Embracing Body and Soul 2-17-13

The Reading— Romans 10:8b-13 The word that saves is right here, as near as the tongue in your mouth, as close as the heart in your chest. It’s the word of faith that welcomes God to go to work and set things right for us. This is the core of our preaching. Say the welcoming word to God—“Jesus is my Master”—embracing, body and soul, God’s work of doing in us what was done in raising Jesus from the dead. That’s it. You’re not “doing” anything; you’re simply calling out to God, trusting God to do it for you. That’s salvation. With your whole being you embrace God setting things right, and then you say it, right out loud: “God has set everything right between us!” Scripture reassures us, “No one who trusts God like this—heart and soul—will ever regret it.” It’s exactly the same no matter what a person’s religious background may be: the same God for all of us, acting the same incredibly generous way to everyone who calls out for help. “Everyone who calls, ‘Help, God!’ gets help.” The Middle Reading— from A Call to Christian Embodiment by Rev. Jim Dickerson We need a spiritual practice that is, as Paul says, stronger and more powerful than what the world considers strong and powerful. We need the spirituality that sustained Jesus’ journey to and through the cross. God’s call and our times demand an enlarged, robust form of divine embodiment that clearly and cohesively integrates and expresses the social, ecological, and cosmic as well as the individual nature of our mystically embodied union and communion with God in Christ. Our current practice needs to become a more comprehensive prayer of embodiment with called, gifted and committed people of faith, hope and love in Christ to live and teach it. The Gospel Reading: Luke 4:1-13 Now Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wild. For forty wilderness days and nights he was tested by the Devil. He ate nothing during those days, and when the time was up he was hungry. The Devil, playing on his hunger, gave the first test: “Since you’re God’s Son, command this stone to turn into a loaf of bread.” Jesus answered by quoting Deuteronomy: “It takes more than bread to really live.” For the second test he led him up and spread out all the kingdoms of the earth on display at once. Then the Devil said, “They’re yours in all their splendor to serve your pleasure. I’m in charge of them all and can turn them over to whomever I wish. Worship me and they’re yours, the whole works.” Jesus refused, again backing his refusal with Deuteronomy: “Worship the Lord your God and only the Lord your God. Serve your God with absolute single-heartedness.” For the third test the Devil took him to Jerusalem and put him on top of the Temple. He said, “If you are God’s Son, jump. It’s written, isn’t it, that ‘he has placed you in the care of angels to protect you; they will catch you; you won’t so much as stub your toe on a stone’?” “Yes,” said Jesus, “and it’s also written, ‘Don’t you dare tempt the Lord your God.’” That completed the testing. The Devil retreated temporarily, lying in wait for another opportunity. God, it is easy for us to lapse into times and places in our lives where we no longer seek your will—where frustration and fear take us far away from you. Bring us back again, refresh our spirits, give us courage to live deeply into the right relationships you have designed to bring us love and life and peace. Amen The story of Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness is always the Gospel passage for the first Sunday in Lent. I suppose it is to get us thinking about sin and lust and grandiosity and other temptations to which we fall prey along the way. Since temptation and sin are nothing new to most of us, this story of Jesus facing down the Devil always bears repeating. I looked for new truths and I found them. Rev. Elder Ken Martin, one of our own elders says this: “The word in today's text that is translated "devil" is diabolos. Literally, it means "the separator"...something that separates what should not be separated, something that breaks what should remain intact, something that fragments what should remain unified, something that destroys what should remain whole.” The Separator, now that’s a concept I can get into. If we look at the temptations of Jesus as our temptations too, then this concept of separation touches our bodies, hearts and minds. If right relationship with ourselves, each other and that is all the each other’s, and God, then the temptations of Christ show us precisely where our temptations lie. These temptations came at the end of 40 days of praying and fasting. There is nothing to eat in the desert. There is only sand—long, hot miles of sand where mirages play tricks on you and you come to believe that just ahead there is an oasis with water and growing plants; but, somehow you never seem to get any closer. Jesus had been there a long time. Biblical scholars point out two things about the number 40. Jesus was not the only person to have gone on a special ‘retreat’ of sorts for 40 days: Israel spent 40 long years in the wilderness waiting for God to show them the promised land and Moses spent 40 days with God on the mountain waiting for the words of the Law. The number 40 is usually thought to stand for a period of time that is really, really long. Nevertheless, we spend 40 days in Lent and while I don’t see much sand, I know that some of us are squarely in the center of a spiritual desert looking for meaning, looking for peace, and looking for God. Some of you may not be there now, but have been in the past. For some of you, your desert experience may lie ahead. But, it is almost certain that at some point in our lives, God’s spirit sends us—just as she sent Jesus—into the desert to learn of God and ourselves. What, then, can the temptations of Jesus teach us about our own desert experience? After 40 long, hot days, Jesus would have been famished. In walks ‘the Separator”. In this temptation, I kinda see the incarnation of Evil, as a swarm of bees with a voice. “What cha doing, Jesus? I’ve been watching you and I bet you are really, really hungry. Hey, Jesus, if you really are God’s child, make this stone here turn into a nice, warm, fresh-baked loaf of bread. Want some honey to go with your bread?” Jesus answered this swarming mass of bees, “God’s word says “you do not live by bread alone.” Stumped and stymied, the incarnation of evil has another idea. This time I see evil as a great black vulture—you know like the ones you see on the side of the road, magnified by 100 times. The bird leads Jesus high up on a hill. Out of the mouth of this disgusting bird come these words, “Here, look, all the kingdoms of the world are laid out before you. I have the earthly authority over all these nations and peoples. I can give it to you, if you will simply worship me.” Jesus, looking at the bird and not the nations, says, “Worship only God, serving and loving in God’s name.” Now seriously annoyed, the incarnation of Evil—this time a fire-breathing dragon in my mind—places Jesus on top of the tower on the temple in Jerusalem. “Go ahead, jump Jesus. If you are who you are, then God will send angels to protect you and to catch you so that not even your feet will be injured.” At this point, the fire-breathing dragon is so close to Jesus that he can feel the heat on his skin. Perhaps, jumping is the best option at this point. And you can hear all kinds of voices getting louder, “jump, jump, jump.” Jesus said to Evil, “it is written, don’t test God”. For now, the testing was done, and Evil slips away. The author builds the suspense by adding “until an opportune time”. While we may hope that Evil has been defeated, we know, on our hearts, that some other test, or encounter awaits Jesus; and, awaits us. Let’s look at some of the practical applications of each temptation. Now, I want to say up front, that no one’s wilderness or desert experience is the same. Yours may be completely different and that is valuable for us to remember; but in looking at Jesus’s desert experience, we may find some themes that resonate with our own. First, are you hungry? There are so many meanings attached to the word hungry—we can be hungry for food, hungry for sex, hungry for companionship or friendship, hungry for things, hungry for fame or power, or even, hungry for God. When Evil taunts him—“you must be very hungry, just do that little magic thing you do and turn this stone into bread”, Jesus, while certainly hungry for bread at that point, takes the focus off of his own need and says, “I don’t live just on bread”. The implication is clear—we are created as physical beings who need so much more than bread to keep us alive and well in our relationship with God. The layers of need and fulfillment are so deep that it would take sermon upon sermon to even begin to touch all the ways that God meets our needs. This temptation, more than the other two, however, brings our attention to the relationship between the physical and the spiritual. When we become spiritually less than what God calls us to—when, in our relationship with God, we become separated from God, we feel it in our bodies. When, in our relationship with ourselves, we become separated from our truest selves, we feel it in our bodies. Our bodies become our transmitters of God’s message to our souls. I really don’t like examples of my own life in sermons, but one example screams to be included here. Since I moved back to Florida now seven years ago, strange things have been going on in my body. Yes, I’m aging—don’t go there—but, more than that, somewhere along the way I stopped feeling a connection with my body. I knew that my sedentary lifestyle would get the better of my strong, yet fragile body, and yet, I persisted in some pretty unhealthy patterns. Most of you know that about 5 weeks ago, I, like some of you, was diagnosed with Type II Diabetes. Suddenly, I got it—this body which had gotten me this far in life—never seriously failing me along the way—was telling me loud and clear that my lifestyle was out of line with what God intends for my life and my work. I won’t tell you that I have made a complete shift yet, but I’m working on it—seriously working on it. And, if nothing else works, those twice a day jabs in my fingers remind me that I cannot control my body, I can only control what goes into it and how I treat it along the way. I trust, that with God’s help and your prayers, that you will be able to see a transformation over the next year or so and rejoice with me that God finally got my attention and said, “You are not in right relationship with your body.” Each of these mini-transitions is hard and there are constant temptations—which sometimes I conquer and sometimes I don’t, but it helps to truly understand that the temptation is not the donut, the temptation is to ignore what my body needs if we are to stay in right relationship. And my spirit grows as well. Being present to my body has the additional blessing of enabling me to be present to God and to all of God’s children around me. Where are you in your body-spirit relationships? Just a question to ponder. Second, who do you want to be? Evil offered it all to Jesus—why just look, you can have all of this—all for the insignificant price of worshiping me. This temptation translates into the shortcuts we are sometimes tempted to take, the footprints we might leave on someone’s back as we climb the human ladder of success, using people to get what we want when we want it—you get the point. Jesus’ answer strikes us in the center of our hearts. “My worship belongs to God and God alone!” Can we face that same temptation as individuals and as the people of God. Keeping our eyes on God, and God as pure goodness, alone calls for us to spend time with God, to seek God’s presence and to learn to listen to God’s still small voice. It’s so much easier to listen to the loud voices in our worlds—God calls us to quiet our minds and listen. What do you hear when you listen? Third, how do you prove it? In what do you place your faith? In what might be the hardest temptation for us to understand, Evil toys with Jesus—trying to get him to prove that his trust is valid. This is hard for us because our friends, our families, our culture all say, prove to us that it is God you are following. Who is this God, anyway? When we take the time to know that God is the source of all goodness, all kindness, all love, we—ourselves—come to a place where the only “proof” we need is in our own changed perceptions of the relationships in our lives. The righting of the relationships between ourselves, each other and God brings us more and more knowledge of God. It will be difficult for some to grasp that knowing God means knowing how much there is yet to know, to seek, to learn. While we do not have magical powers to perform some great stunt to “prove” God’s existence, we are still prey for those seeking to discredit the good they see in your life and in the life of the church. Jesus did nothing to send the Evil away, he just stayed the course of his own spiritual journey. Are you able do stay the course of your faith? And so, this sermon, just like Evil’s time with Jesus, comes to an end. But, in that end, we are called—called to right all the relationships in our lives where we have allowed “the Separater” to split us off from our bodies and souls, each other, the Creation or God. Lent is a time for discovery, Easter is a time for rejoicing and all of life is a time for growing deeper in faith, in knowledge, and in truth. Amen and Amen.