Guide Our Feet: Jesus as the One Who
Brings Us Home
Luke 4.1-13
A sermon preached by Dave Shull
The first
sermon in the Lenten series, ‘Guide Our Feet: Faces of the Jesus Who Calls Us
to Follow’
University Congregational United
I was talking to someone recently
about God’s call. She is not thrilled
with how hard God’s call feels right now.
She said, “What the world calls me to is so much easier than what the
church calls me to.” Then, laughingly,
she asked, “So what in the world am I doing here?!”
It’s a great question. Why in the world do we commit ourselves to a
relationship with this God whose call makes our lives so much harder than they
would be if we just lived by the values of the world?
I’m sure what in the world am I doing
here? is a question Jesus asked himself during his 40 days of temptation in
the Judean desert.
He’s just been baptized, just heard God call him my beloved son. And now this God calls him into the
desert so he can really listen to that call and decide if he is up for all it
involves. As he endured this period of
agonizing soul-searching, Jesus likely told God, “You know, I can think of a
lot of ways you can show me how much you love me that are more effective than
this.” But the way the Gospel writers
connect Jesus’ baptism to his temptation begins to answer the question my
friend asked.
What in the world am I doing here?
We are here to follow God’s call. And we cannot follow God’s call alone.
In this morning’s gospel reading, the devil tries
every trick in the book to persuade Jesus to ignore God’s call and take the
easy path instead. Talking about the
devil would have been common in Jesus’ Day.
At that time people believed they were living on a battleground. Two supernatural forces, God and Satan, were
fighting for their loyalty (Meier: 414-15).
Hearing this story, early Christians would have imagined this embodied
devil having these conversations with Jesus.
Early Christians would imagine the devil transporting Jesus up a hill to
view all the earthly kingdoms, and taking him to stand atop the
Each temptation Jesus experiences tells us how hard
it is to remain faithful to God’s call.
Each one reminds us why we are here.
First: turn these stones into bread. A very
seductive invitation to someone in the midst of a 40-day fast. Today, the temptation might be, ease
instead of sacrifice.* It’s the attitude that says we can live as wastefully
as we want to live and future generations can just take care of themselves. We shouldn’t have to limit our enjoyment of
life. It’s the attitude that the wealth
we have is ours and the government’s job is to let us make and keep as much as
we can. Ease instead of
sacrifice tempts us to believe we can be
faithful Christians without having to take seriously Jesus’ hard
teachings. Like where our treasure is is where our heart will be.
Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Forgive others in the same way we hope God
forgives us.
The second temptation: Unimaginable power will be yours if you just
forget God’s call and make me your god.
For us today, that temptation says aspire to power instead of poverty
of spirit.* By poverty of spirit
I mean what Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount means when he says, “Blessed are
the poor in spirit.” If I adopt a
poverty of spirit, all I bring to my encounter with you is me. Not my resume. Not my influence. Not my wealth or status. I bring me.
And if you bring a similar poverty of spirit, you bring you. And we meet authentically. Not as unequals
with one of us having power of the other.
We meet as God made us, acknowledging our need for one another, our
hopes for one another, our common humanity.
Jesus’ call for us to adopt lives based on
poverty of spirit instead of power has been running through my mind as I’ve
listened to Christians quote scripture to support a constitutional amendment
banning gay marriage. When Christians
claim to be speaking on behalf of God, we should do so only with a poverty of
spirit. We do so knowing
When Christians use the Bible in an
effort to restrict the civil rights of a minority group, then I believe
we have succumbed to this temptation. We
are seeking to exert power over a group of people whom we do not understand and
whom we refuse to befriend, instead of adopting a poverty of spirit. Were we to live out of a poverty of spirit,
we would never assume we know what is best for others. But we would listen to them, learn from them,
and open ourselves to the gift God offers us through them. This doesn’t mean silencing our voices. If we feel called by God to speak out on this
or any issue, we must do so. And poverty
of spirit doesn’t mean ignoring the realities of the political process and
effective advocacy.
The third temptation: Throw yourself down from this tower, because
if you’re really the Son of God, God will keep you from harm. It’s the temptation to put God to the
test, to bargain with God. It’s the
temptation of comfort over commitment.* We
can’t commit myself to following a God who doesn’t behave like God should
behave. We can’t commit ourselves to
following a God who asks too much of us.
We can’t commit ourselves to following a God whose ways are so
mysterious because we need to know God will behave in ways that make sense and
fit into our understanding of how the world works.
Watching Mel Gibson’s new film, The
Passion of the Christ last Friday, I felt like Gibson surrendered to the
temptation to seek comfort over commitment. Not because I question the sincerity of
Gibson’s faith. And certainly not
because it’s a comfortable movie to watch.
It is brutal in its portrayal of willful human cruelty and
barbarism. And yet the film did not
deepen my faith. It didn’t even deepen
my sense of horror at the suffering and crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
What the film did was make me angry. It seemed comfortable in its assertion that Christ
is the only way to God. Indeed, when one
of the thieves being crucified alongside Jesus scoffed at his claim to be the
Messiah, a crow flew down from heaven, perched on the top of his cross, and
poked out the doubter’s eyes. This is
how God responds to those who do not believe?
The Jewish high priests clearly are the
evil-doers in the film. Sure, the Roman
guards behave like thugs, but it’s the Jewish high priests who have clamored
for Jesus’ crucifixion. Perhaps Gibson
felt no discomfort portraying the Jews as the killers of Jesus. After all, he was just telling the story like
the Gospel of John tells it. But it
seems to me that a committed Christian making a popular movie should feel some
discomfort knowing that John’s portrayal of the Jews has to be understood in
light of the fact that the community of Jews John was writing to had been
expelled from the synagogue for believing Jesus was the Messiah. John’s community felt totally betrayed by
their fellow Jews. So John’s Gospel
portrays those Jews who oppose Jesus as blood-thirsty opponents of God’s
Messiah.
The film includes Jesus telling his disciples,
“Love one another as I have loved you,” and, “Love your enemies and pray for
those who persecute you.” But Gibson
does nothing to help us love the Jewish high priests, the Roman guards, or any
of Jesus’ opponents. They are evil and
call forth no sympathy from us in the audience.
We can comfortably hate them and wish them ill without feeling that this
in any way violates our faith commitment.
As I watched Jesus hanging on the cross, I found myself thinking that
this is no different from any form of execution we carry out in this country,
so often in the name of God. Our forms
of execution are just tidier, and much more private. So we can feel comfortable that we’ve
developed humane ways of killing the people Jesus commands us to love.
And as I watched the Roman guards torture
Jesus, I thought that this was no different from the ways Latin American death
squads trained by our government tortured Guatemalan and El Salvadoran
peasants. As Jesus stumbled under the
weight of his cross, bloody and beaten, I wanted to see images from the
Holocaust, My Lai, Siberian prison camps, and the Sudanese civil war. Comfortable in our theater seats, with our
super-sized popcorn and Coke, we can weep over Jesus’ suffering without feeling
the discomfort of naming the suffering my tax dollars support which is just as
undeserved and cruel as the suffering Jesus endured.
“What the world calls me to is so much
easier than what the church calls me to,” my friend said. “So what in the world am I doing here?!”
We are here to follow God’s call. And we cannot follow God’s call alone. We are here to help each other hear God’s call, and give each other the support, courage, and love to let Jesus Christ guide our feet on the path of following God’s call. And what we discover as we let Jesus Christ guide our feet is that as we walk the path toward our call, we discover the home we’ve been looking for all our life. Walking the path of living out our call is home. And living out our call makes each of us healers of some part of this broken and beautiful world. We are here to help one another let Jesus Christ guide our feet home. Guiding our feet, Jesus Christ helps us choose sacrifice over ease, poverty of spirit over power, and commitment over comfort. Amen.
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References
Cited
* - The images sacrifice over ease, poverty of spirit over power, and commitment over comfort come from Donald Spoto’s marvelous book, The Hidden Jesus: A New Life,
St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
John P. Meier, A
Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Vol. II: Mentor, Message, and
Miracles. Doubleday,
1994.
E.P. Sanders, The
Historical Figure of Jesus, Penguin Press,
1993.