If You Are (Ash Wednesday 2017)

Matthew 4:1-11

March 1, 2014 (Ash Wednesday) • Mount Pleasant UMC

Identity is a huge issue today. Identity theft has become a growing concern and problem, with 15.4 million victims last year in the United States alone. That’s up from the year before, and the year before that. There are lots of companies these days who want to give us advice about how to “protect” our identity, how to make sure that no one steals our good name and, more importantly for some of us, our financial information. In addition to the threat of theft, you have to be able to prove your identity to do much of anything today, and sometimes it’s rather troublesome. When Christopher was getting his driver’s license several years ago, it was fascinating and frustrating how much Cathy and I had to do to prove we were who we said we were…just so that he could get his license! I went, armed with what I thought was everything I needed, only to wait in line and find out we were missing a paper or two. After a second trip to the BMV yielded similar results, I went back home, took every piece of identifying paper I could find out of our safe, and hauled it all back to the bureau. “Now,” I asked as kindly as I could, “what is it you need?” Four years later, when Rachel got her license, I was prepared. I took everything on the first trip, but it still took a couple of trips to prove I am who I say I am.

Identity is important. Identity is what sets us apart from every other person on the planet, as no two identities are exactly alike. We have our preferences, our likes and dislikes, our quirks and our oddities. Our identity has undoubtedly been shaped by many different events and persons in our lives, but on a deeper level than that, our identity is shaped by the roles we have chosen throughout our lives. I am, for instance, a husband to Cathy, a father to Christopher and Rachel, and a pastor to this church. The choices I have made in life have led me to those identities. So when someone asks me who I am, those are the things that come to mind first.

But even more than the identities I’ve already mentioned, I am also a child of God, a follower of Jesus Christ. In the New Testament, Paul often describes people who follow Jesus as “servants of Christ,” and in other places, we are called “sons and daughters of God.” But to know what that really means for our lives, we have to ask another question: who is this Jesus we say we follow? If we’re going to follow him, we ought to have an idea of who he is, what he’s like, and in what way he wants us to follow him. And that, my friends, is the biggest question of history: who is this man who, over 2,000 years later, continues to fascinate and attract all sorts of people? Who is this Jesus who continues to impact society in meaningful and unexpected ways, 2,000 years after being born in a nondescript backwater town, 2,000 years after being executed as a criminal in one of the outlying provinces of the Roman Empire? Who is this man? What is his identity? As former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice put it, “There has never been a more important question in the history of humankind” (qtd. in Ortberg, Who Is This Man?, pg. 8).

It is that question we’re going to look at during these next few weeks as we go through the Lenten season. We’re going to consider, in worship and in small groups, the ways Jesus has shaped history, literature, culture and society. He has had, without a doubt, an inescapable impact on our world. But who is this man? And why does it matter? Those are the questions we’ll be looking at in the next few weeks, but tonight, we begin the season of Lent, in the desert with Jesus, as he faces the temptation to give up his identity, to deny who he really is.

Jesus is somewhere around thirty years old when he shows up in the Judean wilderness, far away from his home in the lush area around the Sea of Galilee. He comes here to be baptized. His relative, John (older than him by about three months), has been preaching and teaching in this desert, calling people to repent of their sins and to be baptized as a sign of their new life, of their new commitment to God. Then, Jesus shows up, and John is surprised. He knows who Jesus is, and he knows Jesus has no sin to repent of. He protests for a moment, tried to switch roles with Jesus; “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” But Jesus reassures him that he’s doing this “to fulfill all righteousness,” to set an example. That’s why he submits to baptism, to being put under the waters of the Jordan River as a sign of cleansing, of being washed clean. We still do baptism for the same reason. Baptism is a beginning. It’s starting a walk with Jesus. Baptism is not magical; it does not literally wash away sin and it does not take away our ability to sin. Baptism, rather, is a sign or an offer of grace, of God’s forgiving grace. It’s a reminder that God welcomes us, even before we are willing or able to live the life he wants for us. Baptism is a sign of who we are, our identity. Baptism marks us. No matter where we go or who we become, baptism reminds us that we belong to Christ. He has offered us a place in his family, if we will accept it. When Jesus is baptized, in fact, his identity is confirmed in a powerful way. A dove lands on him and a voice speaks: “This is my son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased” (4:13-17). In baptism, we are called to be God’s sons and daughters.

But baptism itself doesn’t change us. It starts us on the journey, just as Jesus’ baptism started him on the journey toward the cross. Instead, what actually shapes us into sons and daughters is our time in the wilderness. Jesus goes from the waters of the Jordan River out into the wilderness that surrounds it, and there he spends forty days and nights alone: praying, meditating on Scripture, walking, and not eating. Those of us who are headed to the Holy Land in just a few months will discover how barred that terrain is. All you can see for miles is rock and sand and sun. It’s desolate, and it can get quite hot. When I was there in 2012, we arrived in the desert at 8:00 a.m. and the temperature was already over 80 degrees and going up. It may be a “dry heat,” but it’s still hot! In fact, it’s so hot around the Dead Sea, the lowest place on earth, that sometimes you might even feel like you were near the gates of hell.

And so, in this hot place, near the end of his forty days, when Jesus is at his weakest, the devil comes to tempt him. Now, it has become fashionable to sneer at a belief in the devil. While one poll says that more than half (57%) of Americans believe in the devil, another poll focused exclusively on Christians found that 60% of Christians did not believe in the devil. Even more curious is that a majority even of those who did not believe in a devil still believed that demons could influence people. Some only find a “symbol of evil” here, and others become so focused on the devil himself that he becomes a distraction. But you know, the only one who could have told this story to the disciples, who then later wrote it down, is Jesus. He’s the only one who was there. At some point, he obviously shared this story either in Matthew’s hearing or with someone else who then passed it on to the others (Carson, “Matthew,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 8, pg. 111). Jesus doesn’t tell them a force of evil came at him. Jesus says Satan, the accuser, the slanderer (cf. Carson 112), came to tempt him, and laid before him at least three temptations: the temptation to be relevant, the temptation to be spectacular, and the temptation to be powerful. All of these temptations are tied up in who Jesus is, and all of them are set before him in such a way that Jesus will forever be defined by what happens in the wilderness because God calls his sons and daughters to the wilderness, and there he shapes us into who we are meant to be.

The first temptation: to be relevant, to provide what we think we need rather than what is actually needed. The devil comes to Jesus, and I seriously doubt he had horns and a pitchfork. Those images come from popular literature rather than from the Bible. I imagine Satan came in a subtle voice, a whisper, similar to what you and I also hear sometimes. Matthew says Satan came at the point when Jesus was “hungry.” His timing is not accidental. I mean, can you imagine what an understatement that is? I know if I go without a meal or eat late, I can get a little cranky. “Hangry,” they call it no. Hungry and angry. Jesus hasn’t eaten for forty days. He’s beyond hungry. And at that moment of great need, the tempter comes: “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread" (4:3). You know how, when you're hungry, sometimes just the mention of food can make your mouth begin to water? No food for forty days…and now the mention of bread. Warm, freshly-baked bread, just out of the oven. If you are, Satan says. If you are… Whether or not Jesus is the Son of God is not really in question here. Satan knows he is. Jesus knows he is. What’s in question is what that means. If you are the Son of God, Satan says, don’t you have the power and the right to satisfy your own needs (cf. Carson 112)? If you are the Son of God, shouldn't you be relevant, and give yourself and the people what they think they need and want? Make bread, Jesus. Be relevant. Be now.

The temptation to be relevant is real in every generation. Is there anything worse today than being considered or labeled “irrelevant”? When we can throw someone or something into that category, we can ignore them or get rid of them, and the church has always wrestled with that reality. If the attendance is slipping and the contributions are going down, the temptation is to change the message in order to “fit the times.” Consultants tell us to give the people what they want, not what they need. And so we have churches and movements today that won’t talk about the cross, and stay away from Lent. Let’s not talk about suffering. Let’s not allow hurting people to intersect with our lives. I heard this last week about a large church in the southern part of our country whose admitted policy was to refer out anyone who had serous life problems. They wouldn’t host a special needs prom or a Celebrate Recovery because they didn’t want to deal with suffering and pain. The temptation is to try to appear perfect. Don’t upset people, don’t offend people, and only focus on what people want to hear, only focus on the positive. But that’s not new to our time and place. In the first century, Paul wrote to his young friend Timothy with this direction: “Preach the word…For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths” (2 Timothy 4:2-4). We may package the message differently; it might sound like an electric guitar or a video, but the packaging isn’t the message. The old, old story is the same, even when the temptation is to turn the stones to bread, to be overly relevant, to make what you think you want, rather than what you actually need. Jesus quotes Scripture to Satan: “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God” (4:4). The cure to relevancy is to return to the Scriptures, to feast on the Word of God. How else can we come to know this Jesus if we don’t encounter him in the Scriptures? How will you fight against the temptation to be relevant during this Lenten season?

The second temptation: to be spectacular, to be noticed. The devil, perhaps in a vision (cf. Carson 111), whisks Jesus away to stand on the highest point of the Temple complex. He’s above everything in the holy city of Jerusalem. “If you are the Son of God,” Satan says, “throw yourself down.” Then he also quotes Scripture (the psalms, to be exact) to “remind” Jesus that God the Father promised protection. The angels will come, Satan says, and catch you. Just throw yourself down, Jesus. Be spectacular. Do something everyone will notice. Do something that will make everyone notice you…if you are the Son of God, that is. Use your power to show off.

We face this temptation when we insist on being the best, being noticed, even when that means putting on a show to be seen. And I’m talking not only about our own personal lives, but also our life as a church. I’m one who insists that what we do for God ought to be done always with excellence. I believe God deserves nothing less. But it’s a thin line we walk between excellence and “showiness,” between worship and performance. The question we have to always have in mind, no matter what we might be doing as individuals or as a church, is this: are we really doing this for God, so that God will be seen, or are we doing it to show off, so that we can be noticed? And I’m not just talking about worship (though that’s what we usually think of); this refers to everything we do, every ministry we carry out, every event we hold.

Jesus called his followers to be people who serve. On the last night before his crucifixion, he gathered his friends together for a meal. Tradition and custom said a servant would wash their feet as they came in for the meal, but no one wanted to do that. No one took the role of the servant because everyone wanted to be noticed. Even that night, they're busy arguing over which one of them is the greatest and which one Jesus loved more. And so Jesus gets up from the table, takes a basin and a towel, and washes their feet, one by one. He takes the role of a servant, and then has the nerve to tell them that's the way they are to live in the world: as servants (cf. John 13:1-17; Luke 22:24-30). Servants don't get noticed. Servants don’t get accolades. Servants, generally, don’t become famous. Mother Teresa, a servant of Jesus, only became famous because the world never could quite grasp why she did what she did. Why give your life to serving dying people? She tried to explain it this way: “We cannot do great things in this world, we can only do little things with great love” (qtd. in Labberton, The Dangerous Act of Worship, [iBooks version], pg. 406). That’s the heart of a servant. That’s the heart of Jesus, facing down the temptation to be spectacular.

Why, then, does Jesus respond to Satan with these words: “Do not put the Lord your God to the test” (4:7)? Normally, we hear that as Jesus saying that him jumping off the temple would be a “test” of sorts, which God would either pass or fail depending on whether or not Jesus was caught before he hit the ground. But I believe there’s something else going on here, because the Bible is clear that humility is something God desires to cultivate in his people. The temptation to be spectacular is the temptation to be something other than what God wants us to be. James, writing a bit later, would quote the book of Proverbs when he reminded God’s people, “God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble” (James 4:6; Proverbs 3:34). Don’t put God to the test, don’t try to see if he really favors or will bless the spectacular, the one who draws attention to him or herself. Instead, live as humble servants. How will you fight against the temptation to be noticed, to be spectacular this Lenten season?

The third temptation: to be powerful. This time, Satan takes Jesus to what Matthew describes as a “very high mountain" (4:8), which again points to this being some sort of vision, because there is no mountain in the world we know of from which you can see, as Matthew describes it, “all the kingdoms of the world" (4:8). He shows Jesus all the splendor of those kingdoms, all the beauty, all they can become, and all the power. This time, he doesn’t even use the words “if you are.” Instead, he goes right to the point: “All this I will give you if you will bow down and worship me” (4:9). Isn’t it odd that the devil would offer “the world” to the Lord and creator of it all? Doesn’t Jesus already own it? I mean, Paul told the Colossians, “In him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him” (Colossians 1:16). Yes, God is the creator, but for now, Satan rules this world. Jesus repeatedly calls Satan the “prince of this world” (cf. John 14:30). For now, Satan owns it, and Jesus has come to buy it back, to redeem it. What Satan is offering is a crown without a cross, a shortcut: power and authority without the removal of sin. It’s what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace:” “Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession...Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.” All Jesus has to do is bow down and worship the devil, recognize his authority. That’s all. Just a little bend of the knee. Is it any wonder that, later, when Peter suggests that Jesus can be the savior without the cross, Jesus responds so sharply? He even calls Peter “satan” (cf. Matthew 16:21-23; Carson 114) and tells Peter he has in mind only human concerns.

Well, we think, this temptation doesn’t bother us. We don’t want to bow down to Satan. That’s good, but we should also ask what we are willing to bow down to in order to feel good or be powerful. What are the things we are tempted to put in the place of God? What are the things we do put in the place of God? Do we bow at the altar of money, working ourselves to the point of exhaustion just so that we’ll have more, because money is power? Do we bow at the altar of the next promotion, the next rung on the ladder, because position is power? Do we bow at the altar of appearance, or the altar of activity and busy-ness? What is it we let get in the way of worshipping God? All these things, the voice whispers, I will give you if you just bow the knee, just a slight bend, and it’s all yours. Do you hear the voice? How will you fight against the temptation of power this Lenten season?

In the wilderness, Jesus’ identity is formed, shaped, confirmed. The words spoken at his baptism become a reality in the wilderness. He is God’s son, and God still makes sons and daughters out of those who will persevere through the wilderness. Lent is a time of wilderness, a time for reflection, a time for spiritual growth and re-determining who we are as sons and daughters of God. It’s also often a time when temptation comes. Very often, precisely at those times when we best understand who we are in Christ the evil one tries to distort or destroy that identity (cf. Card, Matthew: The Gospel of Identity, pg. 45). The temptations may not be as obvious as they appear to be in this text, but they do come. Distractions, disappointments, shattered dreams, broken plans, threatening circumstances.

For John Wesley, it was a literal storm that broke loose on the ocean as he was traveling back to England after a disappointing time of ministry in America. Wesley was already struggling with his faith, and in the midst of that storm, he felt fear rising. He wrote in his journal, “I went to America to convert the Indians; but O, who shall convert me? Who, what is he that will deliver me from this evil heart of unbelief?” That’s John Wesley, the father of the Methodist movement, being tempted toward unbelief. The evil one will question and distort our identity in desperate times, coming in at those moments and places where we are most vulnerable, and for Wesley, it was only months later when he attended a Bible study, “quite unwillingly,” and he felt his heart “strangely warmed.” The fire of the spirit began to burn again in his heart, and he knew who he was: a child of the most high God (Jackson, ed. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. I, pgs. 73-74, 103).

Tonight, we stand at the edge of this wilderness called Lent, and we come to smear ashes on our forehead. Why do we do that? Does it make any difference? Well, in one way, it proclaims to the world that there is something different about you or me. But these ashes also represent our mortality. In dust we began, to dust we shall return. They remind us of our faith, that everything which truly brings life must first bring death. They remind us that we are in a season where we are headed toward the cross, toward Jesus’ death, but it is not a season without hope for resurrection only comes after the crucifixion. In our own lives, new life only comes after the death of the old one. Ashes are a sign, a symbol of our desire and determination to follow this Jesus, this one who turns from temptation toward the life God the Father has called him to live, even though it means turning away from everything the world thinks he and we ought to embrace. We begin to make that turn tonight as we are marked by the sign of the cross, and even though the ashes will wash off, the calling to be marked by the cross will not. For only the cross can win against the temptations to be relevant, to be spectacular, to be powerful. And as children of God and followers of Jesus, the cross, not those temptations, is our calling, for only in the life of the cross will we ultimately find resurrection.