Sorry it has taken a while to post this, as I was in the midst of the vigil awaiting my mother's death two days hence. This sermon draws on these readings: Deuteronomy 26:1-11; Romans 10:5-11,15; Luke 4:1-13
The Lenten season calls us
to ask what is faith? Is it hope? We call the geyser in Yellowstone Park “Old
Faithful” because it erupts almost exactly every 91 minutes. It is called the
most exact geological feature on earth. In this case faith seems to mean
regularity you can trust, not hope. But we also say that we have faith in the
knowledge and ability of our medical doctor. Here we mean confidence maybe tinged
with hope as we look towards the future. To understand Christian faith we need
to understand the perspectives of OT and NT.
In the OT faith is best
captured by Micah 6:8: “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the
LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly
with your God?” Micah says if we act in the prescribed way as if we have faith we will have
faith; i.e., if we follow the Law we have faith.
This faith means if we believe that God will act trustfully
with his promise we will do what God commands in response out of gratitude. Moses says in Deuteronomy the
Law requires the righteous person to acknowledge they benefit from This promise
of God: 3“Today I declare to
the Lord your God that I have come into the land that the Lord swore
to our ancestors to give us.” But
that is not enough. Moses says that the righteous must (1)confirm that
declaration by (2)proclaiming, or confessing through an action: “A
wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as
an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and
populous. 6When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by
imposing hard labor on us, 7we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard
our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. 8The Lord brought us out of
Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of
power, and with signs and wonders; 9and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land
flowing with milk and honey. 10So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O
Lord, have given me.” The Law expects the faithful to acknowledge
God’s vow and proclaim and demonstrate their faith in the trustworthiness of
the Lord’s promise with a gift of thanksgiving.
Unfortunately it is easy to distort
this point about the Law as the Hebrews did. We may think the first fruit earns
us more trust from God, but that is exactly what does not happen. The law should
be obeyed because God’s promise is trustworthy, obedience and the gift are gratitude
for it; but the Hebrews turn the Law from a matter of trust in God into a
matter of earning it through works (obedience).
The Hebrew act of faith should
gratitude by following the Law for God’s trustworthiness symbolized by the gift
of this land, but they seek their own trustworthiness to live under the Law. Following
the Law is not in their hearts as a natural act of gratitude, but to earn something
for themselves. This removes the whole significance of God’s grace, namely, grace
or undeserved blessing depends totally on the trustworthiness of God.
This sense of faith in the
Old Testament and Paul’s sense of Christian faith on one hand are similar and on
another quite different. It is different
because after the coming and resurrection of Jesus the only meaningful
relationship to God is not living the Law but living its fulfillment in the
presence of risen Christ. This reveals the total trustworthiness of God. Christ
has not ended the law but become incarnate in the Law through God’s promise and
demonstration of faithfulness to his creation. The resurrected Jesus is incarnate in the Law and
now illumines the true meaning of God’s promise to Abraham of salvation
embodied in it.
Faith? Paul says we cannot ascend to Heaven to bring Christ down, or
descend to bring him up from the dead, because Christ is here within the heart
of those who have faith. Because we trust God totally in our heart we can
publically confess that belief by mouth in proclaiming we are saved in His resurrection.
This is the meaning of faith for a Christian; we believe and act because we
trust that God has made us righteous. Like the intent of Deuteronomy, the
faithful Christian acknowledges and proclaims the trustworthiness of God.
KEY: In both the OT Law and its fulfillment, trust comes to us from
God. We do not bring it about by ourselves. The resurrection is critically
important to faith not by the act itself, but as THE fulfillment of the
trustworthy promise of God. God raised Christ from the dead which signifies a
promise that we can trust that God also to raise us from the dead. Gratitude
for this is the fundamental reason “good works” are not a path to salvation and
only faith is. This is food for thought in our Lenten contemplation.
In our sin-distorted way we
think that we must have some role to play in making our relationship with God
right when our only recourse is to trust in God’s Word and goodliness. We share this flaw with the Hebrews, thinking
we can go to God by our own actions while in fact God’s trustworthiness
flows from God to humanity. This is how Lent is connected to the
Hebrew experience: take these forty days to ponder the question and its answer,
“ Why do we feel that we can earn the trust of God?”
Paul makes a very big issue
out if this in his letter to the Romans. If we understand the Law as stated in this
Deuteronomy passage calls the person to trust in God for a gift of land that is
an act of pure grace on God’s part, we can understand that we cannot match
God’s trustworthiness with our own trustworthiness. We can only have faith in
God’s promise of God’s trustworthiness fulfilled by Christ. Christ is the
fulfillment of the Law and our sole basis for a relationship with God.
Paul tells us the faithful understand,
8“The word is near you … on
your lips and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim); 9because if you confess with
your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from
the dead, you will be saved. 10For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one
confesses with the mouth and so is saved.” Faith is found in the true confesses and belief (it is
felt in the heart and voiced in words) that Jesus is Lord and his resurrection
is our resurrection.
No matter how far we feel we
are from Christ, no matter how much we desire to find and bring him near us,
whether to ascend to heaven and drag him down or descend into hell and
resurrect him, he is our salvation. He already is as near as our faith allows,
as near as our heart and mouth honestly proclaims: “Jesus is Lord and he is my
salvation. “ This claim says our trustworthiness depends only on our faith… we believe that Jesus is Lord and the source
of our salvation. This gain is the fulfillment of the promise of the Law.
LUKE. You might think it odd that a lectionary passage on the
temptation of Jesus at the beginning of his ministry is used as a Lenten
passage at the end of his ministry, and you may wonder exactly what the passage
has to do with faith anyway.
First consider that this temptation
occurs after the Holy Spirit led Jesus into the desert to contemplate his
calling for forty days. Isaiah said his
calling is to be a suffering servant and redeemer of humanity by God. Also realize the Greek language of this
passage in Luke makes it very clear that both devil and Jesus acknowledge he is
the Son of God. There is no question of his identity. In verse 4:3 the devil states, “ If you are the Son of God turn these stones
into bread.” The way this question
is written in Greek can only mean “Since you are the Son of God, act like God
and turn these stones into bread.”
The devil offers Jesus three
earthly prizes, bread from stone after a 40-day fast, dominion over all earthly
kingdoms if he will bend a knee to the devil, and demonstration of his
immortality by jumping from the pinnacle of the temple. All 3 temptations ask Jesus to embrace
earthly power. Pointedly, to each
temptation Jesus offers a reply from the Law: on stone to bread - “Man does not
live by bread alone” (Deut. 8:3). Reign over the earthly kingdom and bow to the
authority of the devil- “You shall worship the Lord your God and him alone
shall you adore “(Deut. 6:13). Leap from on high and let the angels save you - “You
shall not put the Lord your God to the test”
(Deut. 6:16). All the answers are
from the Law.
Jesus has spent forty days contemplating
the grace he shall bring to humanity by his own humble humanity. Jesus has not come to earth as a man to turn
stones to bread, to accept the authority and glory of the lordship of the earthly
kingdoms of the devil or to leap from a high building but to fulfill the
promise of the Law.
These three temptations seek
to get Jesus to choose to be an earthly immortal ruler, something he has not
been called to be. God called Jesus not to a vocation of triumphant king of
earthly kingdoms but to be a suffering servant and redeemer of humanity who is
already Lord of all.
Lent then ought to be a
period of self-examination of why when we feel Christ’s distance from us we
persist in thinking or trusting the bondage of self to make it better, rather
than the grace of Christ which is in the heart of the faithful.
Perhaps you recall Mother
Teresa’s unsettling statement about her experiences in India. These reflections
were found in her letters that she intended to be destroyed upon her death but
they were not.
She said her experience
called her to question her faith that Christ is near not too long after the
beginning of her work in the 1950’s and 1960’s in the squalid slums of Calcutta,
India among the poor and infirm, She came to question Christ’s presence which seemed
so distant from her daily experience. She harbored doubt he was there at all.
She said she listened in prayer and heard no response. Her letters reveal she
harbored these doubts for the whole time she worked in Calcutta.
Perhaps she was reacting to
the perplexing question of how can there be a gracious God that allows human
agony and evil to prevail? She said living in Calcutta was living in Hell. (Her
Egypt?) She wondered in her letters how could God allow such pain and tragedy in
God’s world? Perhaps that human agony
was tooo overwhelming for her. However, even Jesus cried out, “My God, My God
why have thou forsaken me?”
Her dark night of the soul
lasted 50 years., yet she persisted in her calling. She remained penitent and continued
her work with the sick, the oppressed and infirm. She brought the light of
salvation however dim into the darkness of Hell. She was Christ’s real presence
among these people in Calcutta.
God was as close to Mother
Teresa as her heart, as close as her faith. Even in her darkness she could say
to a confidant, “Jesus
has a very special love for you, [But]
as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not
see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak
... I want you to pray for me — that I let Him have [a] free hand.” In her 50
years of darkness, still she could counsel her friend to pray for her to Jesus and
quote from Isaiah because even in her doubt and experience with our inhumanity
to others in those slums, her faith persisted.
She could not bring Christ closer to her than her heart, she continued
the work that her faith commanded, to proclaim Jesus Lordship and trust in God.
What does the experience of
Mother Teresa tell us about faith? Even in her estrangement she was engaged in
the kind of conversation with God often evoked by the Hebrew in psalms. She had
faith. Perhaps she tried too hard to find Christ to see he had found her in Calcutta. Even
so in her distress her faith still guided her actions. This is the faith of a
believer that we all can think about in this Lenten season. Amen.
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