To Become the Love that is All Around! Lent 1A

 

To Become the Love that is All Around!

We come from Love; we return to Love; and Love is all around. God is Love.

 

The Reverend Pierre Wolf would visit our congregation at Saint Peter’s on the Green, Monroe, Connecticut. And each time he was with us he would remind us of the fundamental truth of who we are and whose we are: We come from Love; we return to Love; and Love is all around. Because God is Love. We are created in the image of God, male and female created in the image of God, meaning we are to reflect the true nature of God’s love for each of us, for all of us, for all of our neighbors, and for all creation itself.

 

God’s love is not the love of “I want to hold your hand;” not teenage love; not the love of Halmark movies. It is not the love of Valentine’s Day. Rather, it is a love that the Bible repeatedly describes as the fundamental character of God who is “gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from punishment,” as the reluctant prophet Jonah found out when the people of Ninevah repented and returned to the Lord God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It seems as if Jonah might have been happier if just this once God would zap Ninevah, that great city “in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left and also many much cattle.”

 

Perhaps no episode in all the Bible has been as misunderstood as the story of the man and the woman in the garden who are given permission to eat the fruit from every tree in the orchard but the one in the very middle of the Garden. Seems easy enough. But we know ourselves well enough to know that our curiosity is greater than that of all the cats in all of creation! We know they were already looking at the tree with great covetousness in their hearts and minds when along comes a serpent, something like the Iguanas and Nile Monitors currently plaguing Florida like Egypt and all those frogs, gnats, and flies! “Go ahead,” says the serpent. “Eat from the fruit of that one tree. You won’t die. God doesn’t want you to become like God. Go ahead, eat! Enjoy! Become like God!” This was the First Great Lie – from which many others have echoed down throughout human history right down to our own day. The Lie? That they would become like God. We all know that near the end of the previous chapter in Genesis God had already created them in God’s own image. They forgot they were already like God, which is love. And it was out of God’s love for the two of them, the first of his own children, that God wanted to protect them from the consequences of the full knowledge of good and evil. God was acting like our parents warning us to look both ways before crossing a street when saying to stay away from the tree.

 

And look at the result. Look at the consequences. They immediately try to hide their own true nature from one another. Then, as the story goes on, they try to hide from God, for heavens sake! And finally, the rupture begins: the man says, “She made me do it.” Then she says, “The serpent made me do it!” Thus, was born Flip Wilson: “The Devil Made me do it!” Despite the fact that  we have free will, and no one makes us do anything. We choose to do these things on our own. We allow others to misguide us. To mislead us into making bad decisions.

 

Which brings us to the story of Jesus as “The Breath,” the Spirit of God, leads him into the wilderness immediately after he learns that he is God’s Beloved Son. The story intentionally echoes the wilderness sojourn of the people of God who escaped Pharaoh’s Egypt where they experienced 40 years of testing after receiving Ten Commandments, which some rabbis refer to as the Ten Suggestions – Ten Suggestions on how we can best get along with one another, and with God. It does not take a biblical scholar to notice that Jesus undergoes precisely the same tests, and in the same sequence, as those refugees did in the wilderness: the first regards hunger, the second means to put God to the test, and the third regards false worship, or what the Bible often calls idolatry. One might also notice that the child Jesus follows the journey of Israel into Egypt to escape Herod’s murderous slaughter, and now the adult Jesus retraces his ancestor’s experiences in the wilderness. Matthew’s first audiences would notice this.

 

For Jesus the tester is no serpent. He is a character from earlier in Hebrew Scriptures known as sah-tanh – not to be confused with the medieval Chrisitan personification of evil, Satan, or the Devil. This sahtanh works for God, not against him. For reference re-read the story of Job. From time-to-time God sends sah-tan to text the faithfulness of certain individuals. This time it is God’s Beloved Son to see if he is up to the tasks that lie ahead in healing the many ruptures that have accumulated between God and God’s people. The world is broken and has been turned upside down. Will God’s Beloved Son be up to the task of Tikkun Olam – repair of the world?

 

Hunger We read he is famished. Of course he is. Jesus has fasted for forty days! “If you are the Son of God, turn these stones into bread, says Sah-tanh. Jesus knows his scripture and answers from Deuteronomy, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Jesus is called to a ministry to the whole world, not just to perform carnival tricks and assuage his own hunger. That would be to narrow the scope of what lies ahead.

 

Sah-tanh then says, “OK, so you know scripture. So do I! Let’s go to the tippity-top of the Temple. If you are the Son of God, why don’t you jump off, since it is written that His angels will bear you up and not let you dash even your foot upon a stone!” The Son of God replies, “It is also written you shall not test the Lord your God.” To try out the promises of God is not a sign of faith but of fundamental doubt. It is to make ourselves God as if we know not only what God will do, but how, when and where God will act. Putting God to the test dramatically reverses our relationship with God, putting us in charge and God serving us! Nope.  Jesus again answers from Deuteronomy. Jesus is a shrewdie and wins round two.

 

Round three: If you just worship me, says Sah-tanh, you can have all the kingdoms of the world all to your very own self. “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.” Once again, from Deuteronomy. Jesus will become Lord of all the kingdoms of the world, not by worshipping Sah-tanh, but by being nailed to a cross. By speaking truth to power. By healing the woundedness of all the world. By welcoming all people, no matter what. By extending God’s bountiful love to everyone, everywhere, all the time. Because we come from Love; we return to Love; and Love is all around. Join me, says Jesus, and become the Love that is all around. Jesus passes all three tests. Immediately, Sah-tan leaves, his job done, and angels come to wait upon Jesus!

 

To engage Lent and to be engaged by it is to render oneself vulnerable to the reality of who we are as human beings. It is also to open ourselves to the nature of God as Redeemer, the One who will not abide the space that sin has created, and who insists on spanning that abyss with Love.

The moral of the story: for us to pass the test as Jesus does, and to understand what it means to become the Love that is all around, as he did, we might do well to use these days of Lent to carefully read Deuteronomy! Deuteronomy! Deuteronomy!