Where The Spirit Must Live Or Die
Sermon
The Glory Of Our Weakness
Sermons With Children's Lessons For Lent And Easter
In the months leading up to the day I was married, it fell on me to plan the honeymoon. I was living in a new city at the time and did not know the area very well, so I went to a nearby travel agent who booked us into what she said was a beachfront hotel just a few hours’ drive from where I lived.
It was just a few hours away, but that was the only part of it the travel agent got right. The hotel turned out to be roughly akin to a trucker’s hostel. The beach turned out to be black and rocky and littered with broken glass. Our room turned out to be a small cubicle in the basement, with no windows and a musty odor whose rancid memory still lingers. Needless to say, my new bride let me know in no uncertain terms that she was profoundly unhappy with this honeymoon experience; in fact, she still lets me know after all these years exactly what her thoughts are on the subject.
Tonight I feel like that travel agent, trying to convince you to go to a place you would never in your 'right mind' choose to visit. I feel like I am saying to you, 'Trust me: Buffalo is quite lovely in the middle of January!' or 'Honestly, Houston is really the place to be during the height of the summer season!' As Ash Wednesday leads us into Lent, however, my job is even more difficult than talking you into Buffalo or Houston. Tonight, I must convince you to voluntarily and of your own free will spend forty days as Jesus did, being tempted and tested in the desert.
The desert Jesus knew is an awesome, forbidding place which looks more like a lunar landscape than anything from this world, stretching from Jericho all the way to Sinai and beyond. Its flat plains and jagged rocky hills have a severe beauty in their sunbaked hues of yellow and red, but the emphasis is on 'severe.' Here there is no hint of moisture anywhere except for the huge Dead Sea, whose water, as if by cosmic design, is the saltiest on earth and is in no way fit for human consumption.
For all its harsh and arid appearance, however, the desert is a profoundly religious place. It is no accident that so much of what we call the Holy Land is desert, nor is it an accident that so many people searching for God have found Him there. Hagar received God’s promise when she was banished to the desert (Genesis 22:17), and Moses received the Ten Commandments there (Exodus 34:28). Other prophets from Elijah (1 Kings 19:8) to John the Baptist (Mark 1:4) heard God’s voice in the desert and came storming back to civilization to repeat what they had heard. When Jesus went into the desert for forty days of testing and temptation, He followed sacred footprints which even the sands of time had not erased.
The desert is a religious place because it is a quiet place. So often, our communion with God is blocked by too much noise, shrill noises in the world and distracting noises in our hearts and minds. But in the desert, all you hear is the sound of the wind, and when that dies down, all that remains is the sound of silence. That is why God so often reveals Himself in the barren desert, where it is quiet enough for the human heart to hear.
Ultimately, the desert is a religious place because you can only do one of two things there: you can either live or die. You cannot just glide along in life as so many of us do, caught up in our daily affairs and going through the motions of secular routines without giving much thought to deeper realities or higher purposes. In the desert, illusions are stripped away and life is confronted on its most basic level. In the desert more than anywhere else, we finally come face to face with our ultimate helplessness and our utter dependence upon God.
If we cannot go to the actual desert Jesus knew in Israel, we are being asked to make that journey in a spiritual sense this Lenten season. We are being asked to put ourselves in a place where we must face our hungers and thirsts and confront our doubts and fears. We are being asked to abandon our pretenses, let down our defenses and allow God to challenge us with hard questions we normally avoid because we don’t want to think about the consequences of our answers. The desert is a place where the human spirit must either die in despair or live exultantly in proximity to God, and we are being asked to test ourselves by going there.
Our searching and testing in the desert is a descent into honesty which takes place over time and proceeds in stages.
First, as the morning sun arises, we take a look deep within to examine our interior values and desires. We are put on this earth to 'seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness' (Matthew 6:33), and what untold riches would be ours if we lived our lives for that! Instead, we live for the things we earn by the sweat of our brow, being all too eager to 'gain the world and forfeit our soul' (Mark 8:36), organizing our lives and our families for maximum material acquisition, fearing nothing more than even a slight drop in our standard of living and never understanding that we are ultimately owned by the things we seek to own.
We pay lip service to Christian values but live instead for the principles and pleasures of this world, making sure that the faith we profess does not require too much change or sacrifice from us. The divine voice within which would lead us to live by heaven’s ways is drowned out by the relentless roar of our worldliness. On this Ash Wednesday night as we enter the spiritual desert of Lent, we must face the terrible possibility that we are faithless people living as children of darkness rather than as children of light.
The sun glows brighter and the parched desert plain grows hotter beneath our feet. Our thirst for faith burns within as we move from examining our own interior lives to examining our life together as a church.
We gather here as a people week after week to be the Body of Christ in the world, a 'colony of heaven,' a sacred community filled to overflowing with the power and love of Jesus Christ, and what a mighty witness we would be if we lived in that Spirit! Instead, we come to church as lonely, atomized individuals, keeping more to ourselves than we give to the community, seeking more to escape from the world than to be engaged in the world. We come here worshiping the convictions we already hold, pleased to have our opinions confirmed and annoyed when they are challenged in the name of the gospel.
We come here declaring our loyalty to Christ’s church, but our levels of stewardship and mission show that our real loyalties are elsewhere. We come here claiming our identity as Christ’s people, but disharmonies and disputations within the fellowship reveal a far less lofty identity. On this Ash Wednesday night as we enter the spiritual desert of Lent, we must face the humbling possibility that we are an apostate church, virtually indistinguishable as a community from the unchurched people around us and poor ambassadors of the One whose name we claim, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
At this point in our descent into honesty, we stop and protest that the judgment is too harsh, but the desert is a harsh teacher, and we do not enter it looking for glib reassurances or easy absolution! In the desert we learn that the depth of our sin offers no shade from the bright sun’s searching glare, no rationalizations with which to justify ourselves. There is no place to hide as the sun climbs directly overhead and the shadows of our denial disappear. Our defenses grow weaker and our desire for God’s Word grows more palpable as we move from examining ourselves as a church to examining ourselves as a nation.
Is this not the land which borrowed biblical language to call itself a 'city on a hill' (Matthew 5:14) and a 'light to the nations' (Isaiah 42:6), a land with 'liberty and justice for all'? What a different nation and world this would be if our great power and prosperity were married to those noble purposes!
Instead, we are married to the marketplace, with its so-called 'natural law' of competitive self-interest, a human-made law which can only divide and ultimately degrade a people. We are lost in the wilderness of misplaced priorities, generously subsidizing the rich, relentlessly squeezing the middle class, and moralistically 'reforming' the poor by abandoning them to a 'free' market system which exploited and profited from their poverty in the first place.
Meanwhile, on the global stage, we Americans are six percent of the world’s people, owning thirty percent of its wealth. When you think about that single, telltale fact for a minute or two, and when you think about the sheer deprivation so many millions in the world endure, do we need wonder why, even now that the Cold War is over, we continue to spend far more on the military than all our enemies combined? Is it any wonder that our Air Force alone has more planes than almost every other nation on earth… and this does not even count the planes our Army and Navy have!
Step back and see all this as the God of Scripture must surely see it. We are armed to the teeth like this, not to defend our national security, but to defend the imperial security of our unimaginably privileged place in the world -- and woe to the politician or preacher who says that maybe too much is too much! So we go on, through Democratic and Republican governments alike, forging unholy alliances and relying on force as a first resort, trying vainly to postpone an inevitable reckoning with the moral compass of God’s equity. As it is within our borders, so it is beyond our borders, and I, for one, say with Thomas Jefferson: 'I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.'
We suffer dangerous delusions as our technological prowess far outstrips our moral progress, and worse yet -- the political and economic powers and principalities which govern us are completely unaware of their delusions! So convinced are we of our national righteousness that we dare to declare ourselves good and our enemies evil, not realizing that in God’s eyes 'there is no distinction' since all nations 'sin and fall short of the glory of God' (Romans 3:23). On this Ash Wednesday night as we enter the spiritual desert of Lent, we must face the honest possibility that we are living in Babylon, drunk on power and dripping in blood, blindly lurching into a future which is gathering its forces against us, descending into hopelessness because we are spiritually unprepared to even consider the radical change of heart which might yet save us from ourselves.
Perhaps now our hunger and thirst for repentance have reached their peak, and as we finally see ourselves as we are seen by God, we come at last to realize our utter helplessness. Now there is nothing left to do but cry out from this blazing desert with all our might, 'Help me, O God! Help us all! I cannot be faithful without You… our church cannot be true to the name of Christ without You… our nation cannot be saved without You.' Now that we can confess our helplessness and complete dependence upon God, our growth as Christians and our journey to salvation can begin.
Jesus reached that point of helplessness in the desert, exhausted from His battle with the devil’s temptations. At that point, our text says angels came and ministered to Him. When all He could do was live or die, angels came to Jesus to give Him the help and sustenance He needed, to shield Him from the desert sun.
We can trust God’s angels to come to us as well. Yes, the purpose of a Lenten journey into the desert is to stare unblinkingly into the very depths of our sin, but we miss the point entirely if we fail to find God at the end of that journey, if we fail to hear His quiet voice speaking from the desert wind, telling us to believe in His mercy, promising to be there for you, for me, for our church and our nation because He knows we cannot live without Him.
Tonight we begin a journey which will take us to the wonder of an empty tomb. But first we must go into the desert, where our easy optimism and God-denying faith in our own devices are tested to the limit. We must go to dark Gethsemane and climb the hill to Calvary. Then and only then will we be ready for the glory of Easter Sunday, when an angel shall come and tell us that our hope which once was dead and buried has been raised to life again. Amen.
Pastoral Prayer
O God of all mercy and might, who calls us to a desert journey where we may encounter ourselves in all our despair and hear Your still, small voice of hope, we pray tonight for a sincere and meaningful Lenten experience. Do not let us pass through this special season as if it were 'ordinary time,' wrapped up in the small things which consume us and oblivious to the large things which can save us. Give us the faith to confront the truth within ourselves and the fortitude to stop living the lies which formerly have assuaged us. Take us into the desert where our Lord and so many others have gone before, subjecting ourselves to hunger and thirst, to trial and temptation, that we may learn our need for You, call upon Your name and be visited by Your angels.
Lord, embolden us to begin that journey tonight at Your table, where we receive food which never leaves us hungry and drink which never leaves us thirsty. Let this meal sustain us in the spiritual desert we must endure, O God, and help us pass the test which lies ahead, that in forty days we shall be ready to receive good news at an empty tomb, ready to live new lives as children of our Risen Lord, as members of His church and as citizens of this nation. In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.
It was just a few hours away, but that was the only part of it the travel agent got right. The hotel turned out to be roughly akin to a trucker’s hostel. The beach turned out to be black and rocky and littered with broken glass. Our room turned out to be a small cubicle in the basement, with no windows and a musty odor whose rancid memory still lingers. Needless to say, my new bride let me know in no uncertain terms that she was profoundly unhappy with this honeymoon experience; in fact, she still lets me know after all these years exactly what her thoughts are on the subject.
Tonight I feel like that travel agent, trying to convince you to go to a place you would never in your 'right mind' choose to visit. I feel like I am saying to you, 'Trust me: Buffalo is quite lovely in the middle of January!' or 'Honestly, Houston is really the place to be during the height of the summer season!' As Ash Wednesday leads us into Lent, however, my job is even more difficult than talking you into Buffalo or Houston. Tonight, I must convince you to voluntarily and of your own free will spend forty days as Jesus did, being tempted and tested in the desert.
The desert Jesus knew is an awesome, forbidding place which looks more like a lunar landscape than anything from this world, stretching from Jericho all the way to Sinai and beyond. Its flat plains and jagged rocky hills have a severe beauty in their sunbaked hues of yellow and red, but the emphasis is on 'severe.' Here there is no hint of moisture anywhere except for the huge Dead Sea, whose water, as if by cosmic design, is the saltiest on earth and is in no way fit for human consumption.
For all its harsh and arid appearance, however, the desert is a profoundly religious place. It is no accident that so much of what we call the Holy Land is desert, nor is it an accident that so many people searching for God have found Him there. Hagar received God’s promise when she was banished to the desert (Genesis 22:17), and Moses received the Ten Commandments there (Exodus 34:28). Other prophets from Elijah (1 Kings 19:8) to John the Baptist (Mark 1:4) heard God’s voice in the desert and came storming back to civilization to repeat what they had heard. When Jesus went into the desert for forty days of testing and temptation, He followed sacred footprints which even the sands of time had not erased.
The desert is a religious place because it is a quiet place. So often, our communion with God is blocked by too much noise, shrill noises in the world and distracting noises in our hearts and minds. But in the desert, all you hear is the sound of the wind, and when that dies down, all that remains is the sound of silence. That is why God so often reveals Himself in the barren desert, where it is quiet enough for the human heart to hear.
Ultimately, the desert is a religious place because you can only do one of two things there: you can either live or die. You cannot just glide along in life as so many of us do, caught up in our daily affairs and going through the motions of secular routines without giving much thought to deeper realities or higher purposes. In the desert, illusions are stripped away and life is confronted on its most basic level. In the desert more than anywhere else, we finally come face to face with our ultimate helplessness and our utter dependence upon God.
If we cannot go to the actual desert Jesus knew in Israel, we are being asked to make that journey in a spiritual sense this Lenten season. We are being asked to put ourselves in a place where we must face our hungers and thirsts and confront our doubts and fears. We are being asked to abandon our pretenses, let down our defenses and allow God to challenge us with hard questions we normally avoid because we don’t want to think about the consequences of our answers. The desert is a place where the human spirit must either die in despair or live exultantly in proximity to God, and we are being asked to test ourselves by going there.
Our searching and testing in the desert is a descent into honesty which takes place over time and proceeds in stages.
First, as the morning sun arises, we take a look deep within to examine our interior values and desires. We are put on this earth to 'seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness' (Matthew 6:33), and what untold riches would be ours if we lived our lives for that! Instead, we live for the things we earn by the sweat of our brow, being all too eager to 'gain the world and forfeit our soul' (Mark 8:36), organizing our lives and our families for maximum material acquisition, fearing nothing more than even a slight drop in our standard of living and never understanding that we are ultimately owned by the things we seek to own.
We pay lip service to Christian values but live instead for the principles and pleasures of this world, making sure that the faith we profess does not require too much change or sacrifice from us. The divine voice within which would lead us to live by heaven’s ways is drowned out by the relentless roar of our worldliness. On this Ash Wednesday night as we enter the spiritual desert of Lent, we must face the terrible possibility that we are faithless people living as children of darkness rather than as children of light.
The sun glows brighter and the parched desert plain grows hotter beneath our feet. Our thirst for faith burns within as we move from examining our own interior lives to examining our life together as a church.
We gather here as a people week after week to be the Body of Christ in the world, a 'colony of heaven,' a sacred community filled to overflowing with the power and love of Jesus Christ, and what a mighty witness we would be if we lived in that Spirit! Instead, we come to church as lonely, atomized individuals, keeping more to ourselves than we give to the community, seeking more to escape from the world than to be engaged in the world. We come here worshiping the convictions we already hold, pleased to have our opinions confirmed and annoyed when they are challenged in the name of the gospel.
We come here declaring our loyalty to Christ’s church, but our levels of stewardship and mission show that our real loyalties are elsewhere. We come here claiming our identity as Christ’s people, but disharmonies and disputations within the fellowship reveal a far less lofty identity. On this Ash Wednesday night as we enter the spiritual desert of Lent, we must face the humbling possibility that we are an apostate church, virtually indistinguishable as a community from the unchurched people around us and poor ambassadors of the One whose name we claim, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
At this point in our descent into honesty, we stop and protest that the judgment is too harsh, but the desert is a harsh teacher, and we do not enter it looking for glib reassurances or easy absolution! In the desert we learn that the depth of our sin offers no shade from the bright sun’s searching glare, no rationalizations with which to justify ourselves. There is no place to hide as the sun climbs directly overhead and the shadows of our denial disappear. Our defenses grow weaker and our desire for God’s Word grows more palpable as we move from examining ourselves as a church to examining ourselves as a nation.
Is this not the land which borrowed biblical language to call itself a 'city on a hill' (Matthew 5:14) and a 'light to the nations' (Isaiah 42:6), a land with 'liberty and justice for all'? What a different nation and world this would be if our great power and prosperity were married to those noble purposes!
Instead, we are married to the marketplace, with its so-called 'natural law' of competitive self-interest, a human-made law which can only divide and ultimately degrade a people. We are lost in the wilderness of misplaced priorities, generously subsidizing the rich, relentlessly squeezing the middle class, and moralistically 'reforming' the poor by abandoning them to a 'free' market system which exploited and profited from their poverty in the first place.
Meanwhile, on the global stage, we Americans are six percent of the world’s people, owning thirty percent of its wealth. When you think about that single, telltale fact for a minute or two, and when you think about the sheer deprivation so many millions in the world endure, do we need wonder why, even now that the Cold War is over, we continue to spend far more on the military than all our enemies combined? Is it any wonder that our Air Force alone has more planes than almost every other nation on earth… and this does not even count the planes our Army and Navy have!
Step back and see all this as the God of Scripture must surely see it. We are armed to the teeth like this, not to defend our national security, but to defend the imperial security of our unimaginably privileged place in the world -- and woe to the politician or preacher who says that maybe too much is too much! So we go on, through Democratic and Republican governments alike, forging unholy alliances and relying on force as a first resort, trying vainly to postpone an inevitable reckoning with the moral compass of God’s equity. As it is within our borders, so it is beyond our borders, and I, for one, say with Thomas Jefferson: 'I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.'
We suffer dangerous delusions as our technological prowess far outstrips our moral progress, and worse yet -- the political and economic powers and principalities which govern us are completely unaware of their delusions! So convinced are we of our national righteousness that we dare to declare ourselves good and our enemies evil, not realizing that in God’s eyes 'there is no distinction' since all nations 'sin and fall short of the glory of God' (Romans 3:23). On this Ash Wednesday night as we enter the spiritual desert of Lent, we must face the honest possibility that we are living in Babylon, drunk on power and dripping in blood, blindly lurching into a future which is gathering its forces against us, descending into hopelessness because we are spiritually unprepared to even consider the radical change of heart which might yet save us from ourselves.
Perhaps now our hunger and thirst for repentance have reached their peak, and as we finally see ourselves as we are seen by God, we come at last to realize our utter helplessness. Now there is nothing left to do but cry out from this blazing desert with all our might, 'Help me, O God! Help us all! I cannot be faithful without You… our church cannot be true to the name of Christ without You… our nation cannot be saved without You.' Now that we can confess our helplessness and complete dependence upon God, our growth as Christians and our journey to salvation can begin.
Jesus reached that point of helplessness in the desert, exhausted from His battle with the devil’s temptations. At that point, our text says angels came and ministered to Him. When all He could do was live or die, angels came to Jesus to give Him the help and sustenance He needed, to shield Him from the desert sun.
We can trust God’s angels to come to us as well. Yes, the purpose of a Lenten journey into the desert is to stare unblinkingly into the very depths of our sin, but we miss the point entirely if we fail to find God at the end of that journey, if we fail to hear His quiet voice speaking from the desert wind, telling us to believe in His mercy, promising to be there for you, for me, for our church and our nation because He knows we cannot live without Him.
Tonight we begin a journey which will take us to the wonder of an empty tomb. But first we must go into the desert, where our easy optimism and God-denying faith in our own devices are tested to the limit. We must go to dark Gethsemane and climb the hill to Calvary. Then and only then will we be ready for the glory of Easter Sunday, when an angel shall come and tell us that our hope which once was dead and buried has been raised to life again. Amen.
Pastoral Prayer
O God of all mercy and might, who calls us to a desert journey where we may encounter ourselves in all our despair and hear Your still, small voice of hope, we pray tonight for a sincere and meaningful Lenten experience. Do not let us pass through this special season as if it were 'ordinary time,' wrapped up in the small things which consume us and oblivious to the large things which can save us. Give us the faith to confront the truth within ourselves and the fortitude to stop living the lies which formerly have assuaged us. Take us into the desert where our Lord and so many others have gone before, subjecting ourselves to hunger and thirst, to trial and temptation, that we may learn our need for You, call upon Your name and be visited by Your angels.
Lord, embolden us to begin that journey tonight at Your table, where we receive food which never leaves us hungry and drink which never leaves us thirsty. Let this meal sustain us in the spiritual desert we must endure, O God, and help us pass the test which lies ahead, that in forty days we shall be ready to receive good news at an empty tomb, ready to live new lives as children of our Risen Lord, as members of His church and as citizens of this nation. In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.
