Tested
Sermon by James W. Crawford
First Sunday in Lent
February 21, 1999
Richard Lischer teaches at Duke University's Divinity School. In an article written for the Christian Century this week he tells of a Lenten encounter taking place years ago. Lischer writes, "In 1932 my father met my mother by means of one of the great pick-up lines of the era. After a 'young people's' social at their Lutheran Church, he followed her along the park of the near north side of St. Louis to the streetcar stop. When he caught up with her, he said with the savoir faire of a Lutheran Cary Grant, 'Say, do you go to the movies during Lent?'"
And Lischer continues, "I suppose you could say, 'Thank God, even 67 years ago the church's regulations did not prevent an independent-minded woman with bobbed hair from saying yes to an interesting young man in a green fedora. But that's not the point," He goes on: (The young man's) "question was more interesting than that. It presupposes a church whose practices set certain conditions on its members' daily existence. Lent was a holy time of prayer, self discipline and extra church going. When you skipped a meal or altered your social routine you were trying to remember, if not always successfully, Jesus' sacrificial life and death. The church still recognized the incongruity between focusing on the crucified Christ on Sundays and dissipating your wits in movie theaters and speakeasies during the rest of the week. How quaint. . ."
How quaint, indeed. I recall the comments of a mentor of mine as we launched into Lent some years ago insisting that whatever your Lenten sacrificial discipline, whatever you might give up for Lent, you could afford to—and indeed, probably should—give it up forever. And then he would go on to ask that instead of giving up something for Lent, why not take something on: a social service task, a volunteer effort, a risky justice project, an increased monetary contribution to your church or a charity of your choice. Now, there is something that for Christ's sake might change you and the world.
So as we plunge into Lent this year, we confront again, as Richard Lischer writes, "this incongruity between focusing on the crucified Christ on Sundays and dissipating our wits during the rest of the week."
I
In the lesson we read a few moments ago, we begin in the wilderness with this encounter with one who puts Jesus to the test. We need remember here that no one accompanied Jesus on these forty wilderness days; no one witnessed this confrontation; no one put pen to paper to record this towering incident. It comes to us as Matthew and his community some 50 years later reflect on the meaning of Jesus as the Christ and the threats, the competing choices, the varied roads faced by that community as it seeks to faithfully follow him. Tests of our faith, tests of our hope, tests of our capacity to love and serve and follow the way of the Cross—that is what we see surfacing in this dark and daunting wilderness confrontation.
(Peter Gomes, our friend at Harvard's Memorial Church, clearly sees the testing and temptation lying at the heart of this narrative; he speculates that if the devil had known his grandmother, the devil probably would smile with pleasure at her response to her doctor's admonition that she avoid temptation when it came in the form of her diet. She said, "Better to die from havin' it, than wantin' it." She has a point!)
Now who is this figure Matthew hurls into the face of Jesus? Who is this testing, tempting antagonist offering seductive short cuts to throw Jesus, Matthew's church and us—us—off course? Who is this seductive power?
Well, last month televangelist Jerry Falwell offered us one alternative. He identified a subtle demonic figure, a cunning and slick power, and called it antichrist. You have all read or heard about it, I'm sure. On January 14th before a crowd of some 1500 in Kingsport, Tennessee, Falwell said, "Who will the antichrist be? I don't know. Nobody else knows. Is he alive and here today? Probably. Because when he appears during the Tribulation period he will be a full grown counterfeit of Christ. Of course, he'll be Jewish. Of course he'll pretend to be Christ. And if in fact the Lord is coming soon, and the antichrist will be an adult at the presentation of himself, he must be alive somewhere today."
"If an antichrist is going to be the counterfeit of Christ, he has to be Jewish." Can you imagine that? Jerry Falwell's commentary, as you may suspect, raised—and rightly so—it raised the worst fears of Jews; it elicited the fiery condemnation of other Christians. It compelled Jerry Falwell to apologize, not so much for what he believed, but for his lack of tact and judgment.
Oh no, Jerry, it is not simply a matter of tact and judgment. You have it all wrong! This use of Jesus Christ to create scapegoats of any race, nation or religion tends to fly in the face of the universal Gospel itself. I don't want to make you a scapegoat, Jerry, but we need be careful of perceiving and attacking so-called antichrists who seem always to be, you know, over there—the ones who look different from us, the ones who challenge our arguments, threaten our interests, attack our rationale, question our values, disturb our power, those we would exile beyond the pale; those we would categorize as them, rather than us. They are the problem. Clean that type out, and the world would be a better place.
You know the story. And I do not mean to trivialize the point, but I am ashamed to tell you—ashamed—that when I heard the New York Yankees made a trade with the Toronto Blue Jays and Roger Clemens was on his way to New York, my image of Clemens immediately sprouted horns and a tail. Talk about counterfeits!— a near messianic Fenway icon now the arch enemy of Red Sox Nation! (Oh, Linda, you've been right all along.)
Well, taking a stand 180 degrees from Jerry Falwell—and from me—I think Kathleen Norris puts her finger on the nature of this contrary power in the world diverting us from the ministry and mission of Jesus Christ. As she tells it, her woman's circle in her South Dakota Church asked her to conduct a Bible study session on the antichrist. She thought at first it might be a punishment for having missed so many of their meetings during the year. . . but the program leader insisted and presented her with a body of relevant materials. Ms. Norris searched St. Augustine for insights but discovered he gave the topic up as subject far beyond him. "Still," she writes, "the women of the church were expecting something. I went to see the pastor, hoping that he would help me. He quickly summarized and dismissed the tendency Christians have always to identify the antichrist with some of their personal enemies, or with those in power whom they have reason to detest. It's an easy temptation: in our own century the antichrist has been equated with Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, and given the current state of political hysteria, no doubt Bill and Hillary Clinton.
"Well," she continues, "what the pastor said was so simple that it will remain with me forever. 'Each one of us acts as an antichrist,' he said, 'whenever we hear the Gospel and do not do it.'"
Why, of course. So close and yet so far. So who is that figure wrestling with Jesus Christ in the wilderness? Who is the enemy Matthew pictures testing the Gospel, laying out what look like easy choices, where we can love at no cost, claim discipleship with no Cross? As Kathleen Norris suggests, and cartoonist Walt Kelley insists, "we have met the enemy; and they are us."
II
And what does our testing of God look like? Because you see it is we who do the testing. I think all too often we are tempted to lose sight of a gospel promised to hang onto us through the worst life can do to us. I think we are tempted from time to time to give up on God.
For instance, is our faith tested when confronted with an inexplicable tragedy or illness or death? Of course it is. There can be a terrible sense we are all alone.
I read a review the other day of a new Stephen Spielberg film entitled, "The Last Days." It depicts the removal of Jews from Hungary by the Nazis in the spring of 1944. The victims are sent directly to Auschwitz with all of the terrible consequences of arriving in that camp: children and older men and women sent immediately to the gas chambers, the more physically able routed to ghoulish medical experimentation or cruel assignments for the regime. One woman relating her memories in the film testifies to her seeing a guard grasp a baby, smack it against the side of the railroad car, kill it, then cast it into a ditch. "I stopped talking to God then," she says. Is it any wonder?
Or I hear of the young man afflicted with AIDS, finding himself in his last months, furious, "I don't believe in God. I find it incomprehensible that anyone could believe in God after what we have been through. I have learned in every possible way the horrible things man can visit on his fellow man. I'm just overwhelmed by it all. . ."
In such circumstances we find God's so-called promises, any sense of Divine good news, tested. Our faith falters because we believe love falters. What we learned in Sunday school, what we hear from the pulpit, what we sing in our hymn texts trickles down the drain. We are all alone.
John Carmody, about whom we have spoken before, learned he suffered from terminal cancer. The melanoma broke his back, his bone cancer relentless, the toll of pain enormous. In his collection of reflections, composed during his slow drift downhill, he observes that "both consolation and desolation are shaped intimately by our feelings, and that our feelings are imperfect indices of God. We have to use our feelings," he writes, "because they are integral parts of ourselves. We can never become pure spirit, and should not want to be. But God is not limited to what we feel. God need not be missing because we cannot sense him. Our faith can go well beyond our feelings, just as our love cango well beyond our mind. Whether we live or die, feel fine or rotten, we belong to God. Whether we are good or bad, pious or sinful, we belong to God. Even when our hearts condemn us, God is greater. God is always greater—that is our surest ground."
Bless you, John Carmody. We know you speak the truth. Because even today, as we enter into Lent and begin to ponder where all of this ends up—on Calvary, on a Cross—where if ever a human being seems alone, indeed where we might dare ask the question, "Where was God when Jesus died?" we confess in light of all that happens amid that bloody passion event, amid the raucous violence that on the surface seems to deny it, God is there all the time. Just so, as at the Cross, for us when everything seems to deny it, we are not alone.
III
And just once more, we live in a world where the promises of God's realm, God's domain, what the Bible calls God's kingdom can begin to wane. The test is one of our hope. Can the promise of a new world be really true when so much seems to run against it? Are the perverse demonic powers in our human hearts and common existence really in control? Our faith gets tested.
I must confess I was one of those naive types back in 1989-90 who believed that with the so-called collapse of the Soviet Union, the great bipolar geopolitical demonizations would come to a close, and, as the popular phrase has it these days, we could get on with it, bringing peace with justice and mutual interdependence with integrity and good will among the nations and peoples of the world. I believed that with our defenses no longer aimed at Mutually Assured Destruction, we could recast the focus on our own domestic policies to make possible a more just, ordered and gracious mix right here in our own country.
Wrong! The centuries old demons erupt. Even this morning we see those bitter, vengeful neighbors in Serbia and Kosovo barely able to speak with one another without the threat of a NATO bombing raid.
And among ourselves? This unbelievable constitutional conundrum we have just been through? Some men and women, like William Bennett, were furious at much of the American public who refused to demand President Clinton's resignation, much less his impeachment, labeling it the death of public moral outrage. The very people he accused of moral desuetude, no less outraged at what they consider to be a relentless, hate-triggered, vengeance-motivated investigation. For all the bi-partisanship and hale-fellow-well-met appearances in the Senate a week or two ago, there seethe hard feelings, unresolved anger and pent-up moral fury that will poison our national debate and landscape for years to come.
And here in our own city? We still struggle over the racial divides in our public service positions, at our universities, in housing, education, health care, public safety.
Hope is at stake. Hope hangs in the balance. Do you know what the opposite of hope is? The opposite of hope is not despair. The opposite of hope is cynicism. Who cares anymore? What difference does it make? Who gives a damn?
The other day, I came across a little prayer by Marion Wright Edelman, the founder and president of the Children's Defense fund. Talk about opportunities for cynicism and surrender, her fight is never ending, both to save children as well as to keep her spirits up. And you can see she understands the risks: "God," she prays, "God protect us from and keep us from being:
Hypocrites,
Experts
Attention huggers,
Blamers and complainers
Snake oil sales people
Takers and just talkers
Lone rangers
Excuse makers
Fair weather workers
Braggers
Magic bullet seekers and sellers and
Quitters.
God send us and help us to be:
Righteous warriors
Moral guerrillas
Scut workers
Nitty-gritty doers
Detail tenders
Long distance runners
Energetic tryers
Risk takers
Sharers
Team players
Organizers and mobilizers and
Servant leaders
to save our children—but I might add—to save our world.
Well, friends, this Lenten season I pray we not lose hope. I pray we rest confidently in the promise of Providence who even at Calvary took that Cross and with a power we do not understand but to which we can only testify—yes, took that hopeless mess and transformed it into the most radiant symbol of hope ever wrought. If God can turn the cynicism, the base motives, the failure of Jesus—all that concentrated on Calvary—if God can transform that into a promise of a new world, we dare not succumb to discouragement and cynicism. We stand with hope against hope.
So friends, as we walk this Lenten walk together, I ask not whether you decided to give up the movies, or booze, or chocolate—or whatever. No, as we try to dissolve the incongruity between the Cross on Sundays and the witlessness of the rest of the week, I pray we be sensitive to and recognize ourselves most frequently as the great antagonists of Christ, and even then, that we live secure—secure in the confidence of God's loving presence by our side regardless of the circumstances—No!— even in the worst of circumstances; and that we live by hope against hope, singing, as we shall in a moment, with William Matson:
Guard us, O Christ, that we may ne'er
forsake the right or do the wrong;
Against temptation make us strong
and keep us in your sheltering care.
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