Sermon: Living Gratefully

Deuteronomy 26:1-11, Luke 4:1-13, (Psalm 91)

I wonder what heaven on earth looks like to you? If you were one of the people who had spent 40 years trekking through the wilderness between slavery in Egypt and the Promised Land in Israel, you'd have a pretty good idea. It would be somewhere to settle, with some shade from the unremitting sun of the desert, a water supply rather than the occasional oasis and fertile soil that you could grow crops in so you didn't have to rely on what the wilderness offered here and there. Better still, it would all be ready and waiting for you so that you didn't have to do the back-breaking work of clearing the land before you could plant your crops.

And that is exactly how they described the world God created. Two weeks ago, if you remember that far back, the Old Testament reading was the wonderful creation story in Genesis 2. It dates from the tenth century when the people were settled in the hill country, a rocky terrain that is difficult for farming so what is the people's ideal for agriculture? - land that is already cleared of stones, planted and producing food. So they told their creation story that way - God was so good that he did all the gruelling work for them by planting a garden which grows everything that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, but then God realised it was not good that the man should be alone so had another creative spree and made all sorts of living creatures but the man was still lonely until God created the woman. Then there is delight all round and all they have to do is look after this wonderful creation. It's a vivid story that is full of the sheer goodness and generosity of God. This is heaven on earth for them.

In that context, look at today's Old Testament reading which is also bursting with the goodness of God in giving them the fertile land that they inhabit. It was written down long after the events to which it looks back and shows that the theological emphasis of the story has survived the intervening centuries - essentially God delivers them from slavery, leads them through the wilderness and gives the people a good and productive land, described as ‘flowing with milk and honey' that yields a harvest of all sorts of fruit of the ground. Their response is to be to bring the first fruits to God as a thank offering and to remind themselves of the story of all God had done for them in their time of distress and oppression. Life is to be a celebration with all the bounty that the Lord has given them. Underpinning this is the awareness of what god has done for them in the past that gives them the confidence in God's generous and good purposes that enables them to live gratefully and to withstand the temptation to doubt God when times get hard. Their creed is to be not only who God is but what God has done for their ancestors and for them - they are to recall this out loud and live gratefully.

If we turn to the Gospel reading, we are taken to another wilderness where the temptation that Jesus faces is to doubt God's goodness and to live with a world view of fear that he is on his own in this. Remember he is famished and there is no food to hand. Yes, he was described as full of the Spirit when he entered the wilderness, but he is being relentlessly tempted by the devil who has had a long period of time in which to wear Jesus down. Like the people in the wilderness centuries before him, the need for food and water is very real, will he grumble and turn away from God?

So what temptation is used? First it is to use the power, which the devil knows he has, to turn a stone into bread. What underlies that temptation? It is not so much the satisfaction of his hunger but an attempt to make him doubt that God can sustain him and provide for him, essentially to doubt the goodness of God and that the Holy Spirit is leading and filling him. So Jesus answers that physical food is not the only thing we rely on to live.

Then the devil tries the offer of glory and authority. There is a blatant lie involved in this: all the kingdoms of the world have not been given to him: scripture is quite clear that the kingdoms of the world belong to God and Jesus would later teach his disciples to pray to God, ‘your kingdom come'. But here the deal on offer is all the kingdoms of the world and their glory if he will turn his back on God. Again, the underlying temptation is to doubt all Jesus knew about his Father and to grasp the glory and authority, not trusting God to give it to him. Incidentally, this question of to whom the kingdoms belong is a theme in Luke; at the climax of his gospel Luke records that one of the criminals crucified with Jesus recognises that the kingdom belongs to him and asks ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom'. Then Jesus' last, loud cry, is ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit' - he lived and died knowing, even under extreme duress, that the kingdom and the authority are God's and that he is safe, even in the face of torture and death, to commend his spirit to God.

And finally there's a clever temptation based on scripture. Surely Jesus believes scripture? The devil quotes Psalm 91 but omits the crucial preceding lines that give the context, thus twisting it to mean something different. Psalm 91 says nothing about the temple where the Messiah was expected to appear at the end of time, but the devil makes this sound like a promise to Jesus to prove he is the Messiah by jumping from its pinnacle thus forcing God to act to save his reputation before he crashes to the ground. Psalm 91 is very different, ‘Because you have made the Lord your refuge and the Most High your stronghold, there shall no evil happened to you, neither shall any plague come near your tent (a terrible prospect as we know from refugee camps today) for he shall give his angels charge over you to keep you in all your ways. They shall bear you in their hands lest you dash your foot against a stone.'  It's not licence to perform a daredevil act of exhibitionism but about the daily protection God offers the people as they remain faithful to him in daily life, travelling in the wilderness where they could trip over stones so easily.

What is Jesus' response to this? a very robust rounding on the devil with ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test'. Not ‘the Lord my God' but ‘the Lord your God'. Jesus, even in this extreme human need, knows himself to be God and was being tempted to misuse his power.  Luke sets this temptation story in the context of other stories concerned with Jesus identity as Son of God. It follows from his baptism when the heavens opened and a voice from heaven came saying, ‘You are my Son, the beloved, with you I am well pleased' and then a theological genealogy which traces Jesus' lineage back, not to Abraham as Matthew does, but to Adam who is described as son of God.  No wonder the devil begins the temptations with the words, ‘If you are the Son of God' - he knows all too well who Jesus is, his problem is whether he can put himself in God's place by making Jesus act at his prompting rather than that of God.

This story tells us the truth about being human in difficult circumstances. Most of us, probably some of you now, have had times of facing unremitting temptation to doubt your value as a person and God's care for you. This story at the beginning of Lent is a reminder that Jesus also knows what that is like. He withstood the temptations because he knew he was God's beloved Son with whom God was well pleased. What got him through was turning again and again to the core truths of his belief - that God is good, that the kingdoms of the world are God's, and that he himself is God's beloved Son.  He did not need to grasp power for himself to survive.

In that light, let's go back to Deuteronomy. The people, coming out of terrible slavery and forty years in a parched desert are moving into a settled existence for the first time, and they are to live out of gratitude to God, out of a deep sense of assurance of God's goodness towards them. They are to worship God because they have been invited to share the bounty of God's world and are to live gratefully. If we read on through the Old Testament, we know that sometimes they managed this and other times they didn't, that they did put God to the test but also they enjoyed the relationship of trust and blessing that was God's purpose for them from the moment of creation.

At the beginning of Lent we have the assurance of God's love for us but also are reminded of the daily and subtle temptation to doubt it, so that we resort to living graspingly, grabbing for ourselves what we think we need to survive rather than trusting the goodness of God. The survival instinct is not wrong in and of itself but can lead us to despair. I suggest that a good project for Lent is to work at adjusting our way of life to one of gratitude to God. We can't do that in an instant or by mind over matter, but by remembering and telling the goodness of God to us in the past and by daily, gritty living with the determination to make God our refuge in times of trouble, knowing he can keep us from stumbling in daily life.

Lead us, heavenly Father, lead us

O'er the world's tempestuous sea;

Guard us, guide us, keep us, feed us,

For we have no help but thee;

Yet possessing every blessing

If our God our Father be.