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
