Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor; and he said to him, "All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me." Jesus said to him, "Away with you, Satan! for it is written, 'Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.'" Matthew 4:8-10

Lent is the desert season – and that doesn’t mean that it’s time for us to pack up and go to Arizona, much as we might welcome the warmth and the dryness. Instead, it is the time in the Church year when we are called to step aside, to take a time out from all the business-as-usual of our lives, and examine our attitudes, our actions, our behavior, and especially our motivations – to see how well we are walking the walk of being Christians.

It is a desert time because the desert is a place where the landscape is clear, where there is not an abundance of lush vegetation to distract the eye, a place where one has to consider carefully the way to use such important resources as water, food, rest and shade. And during the forty days of Lent we attend in a particular way to our spiritual resources of prayer, fasting or abstinence, and alms-giving/charitable giving. During Lent we also pare back and restrain the sense of celebration in our worship – focusing on themes of sin and forgiveness, sacrifice, Jesus’ work on the Cross, and the quality of God’s mercy.

Throughout the Bible the desert stands as a metaphor for coming face to face with oneself, for stripping our psyches down to the point where our souls are bared; it is a place of struggle; it is also the place to meet God. Adam and Eve cast out of the Garden into the wilderness, Abraham and the generations of his family in their journeys, Moses meeting God in the burning bush, the Israelites escaping from Egypt and moving toward the Promised Land, John the Baptist preaching repentance for the coming of the God’s Kingdom, and now Jesus fasting and praying following his baptism: all of these took place in the desert, away from the centers of worldly power and control, away from the daily expectations of life.

Jesus’ time in the desert was an opportunity to meditate and pray and get clear about what he had heard at his baptism: the voice of God saying, “You are my Son, the beloved.  With you I am well pleased.” It was a time of letting his identity sink in, become clear and real, so that he could then go out and begin his public ministry.

But after forty days of prayer and fasting, the devil came to Jesus to tempt him, to try his soul, to attempt to throw gravel in the gears of God’s plan. The devil tried twice to appeal to Jesus’ identity as the Son of God, the Messiah, the Anointed One: “If you really are the Son of God, then it will be so easy for you to turn these stones into bread, and you’ll be able to feed hundreds and thousands of hungry people, just like everyone has expected the Messiah to do” AND “If you are really the Son of God, prove it by throwing yourself off this skyscraper, because God’s not going to let anything happen to you!  Let’s see what all this Son of God stuff is all about.  What’s the matter – don’t you trust him?” When raising teasing questions about Jesus’ identity didn’t work, the devil tried to appeal to vanity and a naked desire for power: “Look Jesus, we can make a deal here, you can have all the power and glory and adulation you want – I’ll give you all of it.  And all I want in return is one little thing, for you to worship me.  That’s simple, that’s fair; is it a deal?”

In each instance Jesus responded by quoting the Hebrew Scriptures; he didn’t depend on his own resources, he didn’t try to tough it out all on his own. Those words from the Old Testament stand as sentinels in Jesus’ struggles with the tempter, they ground and connect Jesus’ spiritual wrestling with the long, long history of God’s relationship with his people. Jesus was reliving some of that history in his desert experience; he was connecting what had happened in the past and all the ways that God had been faithful to his people with own struggle over temptation.

But Jesus’ struggle wasn’t merely about whether or not to magically have something to eat at the end of his fast, or to make a dramatic and very public entrance on to the scene of first-century Jerusalem by throwing himself off of the pinnacle of the Temple in the sight of a capacity crowd. His temptation (as he was about to begin his public ministry and mission) was to go it alone, to fall back completely on his own resources, to be self-sufficient instead of God-sufficient – in short, to cut himself off from the true source of his power.

And we are in that same place – all the time, if we are really honest about it. We are always vulnerable to believing that we know better than God does, that we need only a little bit of help from God, that are sins and our shortcomings are something we can deal with on our own, that our lives only need tweaking, and not salvation.

We are always in danger of trying to be self-sufficient instead of God-sufficient.n And yet being in the desert of Lent forces us back onto our most basic and fundamental resources: God’s gift of life and God’s will for that life we have been given – neither of which we did anything to bring about so we can’t claim them as accomplishments.

And so in this season of Lent we are asked to embrace the desert, to face into what really is between God and us, to ask how it really is with our souls. Because the bottom line of Lent is about being dependent upon God – not merely about being good or moral or holy. To depend upon God means that we acknowledge that we are limited, fallible humans beings; that we have inherited some of Adam and Eve’s attitudes and behaviors; that sin and crossing the boundaries and missing the mark are not just things that happened in the past, but are with us all the time – part of what it means to be human.

To depend upon God means that we realize that God has been sustaining and directing the world for millions of centuries – and has done so quite nicely without our help before we ever appeared upon the scene; the world does not revolve around us and our wants and needs and desires.

Being dependent on God also means that we can’t assume that we are so sinful that God washes his hands of us, doesn’t want to have anything to do with us; we are not beyond God’s reach nor beyond redemption. God made us for a purpose – to be in relationship with him and to take our place in creation; for us to say that we are better than that, or lesser than that, is to question God and God’s purposes and judgment and will.

And so we struggle and we are tempted, just as Jesus was tempted, to close ourselves off from God, to act and live as though God didn’t exist. So in this Lenten time we are asked to withdraw into the desert, to meet ourselves face-to-face, to wrestle with the things that distract us, seduce us, take our attention from God. But we do so knowing that not only are we walking in Jesus’ footprints on that dry and scrubby desert ground, but that Jesus is here with us, hearing the words of our particular temptations, reaching out a hand to embrace and steady us, giving us the strength and the stamina to face what we need to face and do what we need to do, and the grace to know that there is redemption up ahead, and food for the journey at hand.

Let us pray.
Holy God, you are as close to us as our breath, yet we remove our eyes from your face and think that you have abandoned us.  Help us in this Lenten journey to know that “the eyes of all wait upon you, O LORD, and you give them their food in due season.  You open wide your hand and satisfy the needs of every living creature” (Psalm 145). Walk with us, Jesus; be our bread, be our salvation, be our life.  Amen.

Victoria Geer McGrath
First Sunday in Lent
March 13, 2011

 Jesus said: No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth. Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Matthew 6:24-25

Have you ever heard a child say: “You’re not the boss of me”? It’s usually said in resentment and defiance when the child doesn’t want to do what he or she is being told to do. And sometimes it really is justified – when one girl has told another that she can’t play on the slide or the swings because the first girl and her friends have decided that they have exclusive rights to the playground equipment and don’t want anyone else around. “You are not the boss of me” then becomes an assertion of the excluded child’s right to share the swings or the slide; she’s standing up for herself.

So who is the boss of you – you, sitting in the pew this morning? Your first thought may be of your employer, or maybe your spouse, or how about your cats! Or, in our individualistic society, you may feel that no one is your boss – in the sense of having control or power over you.

But that was not the case in the first century Roman world. Caesar’s reach stretched from the Irish Sea to the Persian Gulf, and from the Straights of Gibraltar to the Caspian Sea – and throughout that entire empire the residents and citizens were required annually to burn a pinch in incense before the statue of the Emperor and say “Caesar is Lord.” This phrase even was sometimes used as a greeting between people: “Caesar is Lord;” it helped to cement the bonds of the social system, the hierarchy, making it very clear that it was the Emperor who was the highest and final authority – politically and spiritually.

The only group of people who were exempt from this requirement (most of the time) were the Jews; the Romans had realized it was useless to try to get them to participate in Caesar worship, because it violated the first Commandment: “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of bondage. You shall have no other gods but me.” And then as Christians – particularly Gentile Christians – began to claim the same exemption from having to burn incense and proclaim Caesar as Lord, conflict with the Roman authorities began to build. The supremacy of Caesar and his authority could not be challenged or ignored; everyone in the Empire was to be under the lordship of Caesar.

So when Jesus spoke of not serving two masters his listeners would have understood that he was not just talking about the person they worked for, the employer who gave them wages or goods, but that he also was speaking about who was politically and socially and spiritually in charge. And Jesus was clear that the pursuit of wealth, and the accumulation of it, could become master or lord of one’s life all on its own, as much as Caesar could. He wanted his followers, those who were choosing to walk in Jesus’ way and live a Jesus life – to know that they could only have one master – and that was God.

And how much greater a master was God than Caesar – the Empire might promise the peace of the realm, security from war, the benefits of living in an ordered society – but it could not promise salvation, nor peace of heart and soul. Jesus told his disciples not to worry about life, not to worry about what they would eat or drink or wear, because God knew they needed those things and would provide them – whether they worried or not.

Jesus says the same thing to us – we are not to worry, not even about the most basic essentials of life. He is not asking us to ignore very real physical needs and hungers, either in ourselves or in someone else; feeding the hungry is part of our Christian responsibility; Mother Theresa is quoted as saying: If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one. Nor is Jesus proclaiming a disembodied spirituality, saying that material things don’t matter or are somehow evil in themselves. But instead – Jesus is saying that God knows what we need - food, shelter, clothing - but our needs and wants are not the master, we should not make our needs the ultimate force in our life, they are not what rules us: GOD is.

When I was travelling to Honduras and working at El Hogar, the boys’ home in Tegucigalpa, some of the boys there needed to learn not to hoard food, not to take it from the cafeteria back to their beds and hide it away under the blankets. So many of these children had lived on the streets, and had come close to dying for lack of food or safety; it is no wonder that when they first arrived at El Hogar they might have been fearful and nervous, and felt that they needed to stockpile whatever food they could get their hands on.

But it’s a problem, a spiritual aspect of their poverty; the boys were very anxious that there wouldn’t be enough – and they ended up denying themselves their proper meals so they would have something to store away against a fearful future. But in reality they had come to a place where they had all the food they needed, where the love of God was made real and tangible every day through regular meals and clean clothes and schooling and sensible, consistent rules and caring, stable adults. God was taking care of them, and part of what they were learning was faith and trust in the Lord in whose name they had been rescued from the streets and set on a path to health and wholeness.

So what about us? What are the things that make us anxious? What are the areas to which we give control of our lives – for that is what we do when we worry incessantly; we make that person or need or concern or desire the controlling factor – the master - in our lives.

It’s very understandable that we might be nervous about finances – especially after the last several years, or about our children – especially when we see them making choices that may very well harm them in some way, or about the safety and stability of the world. But Jesus asks us to remember that, because we are Christians, we have given charge of our lives to God, and God is more than capable of being in charge and doing a good job of it. One of my colleagues has a tag line at the bottom of her e-mails; it says: “Stop telling God how big the storm is, and start telling the storm how big your God is.”

Jesus asks us to face into the hard places of life with the confidence that God will not leave us or abandon us. But if we are going to serve God, if Jesus is our master, then we need to let go of the worry, to free our hands from the false gods of control, and take God’s hand, instead. Jesus says: …indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”

Let us pray. "O Christ Jesus, when all is darkness and we feel our weakness and helplessness, give us the sense of Your presence, Your love, and Your strength. Help us to have perfect trust in Your protecting love and strengthening power, so that nothing may frighten or worry us, for, living close to You, we shall see Your hand, Your purpose, Your will through all things. Amen. " (St. Ignatius of Loyola, 1491-1556)

Victoria Geer McGrath 
Eighth Sunday after Epiphany
February 27, 2011

 [Jesus said:] So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.  Matthew 5:23-24

If you could build your ideal community, what would it look like, what would it be like?

In the early 1990’s the Disney corporation asked the same question and built a fully planned community in Osceola County, Florida called Celebration – community with schools, hospital, library, town hall, local businesses and parks. The idea behind Celebration was that it was to re-capture the feeling of small town America with buildings designed by top-notch architects; some have said that visiting Celebration is like walking through one of the Disney theme parks.

And, of course, life in Celebration, Florida has never fully lived up to its hype or expectations; how could it? But that is true of all planned communities and all utopian societies. The U.S., certainly, is no stranger to planned communities or cities – Washington, D.C. being a prime example. Our capital has all the beauty of broad avenues and circles, monumental architecture and inspiring memorials, and all the heartache of nearly twenty percent of the city’s residents living below the poverty level.

And utopian communities have had their place in America, as well, the Shakers probably being the best known group. They gathered into closed, co-ed, celibate communities from Maine to Kentucky to live as perfect a Christian life as they could, creating buildings and furniture and music that reflected their belief in the presence of the Spirit in their midst. One of their hymns is in our hymnal – “Simple Gifts”; their worship was energetic and joyful, and involved communal dancing, as well as prayer, preaching and singing.

The Shaker communities have all but died out now. But the failure of such endeavors doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t still ask the question – what is your ideal community?

Some of us will want to answer that question in terms of culture: a place where there are museums and libraries, orchestras, film, dance and theater. Others will want their community to be a place where jobs are readily available, where the housing stock is good and affordable, where the schools work well for all the children in town. Still others will want to pay attention to the look or the feel of the town, guided by their love of history, or the environment, or a desire to be undisturbed by the noise of children and teenagers; there are so many possibilities for what one might consider “ideal.” So on one level each of us here might answer that question differently, I am sure.

But as Christians, we need to be thinking about what kind of community Jesus calls us to create, even when we know that we will fall short of the goal. We start with the vision – the Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus has been talking about all through the Sermon on the Mount which we are in the midst of hearing in these weeks after Epiphany, and which we will continue to hear about all through the Gospel of Matthew. The Kingdom of Heaven is also called the Reign of God, and it is the vision of what life is like when it is lived from God’s perspective. We know that this vision will be fulfilled when Christ returns, when all the world will be aligned with God’s purposes, but in the mean time we do the best we can to create and embody that life here and now.

One thing we do know is that Jesus never asks us to consider what is best for us alone, in isolation from others, but what is good for the whole – the whole community, the whole Church, the whole Body of Christ, the whole Kingdom of Heaven. Christianity is not a religion of the individual, nor is it a religion of the group – but it is a faith that understands the individual in community, and the group embracing the dignity of every human person; this is part of what makes being a Christian challenging.

And in order for us to live this way Jesus calls us to live from the deep well-springs of God-given and God-redeemed life; to look beyond the external demands of the Law to the interior rationale and power and meaning of the Commandments so that we can learn to live them ourselves, so that each one of us can learn to be (as one person coined it) “Jesus theologians.” So in this portion of the Sermon on the Mount Jesus cites several of the Ten Commandments: “You shall not murder” and “You shall not commit adultery”; as well as several other rabbinic teachings about divorce and swearing falsely. In each instance Jesus goes deeper into the purpose of those Hebrew Scriptures: unresolved anger is the root of violence and murder; adultery begins when lust is entertained; the fabric of a marriage relationship is to be guarded and not dissolved for frivolous reasons; our speech is to be trustworthy and true and dependable. All of these citations are examples of what life is like in the Reign of God, in the Kingdom of Heaven and in the Body of Christ.

Our inner state affects our behavior and the way we act with others, and our relationships with those around us are intimately tied to our relationship with God; so if we are to be reconciled with God, we must also be reconciled with others – our family members, our co-workers, others in the Church, others in the wider community, those with whom we disagree, those who really rub us the wrong way.

Jesus says: “So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.”
The original meaning of reconciliation is “to make good again,” and that is what the vision of the Kingdom of Heaven calls us to – to make good our communities, our schools, our societies, our world for the benefit of all who live in them.

The ideal community, from a Jesus-centered perspective, is what we need to be working towards. Jesus calls us to take the vision of the common good, the Kingdom of Heaven, and make it a reality as much as possible in the here-and-now, knowing that our actions and efforts will always fall short in some way, that we will never complete the job; but knowing also that there is a great deal of good that we can do, that there is much suffering that we can alleviate, that we can and should look for ways to make sure that everyone can benefit from the blessings that God offers to us all.

In the reading from Deuteronomy we heard Moses speaking on God’s behalf to the Israelites as they were finally about to cross the Jordan River and enter the Promised Land. A choice for God and a relationship with God and an intention to live according to God’s precepts in the new land was to be a choice for life and blessing for the whole community – a vision of salvation and reconciliation lived out in real time and real life. And so Jesus says to us – choose life, choose blessing, choose wholeness and goodness for yourself and for the world, and choose to work at it, with God’s help, until Christ comes again.

Let us pray. Lord Jesus, you call us to pray and follow and serve and work for the good of the whole world and all people – those for whom you gave your life and rose again. Give us your vision and wisdom and strength to do your work, in your way and in your time – for the building up of your people and for your glory. Amen.

Victoria Geer McGrath 
Sixth Sunday after Epiphany
February 13, 2011