The Backward Power of God

Matthew 4:1-17

The temptation of Jesus is all about Jesus in his humanity. And we don’t so often think about Jesus in his humanity, so we don’t tend to consider this a very important story. I mean, of course Jesus wasn’t tempted by Satan! He was perfect, obviously. When we think about Jesus, we tend to default to his divinity; the human side of Jesus doesn’t tend to interest us, I suppose because we are all human. We know what that looks like.

Jesus as fully God is easy. It allows us to focus on him as this perfect creation. He was without sin, we say. He died to save us. He lived exactly the life he was supposed to. This is easy. But the temptation of Christ reminds us of another very important reality: Jesus was also human. Fully divine. Fully human. And the question of which would win the day had not yet been answered when Satan takes him up on the tower.

            This story only makes sense if we put ourselves into the shoes of Jesus, the one being tempted. This story really only makes sense if there’s some chance that Satan will be successful. Something deeper is going on here than a mere object lesson in how awesome Jesus is. A real question is put to Jesus: Can you do what every other human has failed to do? Can you refrain from reaching out and taking the fruit of the tree?

            This story has happened before. You have to go back to the beginning. In the Garden of Eden, there was that tree of the knowledge of good and evil that God planted. It was the one tree from which Adam and Eve were not allowed to eat, so naturally it was the one tree that the serpent used in order to tempt them. He told them that if they ate from it, they would become like God. This is a huge temptation: Just eat this little fruit and you will know everything. You would eat it. You do eat it. In a million ways, we all eat that stinking fruit. In that moment, which has been lived out again and again throughout history, humanity’s weakness triumphed over God’s desires for us.

            It’s the same story all the time.

Satan assumes that Jesus will fall into the same trap. Every one of us does, after all. The boy-king is unlikely to be any different.

The long winter

Matthew 3:1-17

 It’s been a long winter.

I realize that isn’t true. By the standard of the weather, it has been a really excellent winter. But that’s not what I mean. I mean, I’m biased. Some of you have probably had awfully healthy winters so far. You probably also don’t have young kids. I was warned about this but didn’t fully appreciate how these germ-ridden children will not only make me terribly sick, but then stomp over me in my sickness, while I’m lying on the couch, and pull out all the glitter and acrylic paints and decide it is time to decorate the floors.

“You brood of vipers,” said John the Baptist—not about my daughter but maybe also about my daughter. “You brood of vipers. Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”

One of the lessons I learned in seminary was that there is no need to preach the law at a people broken by it, who feel it in their bones already. This is why I believe preachers who stand up and proclaim judgment and fear and wrath at funerals don’t know what they’re doing. At times where we understand our frailty and our limitations, like funerals, the weight of the law is already on our backs; there is no need to pile it on. The law is already reminding us that many things are final and they can’t be undone. At a funeral, we don’t need the law, because it is the water in which we swim already. At funerals, we crave the Gospel.

It is the same for all of us in this long winter. I’m not sure we have much need for John the Baptist at the moment. Repent. Sure. But most of you don’t need to be called a brood of vipers. Just Natalie. The rest of you are OK. You don’t need to be called that, not because you aren’t sinners. You’re just as limited as you were in the cheeriest of times. Rather, in this long winter, you are more aware of it by nature. We know it every time a family member comes home sick, and we know it every time we hear that somebody we knew and cared about has died, and we know it when we want to go into town but the winds are howling and we can’t see to the end of the drive. Everything about this season reminds us we are fragile. Nobody is arguing with John the Baptist. We come to the waters looking for renewal time and again—anything to free us from this constant refrain of life’s limitations.

That’s the baptism John offers. Repentance. Sin. Repeat. For all our ordaining John with the title of “John the Baptist,” his baptism is actually pretty weak. It is more like confession. It is a consistent, repeated ritual of repentance, confession, and absolution, where God washes away sins only to have them pop up again in the morning. John’s baptism only required returning more often when the winter was long.

Breaking down those walls

Matthew 2:1-23 

           Those three wise men that we so often sing about at Christmastime are traditionally associated with this time of Epiphany. They come riding into town as the birth of Christ transitions into the implications of God-incarnate living amongst us. On Christmas Eve, I talked about the frankincense and myrrh, how these were incense often used at burials—how the kings were, perhaps unwittingly, giving this child the gift of spices for his own burial. I talked about how appropriate that is.

            But we need to talk about what happens next. The Gospel of Matthew says, “Now after they had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, ‘Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.’”

            Leave this place, because it is not safe. I find it fascinating that the holy family is told to flee to keep Jesus safe. Jesus, who spends the rest of his life set toward the cross, begins his time on earth being rushed away from it. As with every instance of evil in our lives, God could have intervened. It didn’t need to happen this way. Instead, the angel tells Joseph: Get up, take the child and Mary, and flee to Egypt. That’s an order.

Christmas Eve: The birth and death of Christ

Luke 2:1-20

Babies are wonderful, aren’t they? I mean, I should know, because mine is the wonderful-est. He’s the most beautiful, most special, best of all things in the whole world is mine—that baby. How astonishing is it that of all the possible babies in the world mine is the most perfect?!

            Sorry, everybody else, you’ll have to fight it out for second.

            Then, they grow up.

            The miracle of Christmas isn’t a perfect baby, because we know every baby is perfect, but the true miracle is this baby is God-incarnate, not destined to become a little sinner like the rest of us; in fact, destined to be the Savior of the world. This baby—Emmanuel.

            See, the reality is that my perfect little baby is also perfectly broken. For all the love I have for him, I can’t pretend he isn’t a stinky little guy—literally and figuratively. I mean, nobody is more self-centered than a baby. They are so inconsiderate of my sleep needs, my sermon writing, the fact that I’m under the weather, and my desire to have just ten stinkin’ minutes to myself. Geesh. We only let them get away with this stuff because they are babies and they don’t know any better.

            But this baby, this Jesus, was somehow different. What would it look like for a baby to be born without that inclination to turn in on himself? Honestly, how much did Mary and Joseph luck out when Jesus was waiting to feed at their convenience? Or when he took conveniently-timed bathroom breaks? There were lucky, that is, until they understood the cost. This child—this once-in-a-universe happening—had an ultimate destination—a telos—that didn’t fit his perfection. Or, rather, maybe it fit it perfectly. In this broken world, all things bright and beautiful end up at the cross. Christmas is the start of that road to Golgotha, those first steps from manger to tomb.

            Because babies are so beautiful and so fragile, this is a move we are naturally scared to make. Come on, pastor. Don’t bring that stuff into this. Let’s stay with Christmas—none of this Good Friday/Easter stuff. But this ignores the reality that Christmas is part of the Easter story and vice versa; it’s all connected, and there is a reason that the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight. This is not just happy-go-lucky nonsense. Tonight is the real deal.

God with us

Matthew 1:18-25

Emmanuel—“God is with us.”

            It’s such a well-known name that we may miss how revolutionary this is. With Jesus coming into the world, God is with us. When things are rough, God is with us. When things are good, God is with us. When our life is full of despair, God is with us. This is the promise we have through Jesus with the coming of the Holy Spirit—that there is no place or time that God is not there.

            This son of Mary, through the Holy Spirit, is given two names: Emmanuel—“God is with us”—and Jesus—“He saves.” These are two promises we have—that God is with us and that God saves us. Yet, the history of the world proves that this kind of saving is not mere protection from forces of evil. Evil is alive and well, but because of this God with us, whose journey leads us to the cross, we know that there is no place full of suffering where God will not be.

            From a lowly beginning to a lowly ending, Jesus doesn’t set out on an expected course for the Messiah. He shatters expectations. First there is Mary and Joseph. The account of the Gospel of Matthew focuses more on Joseph, whose expectations are obliterated by an unexpected pregnancy. So are Mary’s, of course. This was not the engagement present they were looking for. From the beginning, God elects to enter humanity in the humblest of ways, against convention, partly to demonstrate the holy-ness of this birth but partly I imagine to demonstrate that God is with us no matter the discomfort where we might find ourselves. No matter the poverty of our circumstance.

God's left handed power

Isaiah 42:1-9

            Here, according to Isaiah, is what it means to be the chosen servant of God: He is one who will bring forth justice to the nations, not by crying out or lifting up his voice, not by force or beating down the opposition. Instead, this servant is coming with a different kind of power—the power that Robert Farrar Capon calls “left handed power.” In the Bible, there is much said about the strength of the right hand. It is the right hand that defeats nations. When you sit at the right hand you are in a place of power and prestige. In this metaphor for strength, the right hand is the good one, the strong one—sorry, left-handed folks. The right hand is the power of force.

If you Google this, you will find no less than 58 examples of God’s right hand at work in the Bible. Some say things like “Save with your right hand and answer us!” (Psalm 60:5), or “Your right hand, O Lord, is majestic in power, Your right hand, O Lord, shatters the enemy” (Exodus 15:6), or “He has bent His bow like an enemy; He has set His right hand like an adversary and slain all that were pleasant to the eye; In the tent of the daughter of Zion He has poured out His wrath like fire” (Lamentations 2:4). Lest you think this is only Old Testament, Psalm 110:1 is quoted no less than three times in the New Testament, saying, “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet” (Matthew 22:44, Mark 12:36, Hebrews 1:13).

Human beings have a great attachment to right handed power. Strength. Conviction. Decisiveness. All of these are traits of right handed power. We so badly want God to round up all the baddies and beat them up for us, teach them a lesson, and put them in their place. So much theology around heaven and hell in the church, if we’re being honest, is about other people getting what is due them. We love the right hand of God, because it means destruction for our enemies—something the Psalmist asks for again and again. In the pre-Christmas world, the power of force and coercion is the power that speaks loudest.

By contrast, scripture barely mentions the left hand of God. The only use of left hand in the entire New Testament is Jesus saying, “But when you give to the poor, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing” (Matthew 6:3). There is nothing about left handed power, and I want to suggest this is very much by intention. You don’t need scripture to tell you about left handed power, because Jesus shows us by example exactly what it is. Our expectations were that Jesus would come wielding God’s right handed strength. He was supposed to be the Messiah who brought the chosen people back into the Holy Land. He was supposed to get back at those who had wronged his people. He was supposed to bring vengeance for all those killed—the powerless, the woman and children, and the warriors who gave their lives fighting for the faith. He was supposed to be the fulfillment of all the waiting for the people to get what they were due. He was supposed to be all these things, but instead he came wielding God’s left handed power, which is self-sacrifice. Left handed power is the least sexy power you can imagine. It is somebody slapping you on one cheek and turning the other and saying, “You forgot this one.” To the world, it looks like giving up. It is powerlessness and weakness and meekness and all those things that don’t look like power.

Prophet of death--prophet of hope

Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:2-4, 3:17-19

Last week, we read from Jeremiah, who brought a message for those of us who have some power—to care for the immigrant, and the widow, and the orphan. Well, this week, we turn to Habakkuk, who is bringing a message of hope for those same folks who are oppressed. But… it might take some time.

I often think about what it would be like to live in the times of the prophets. Let’s say you hear this message from Habakkuk. You’re an Israelite living in the Promised Land six-hundred or so years before Jesus. The Babylonians are beginning their march toward the place where you live. Things moved slow in those days—it might be years until they got there—but you know when they arrive it’s going to be bad. So, you’re a Jew living in the land promised to you by God, knowing that within your lifetime outside invaders are coming to take it away, and everything you have—your property, your work, your place of worship—is going to be taken from you. And into this anxiety comes a prophet, in Habakkuk, preaching a message that says, “There is hope, but it may take a while.”

Now, imagine you can see the future and know that that hope is coming in six hundred years. Not only will you not see it—neither will any of your children, or grandchildren, or anybody else in living memory. By the time that hope arrives, you will be forgotten. This is the context of Habakkuk. It’s all going away, and it won’t be made right for a long, long time.

Frankly, this is why I get so agitated when people read from Jeremiah and pull out that one verse (Jeremiah 29:11) and talk about God knowing the plans he has for us and giving us a future with hope, because the prophets are talking about the same thing here! This is hope for a nation. It is hope for a telos—God’s ultimate purpose for creation. It is not a promise that life will be peachy in the meantime or that everything that is happening is according to God’s plan. This is, in fact, the opposite of what the prophets are preaching. They are telling us that things are most definitely NOT happening according to God’s plan, and that’s why the nation is being displaced, and anxiety is rampant, and this hope is far, far off. The prophets are saying that things are, in fact, really bad, and the hope we have is not one for this world, because most of us won’t see it.

At first this doesn’t feel like a better kind of hope. I can understand why we want God to tell us that it will all work out for us in ten years, because we want to experience that telos on this side of death. We want to see our children and grandchildren fulfill our hopes for them. It’s perfectly natural to give God our timetable. The problem is that it doesn’t always happen that way.