texas
would call bare-naked and descend into the water, very much dying to their old lives and very much rising again to be clothed in
new white garments and welcomed into the loving arms of their new family.

What they tried to teach in the early church and what they hammered out in the council that created our Nicene Creed and what we’re still trying to get our minds around today is the fact that Jesus the Christ was both fully human and fully divine. That is what today’s lesson is all about.

We read earlier about how he presented himself down at the Jordan River . I’m imagining he stood in line with all the others,
the sinners, and even though he was free of sin, he didn’t take a pass, but when he got there, he stepped into the muck, and
by his submission claimed his insignificance until the voice of God boomed out when he came up into the air:  You are my Son,
my beloved, In you I am well pleased.

Jesus must have gotten whiplash. No sooner does he take on the humility of abject humanity than he is anointed with full divinity.
What happens in the test of the desert is the opposite. He’s just been crowned the king of heaven. He’s just been told that he is fully divine, and the Spirit forces him away from that flowing river, away from the crowds who must have been embracing him, out into
the brutal wilderness, out to where it is hotter than hot and colder than cold, where only venomous creatures live, hiding under rocks to come at you when you let your attention flag, where there is no place to take refuge from the elements, and who saunters up to you but the devil himself.

Now, the devil is not scary: no, the devil is slick. Have I got a deal for you. Greasy. Unctuous. And you are tired after forty days
of no food, no rest. What is it with this son of God business if all it gets you is boredom, loneliness, calluses and scorpion bites? That’s where we would be, but not Jesus. The devil says, three times he says, If you are the son of God. Actually he says,
since you are the son of God, as if Jesus’ identity as the son of God were negotiable. He’s saying prove it. He’s saying, you’ve got it, now take advantage of it.

 And what he’s saying to Jesus is I don’t buy that you are fully human and fully divine. You stepped into the mud of that nasty river, you subjected yourself to the same confession as all those people but you are God and you don’t have to go there. Here. Your super powers can fill not only your stomach but all the stomachs of the starving people on earth if only you’ll give up your humanity.

Jesus is in pain for himself and all hungry people but he says no.

Satan says, look out over all the earth, all those people fighting each other. You can be emperor of all of them, you can make them stop fighting and killing each other if only you’ll give up this dumb idea that you are not more powerful than they are.

And Jesus, whose heart breaks, says no.

Satan now takes time to do some homework. He reads the Bible and comes back armed with Holy Scripture in the tradition that
Pat Robertson has followed to this day and he tries to beat Jesus upside the head with it, and he says, give God the glory, give God the glory, invoke his name and jump off this precipice and call the angels to catch you. Show the people the fireworks and make them believe.

And Jesus says no. No, I will not give up my solidarity with the least, the last, and the lost for the sake of claiming glory.

Glory is not what Jesus was about. Solidarity is. He is not a savior who will ever sell us out to prove to us how divine he is.
He will never leave us alone. Wherever we were on Wednesday when we got those ashes on our foreheads, he was with us receiving them as we acknowledged the fragility of our life.

He proved on the cross that his life was as fragile as ours. As much as he was with me as it was my obligation to smudge them on you as much as I wanted to call death a lie, Jesus was there with us.

Death is not a lie, but it is not the last word. He gutted it out in the desert for us. To be one of us. He chose to cling to his flesh and most indelicate bodily functions, the limitations of his humanness; even though he had access to a free pass, he did this in order to stand with us.

Don’t think he didn’t grieve. Don’t think he wasn’t wasted by the experience. Don’t think he wasn’t parched and that his stomach was not groaning in knots because of it. He was. It did. It was agony for him. But the angels came. God’s angels were waiting,
not to erase the pain of the trial but to embrace it with him. This was Jesus’ first scarring, as indelible as the scars of the nails at his crucifixion. The scars at the beginning of his journey gave his journey its meaning.

Nothing is as irreconcilable as this business of being fully human and fully divine. The desert tells us that Jesus did not understand it. No, he endured it for our sake. We are selling him short if we think we will ever understand it. No. We are called only to accept it as pure gift and to be grateful for it and to live into it for his sake and for the sake of all humanity on his behalf.

Amen.