10 Feb 2008

United Lutheran Church (Steve sick) Red Wing 7:30, 8:45, 11:00

1 Lent

Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7 Fall in the garden

Romans 5:12-19 By one man’s obedience many will be made righteous

*Matthew 4:1-11 Temptation of Jesus

Title: No Easy Buttons

Ideas/themes: Devil offers the Easy Button.

Tempting dessert

Many of you will probably go out for Valentine’s Day dinners this week, and when you do, peek at a dessert menu, if you dare.  

Death by Chocolate.  Devil’s food delight.  Cheesecake of the Gods.  Triple layer berry ambrosia.  Dulce de leche brownies a la mode. 

Dessert is designed to tempt you.  You’re already stuffed to the gills with a big dinner, and out comes the server with sexy descriptions to taunt you into ordering something decadent and probably not very good for you but sinfully delicious.  You never hear people saying “that broccoli was to DIE for!”

Temptation lurks for us in many places.  Some of them include restaurant menus or the shelves in my pantry, especially the basket holding the Doritos, but other sources of temptation are more elusive. 

Our Temptations

Sometimes when everyone in the house is asleep and the call of the Doritos grows loud at night and only God, our German Shepherd, and I will know I have eaten them, I wish I just had one of those Easy Buttons like on the commercials for Staples office supply stores.

They claim that having Staples is like having an Easy Button. You just click it and all your troubles go away.  I don’t know about that, but I want an Easy Button for other things in my life.

Tempted by Doritos in the pantry?  Just click the Easy Button.

Tempted to run screaming down the street if the kids fight over who gets the blue cup one more time?  Easy Button will make three blue cups magically appear, granting simultaneous happiness.

Tempted to get out of this bitter cold wind chill?  Easy Button will turn the weather to 80 and sunny.

We want the easy way out, don’t we?  I do.  I wish I could eat Doritos 3 meals a day and still be able to keep up with my children and husband, but it doesn’t work that way.

Today, on the first Sunday in Lent, our lessons focus on the theme of temptation. 

Adam and Eve were tempted in the garden of Eden, paradise itself.  God places them there, says: “Eat anything you like.  Anything!  Oh, but not that one.” 

So of course that tree became the focus of the crafty serpent.  Eve fed Adam, they shared and ate in the great fall, the beginning of temptation for us.  They failed their test, and we have followed in our ancestors’ footsteps with great predictability since then.  That was long before the Easy Button commercial, but the serpent convinced them that tasting the fruit would be the way to become like God.

Then, in today’s gospel lesson from Matthew, Jesus is visited by the crafty one once again with temptation.  Unlike Adam and Eve, He passed the first test and even got two more questions.  So how’d he do it?  Did Jesus have an Easy Button since He’s got an “in” with God?

No.  He had to face temptation like we do. Some of us will explain away the humanity of Jesus in today’s gospel by saying something like: “Well, Jesus was the Son of God.  He had resources I clearly didn’t, so he must not really have been tempted like one of us would have been.”  Sometimes we may not take this very seriously. We may not think Jesus was really tempted, not the way we are tempted, not our Jesus. But we need to understand that the temptations of Jesus were real temptations. Jesus was tempted…Matthew tells us plainly that Jesus was in the wilderness tempted by the devil. He did not say Jesus wondered, imagined, was charmed, or that He considered his options. He tells us He was tempted, and that He went there to be tempted.  Pilgrim, esermons.com, “Man from Galilee”

Jesus faced three temptations that day.   Interpreters of this scene have given much attention to the moral significance of the threefold temptations, suggesting, for example, that Jesus rejects, in turn, self-gratification, arrogance, and corruption of power. (Abingdon Commentary) While this might be true, and worth our contemplation, today I am less concerned with the things Jesus declined than with what he affirms in his refusal.  He resisted temptation, yes, but I think it’s more helpful to us to know that was genuinely tempted, a man with desires like us who probably wanted an Easy Button too.  He moved through this face-to-face encounter with the devil and kept looking toward the cross.

The temptations or “tests” that the devil flung at Jesus after his forty-day-fast in the wilderness weren’t just challenges to DO something he wasn’t supposed to do. They were challenges tempting Jesus to BE someone he was not born to be.  L. Sweet, esermons.com, “Take On Something For Lent”

Great, you might say.  Jesus resisted temptation.  That’s good for him.  So what.  How does it help me?  Doesn’t being the Son of God give one a thousand Easy Buttons?  Who was He born to be, and who was I, for that matter?

If there had been an Easy Button we’d never have had the cross.  We would have gone straight to Easter morning and skipped the hard part.

So can’t we just skip the hard part?

Can’t we just skip the hard part?

Tuesday this week, our youngest daughter Bethany woke up suddenly with a nasty croupy cough that kept her from breathing well, which made us all panic a bit.  Once before while Steve was in Iraq we’d had a similar experience of having to go to the ER for a steroid shot that relaxed her throat and helped her through the worst of the croup, so I knew what might be involved in our visit.  So did she.  When I was buckling her in her carseat she gasped at me, “Mommy, I don wanna shot.”

I wanted an Easy Button to make that whole shot experience go away.  So did she, I guarantee it.  Sometimes we just want to skip the hard part. 

Jesus was tempted to skip the hard part.  I believe he was human enough to genuinely want to skip that ugly cross ordeal.  What person in their right mind wants to die a painful death?  The devil came to him after his 40 days in the desert to offer him popularity, the kingdoms of the world and their splendor.  “Get the crown without the cross!”  Satan offers.  “Here Jesus!  Here’s your Easy Button!”  (I like that it’s red.  A good color for the devil, don’t you think?)

Modernity and the Devil

So many of us still think the devil is a joke in red tights and pitchfork.  What do you mean, the devil’s tempting me?  I’m a modern person in the U.S. of A.  Who is this preacher?  Is she for real?  That notion is so…outdated and Puritanical.  Come on.  We live in a credit card, laptop, cell phone world.  Isn’t blaming something on the devil just an antiquated notion to remove the responsibility from our own shoulders?

It may be old but that doesn’t make it less true.  Temptation is sneaky.  While we most often use temptation language to speak of “sinful” food, as I’ve already alluded, the very beauties and efficiencies of our modern technology can also lure with promises of free money, no-strings-attached sex, and limitless communication.  And while demonizing technology is not my intent here, I think temptations lurk there along with all the opportunity.  I see a lot of people my age thinking they’ve hit the Easy Button with their cell phones, yet they end up isolated from their friends, losing compassion and simple common courtesy while they’re busy staring at tiny screens.

Despite the clever commercial gimmick, there is no Easy Button.  When you think you’ve found one, that should be a red flag: this tempts me away from who I am meant to be as God’s chosen child.

Jesus took the Hard Part

We were not promised Easy Buttons at our baptisms.  Nobody wants to hear that life isn’t fair or that the good guys don’t always finish first. 

Jesus knows we don’t get to skip the hard part.  Sometimes we need a shot to get better, and nothing makes that part sting any less.

He didn’t jump over the cross and leave us behind to deal with our own temptation.  He went through the hard part in order to bring us along with him to the happy ending.  He took the hardest part for us so the daily struggle with temptation will one day have an end.

The devil offers deceptive Easy Buttons all the time, even ones disguised as good things.  “Give up something for Lent!  God doesn’t really love you, but might tolerate you better if you at least tried now and then.” 

Sometimes the temptation is to believe that our daily efforts have won us God’s favor or convinced God to have nothing to do with us.  Only the one who has stood with us against the crafty snake knows how we crave to be loved as we are, faults and all.

You are loved, just as you are.  Try not to fall for those Easy Buttons. 

When you do, know that you’re not alone.