Genesis 3: 21-24; Matthew 4: 1-4

Keeping the Faith 1: Tell the truth about yourself

Carolyn showed me a small white bowl we have had many decades. Turns out it goes back further than that.  Her family got that little bowl (which we use all the time) from church people when she and her family arrived in the US as refugees in 1975.  This was a surprise to me. “Make sure to keep this,” she said:” I have kept all those years” to remind myself where I came from.”  That bowl symbolizes what she was so many years ago.  Friends, you and I all have objects that remind us who we are at our simplest level.  These simple objects tell us that we are not made off the things we have or the things we have achieved that society considers important.  We all came from a simple little bowl.  Lent tells us to jettison all the stuff that keeps us from the simple faith, all the stuff that keeps us from seeing who we really are when we scrape back the layers.  Frederick Buechner wrote many books and in one of his last ones “Telling Secrets” he says that Genesis points to an original self we are born with “with the print of God’s thumb still on it.” It “is the most essential part of who we are and is buried deep in all of us as a source of wisdom and strength and healing which we can draw upon.”  He writes that “This is the self we are born with, and then of course the world does its work….the world sets into making what it would like us to be , and because we have to survive after all, we try to make ourselves into something the world will like better….That is the story of all our lives, needless to say, and in the process of living out that story, the original, shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us end up hardly living out of it at all. Instead we live out all the other selves which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world’s weather.”(p. 44/5).

Friends, we forget who we really are. Sometimes we can no longer access to it. I saw a poster with had the following words by the writer I just mentioned:” There is something deep within us…, that gets buried and distorted and corrupted by what happens to us.”  Lent calls us to that true self that is in touch with God with full honesty.

In our lectionary passages The power of evil tempts Adam and Eve in the Old Testament and they give in. The power of evil tempts Jesus in the New Testament and he does not give in. Symbolically Jesus is supposed to be the New Adam.  Adam finds himself outside of the Garden and outside of God’s good graces.  Jesus is right where He should be: very much in God’s good graces. The power of evil says to Adam: this is what people do, this is what people want: they want more power.  Adam bites, literally.  The power of evil says to Jesus: here, let me show you what You can have. This is what humans want, so why should you not take it?  The passages tell the truth about the darker side of human nature, about the things we humans crave: power, adoration and our name in lights. But the reason we crave those things is because we have trouble getting what we really need: unconditional love and companionship and the freedom from suffering. The passages are about us, not about Jesus. That was the miscalculation of the temptation. It would have worked on pretty much anyone but Jesus.

In this Lenten series we are talking about Keeping that Faith. The backdrop of this is the disappointment we feel with people of faith who so often behave in a less than stellar fashion.  We are included among those people.  We too disappoint people. We make decisions that are not Christian, we make remarks that are not Christian, we show impatience and irritation and are often unkind.  But is the disappointment realistic if we all get if all of us are distorted and corrupted by what we get exposed to: war, discrimination, grief, bullying, oppression, false information, bad parenting etc. etc?

Friends, in today’s message, the first in the series about keeping the faith, we take the first step and realize that no one is pure. It doesn’t matter how religious we may seem, or how piously we talk or how many people praise us, we are all distorted in one way or another by our desire to be successful in the world we know.  All of us are constantly tempted to be less true, less honest and less authentic than we aspire to be.  Friends in our quest to keep our faith in a time when we do not agree with what many Christians profess, let us not only hold them accountable, but let us look in the mirror and see the things that distort us. Let us see where we can improve. Let us then be realistic about humanity.  Others are accountable for their faith, we must be accountable for ours. May God grant us wisdom.