"Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and of Hades. Now write what you have seen, what is, and what is to take place after this." Rev. 1:17-19.

Sunday, February 14, 2016

A Lenten Valentine: An Intergenerational Sermon for Lent 1



 Lent 1, Year C


Almighty God, whose blessed Son was led by the Spirit to be tempted by Satan: Come quickly to help us who are assaulted by many temptations; and, as you know the weaknesses of each of us, let each one find you mighty to save; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.



It was the summer before 9th grade, and I was about to start high school in a new school. I was taking a summer algebra class in order to catch up in math with my fellow classmates. There were only three of us new, entering students in the class, and we were each afraid to talk to one another. Even my timid footsteps in the deserted school corridors gave off loud and lonely echoes. We had class in the chemistry lab, for some reason, and the whole room smelled like old, rancid chemicals. For what seemed like forty days and forty nights, I labored alone in the stinky wilderness of algebra. It was very, very hard.
          On the day of our first test, I panicked. I had always been a good student. In fact, school work was all that I felt good at. But as I looked at the problems on this test, I was stumped. The numbers started to swim in front of my eyes, and my hand shook holding the pencil. I couldn’t think straight. I kept erasing and re-writing my answers. Soon, I watched each one of the other students walk up to the front of the room, put his finished test paper on the lab counter, and leave for the day. The teacher had gone down the hall for a cup of coffee, counting on the school’s strict honor code to keep us honest. When the last student left, I sighed, gathered my paper and my pencil and walked to the front of the room. As I placed my work next to the other exams, I couldn’t help but notice that my answers for many of the questions differed from the answers on the other students’ papers. I froze. If they were right, and I was wrong, then I was going to fail this test. Maybe I wasn’t smart enough to go to this school, I thought in a panic. My parents would be so disappointed in me. My teachers wouldn’t like me anymore. It wouldn’t be bearable.    
So I peered around the room to make sure that no one was watching, grabbed my pencil, and erased my answers one last time, rewriting them to make them match the numbers on the other students’ papers.
I ended up making a nice B in summer algebra. I didn’t get an F on that math exam or get caught for cheating. But I failed--I failed my first (but certainly not my last) wilderness test.
“Since you are a smart girl,” the Devil crooned to me, “you must do everything perfectly. They only love you for your brains, you know. ‘To the one to whom much is given, much is expected,’” the Devil added, paraphrasing words that I’d heard even in church.
And I believed him. Unlike Jesus, I hadn’t bothered to learn any words from the Bible with which to counter his arguments.
We all have something, or many somethings, that cut us off from our bond of love with God. We all have something to which we give our hearts, believing that it alone will make us worthy.
Those of you with bags and clipboards this morning will find a piece of paper with a big heart drawn on it. You might think that it’s a Valentine’s Day heart. But we’re not going to color it red or pink and write “Be mine!”
Instead, inside this heart, I invite you to draw a picture of the love that takes up a big share of the room in your heart. The thing that you love is probably not a bad thing in itself, except for when it squishes out the place where God wants to be. It might be the desperate love of being smart or good, like what caused me to cheat on my math test. It might be the frantic love of excelling at a sport or a musical instrument—a love that would tempt you to play too rough with your teammates or to practice so hard that you ignore your health or your time with God. It might be the love of TV or texting—a love that makes you snarl when it’s time to stop for dinner. For us adults, it might be the love of busyness and that important feeling that it gives you. It might be the powerful feeling of being in charge and in control. Or it might be the love of security and comfort. Or the love of money and success.
In this season of political debate, I was struck by the similarity of the Devil’s challenges for Jesus and our own language about the ways of the world.
“Do you care about your hungry people, Jesus? Of course you do! Simply turn on your power, then, and feed them,” offers the Devil. How often do we hear from political leaders that there are easy, painless fixes for the world’s problems?
“Do you want to bring the nations to God, Jesus? Of course you do! Then rule them with an iron hand, as Rome does, and they will all fall to their knees,” offers the Devil. How often do we hear that taking power over others is the only way to survive?
“Do you want to impress us, Jesus? Do you want us all to turn to you? Of course you do. So just leap unhurt from the highest wall in Jerusalem and sway us with your divinity,” offers the Devil. How often to do we hear on TV that outward success is the true proof of our worth and of God’s blessing?
The goals that the Devil has for Jesus sound like laudable ones, until we realize that God is missing from the heart of them. Unlike the rest of us, Jesus’ heart beats in tune with the loving heart of God. He understands that true strength lies in vulnerability, that true love only enters a heart that has been broken open, that true power often looks like weakness, and that true life is stronger than death.
Jesus wasn’t only tested during those early forty days in the wilderness. Luke tells us that the Tester would return at an opportune time. And he does:
“You’re not really going to leave us?!” cry the disciples when they hear Jesus tell them what awaits him in Jerusalem.
“Take this cup from me!” begs Jesus in Gethsemane.  
“You don’t really want me to stand up to this bully, do you Jesus,” we pray.
          “You don’t really want me to give THIS much of my hard-earned income to the poor, do you, Jesus?” we plead.
“You can’t mean for me to fail my math test?” cries young Anne.
“Yes, yes I do,” answers Jesus, his own heart breaking for us.
Lent is a time to examine our hearts, to look at what fills them and at what makes them shrink with fear. But it is also a time to mark them with a cross, to dedicate them to the God who saves us through love, love that is fearlessly poured out into a sinful world, love that is poured out on us, even when we fail our tests again and again.
So children, take your pencils and draw a big cross in the middle of your heart pictures.[1] Make it big and bold. Draw it right on top of those loves that get in your way. You can put this heart in the offering plate today, if you’d like, and give it to God in our Eucharist. This Lent, remember, with St. Augustine, that “we were made for You, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” Help us to dedicate our hearts not to perfection, nor to fear, nor to shame—but to the God who teaches us how to love, and truly how to live.


[1] Adapted from Carolyn Brown, http://worshipingwithchildren.blogspot.com/2013/01/year-c-first-sunday-in-lent-february-17_27.html