Walking the Prayer of the Lamb

For the last ten years besides sitting in meditation with the Prayer of the Lamb, I have also prayed the Prayer while walking. Living where I do in a pedestrian-intensive neighborhood I walk to the post office, bank, grocery store, restaurants, etc. on a regular basis. So I get many opportunities for doing my practice interspersed throughout the week in the midst of routine activity. Not only am I getting in extra time beyond my commitment for daily sittings, but I know that I am also contributing to other beings around me as I walk along asking for that abundant and free-flowing mercy of the Lamb of God for all of us.

The labyrinth has been a spiritual practice that many people have tried out or engaged. It is a way to “go on pilgrimage” without traveling great distances. There are specific ways by which people can undertake walking a labyrinth, but here I would like to offer another option using the Prayer of the Lamb, although note that this should not replace the basic practice of sitting in silence.

Consider the following: As I embark on a personal pilgrimage of walking the labyrinth to its center and back, I begin from where I am. That means I am taking along with me all the current thoughts running through my head, all the to-do list, relationships currently being engaged, concerns, anxieties, desires, and an ever fluctuating self-identification. As I walk slowly, mindfully and deliberately with the words, Yeshua, Lamb of God, have mercy on us, gently marking each step, all that I have brought with me is offered into that mercy. As may often be the case in silent meditation, this stage may take awhile. By the time I reach the center all has been offered (purgation) and now comes a time to sit and simply be in that mercy offering the innocent devotion of the Prayer with an openness of heart to God (illumination). After a luxuriously long amount of time at the center, I begin the journey of returning, and out of the realization of baptismal identity in the Lamb of God (union) I am offering the Prayer as a universal intercession for all beings that I will encounter as I emerge from this walking meditation. This last stage is an act of outreach ministry, a contribution pouring out of abundance. As with all my meditation this is not a private spiritual practice; it is ecologically and sacramentally integrated. …another way to walk the labyrinth.

Sermon 5th Sunday Easter, Emmanuel, Mercer Island

Last week we had a lovely time relishing in the past, among other things looking at photos that reminded us of the way things used to be. But our memories, we know, are selective. We reminisce about what fits with our current agenda, either positively or negatively. All the past memories have a bittersweet quality to them because we know that what we are remembering is in the past not to be repeated. It can never be that way again.

That can fill us with sadness, or on the other hand we may say, thank God! We don’t have to go through that again!

A lot of you liked last Sunday’s liturgy, but come on, admit it, you don’t really want to have it that way every Sunday.

Let’s not dwell in the past. Isn’t that usually good advice? Instead one might look at the passage from the Revelation for today in this Easter season series of readings. The book of the Revelation is a really scary book and incredibly misunderstood as though it were possible to “decode” the book and thereby discover the exact time and set of circumstances for the coming again of the Lord for vengeance and judgment.

Ah, but we Episcopalians have figured out how to have readings from this disturbing book of the Bible and not cause ourselves nightmares. We simply pick out the lovely parts. We even read them at funerals as a way to comfort the bereaved.

And we make huge leaps with these passages into ideas about what heaven is, and what it is like, how if we have been decent folks, led good lives, been reasonably nice we can look forward to being reunited with loved ones and enjoy a happy, pleasant eternity. It isn’t usually in our thoughts that we might just as well be reunited with ones we don’t love.

Yes, if our heads aren’t in the past, they’re in the future.

Well, I have some cold water to throw on all that this morning. You’re probably not going to like this if you really pay attention and think this through.

There is no past nor future. They’re all in your head. There is only now, and most of us don’t like being in the now.

And yet the now is where salvation is, liberation, where truth is, where life is. Be here now and you can discover how much illusion and denial is going on but you can also discover that there is a huge abundance of life right now untapped, un-tasted, unlived. You may also discover that the present moment is incredibly full, overflowing with mercy, freedom, love, peace and joy.

You may have noticed that the Bible doesn’t really say a whole lot about an afterlife. All the stuff about St. Peter at the pearly gates checking names in a book with a plumed pen, or people with wings sitting on clouds and holding harps is made up, right?

Instead eternal life is referred to over and over again as the quality of life, the recognition of life in its fullest form present here and now for the eyes of faith.

This passage from the book of the Revelation says, “See, the home of God is among mortals…” See, and the word in Greek means realize this, with insight, perceive, really get it. The home of God is among mortals, not off somewhere in a heaven far across the universe but here in our midst God is at home. When we see that, then every tear, every sigh, every downcast spirit will realize profound and healing comfort. All the lost dreams, all the wounds of the past, all the griefs we have known are eclipsed by the Light that shines forth from the One who is Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the source point and the completion/fulfillment, the One who holds within him the whole scope of life and existence and creation, the One who makes all things new,

who transforms our seeing so that we can actually perceive how creation is new every moment so that we can get it that resurrection is the way new creation comes into being now and now and now.

It’s not “Jerusalem, my happy home, when shall I come to thee?” but God himself is with us - Emmanuel.

The first way of seeing things and giving it meaning and thereby struggling with it and living in frustration, fear, anxiety and anger has passed away, and now the limits of vision are blown and we do not know what we see.

So we retreat to the past and the future, those places in our mind that we can have some control over, and we miss the abundance of life in its eternal quality right now all its potential and potency and threat and promise.

Jesus saw the truth of now and lived it fully. That is why he could say in that moment at the last supper right when Judas had gotten up from the table and had gone out into the night to betray him, “NOW the Son of Man has been glorified.”

Jesus goes on about this glory: “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once.”

Glory, glory, glory. In light of what is about to happen in the Garden of Gethsemane and at Golgotha, what in the world is this glory?

In the biblical sense of the word, both from Hebrew and Greek,

to glorify is to give honor to, to attribute value and worth to, to give weight to. Glory is more than just having splendor, flashiness, pizzazz.

Glory is the weight of all worth.

And truly that describes the Cross. And its outcome – Resurrection.

And so Jesus at that moment of glory begins his long discourse with his disciples, the last words of his earthly ministry begun here in the 13th chapter of John and continuing on through the 17th chapter.

And right out of the chute he gives his disciples the means by which they will be able to see the glory and live in the now and have that abundant, eternal quality life now and now and now. “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.”

Yes, that’s the ticket – love one another.

Love one another and it will all come clear, and, glory be, we will see that the home of God is among mortals.

Well, of course, this isn’t ordinary love.

Our English language is poverty stricken when it comes to the word love. In Greek there are several words for love, each with rich nuances of meaning: the intimate love between two people, and the love that keeps the bonds of fidelity, and then the God-quality kind of love which is unitive love, the love that exists within the Trinity, so full that no distinction can be made between lover and beloved, there is only Love. And we are pulled into that love, drawn up into that by the action of the Cross so that we might know that love now, and be transformed by it.

As we find in the first epistle of John, “God is love.”

Jesus, the Son of God, the Eternal Word present from the beginning with God, the One through whom all things came into being and have creation, Jesus tells his disciples, “Love one another. Just as I have loved you, - with that unitive love of God – you also should love one another - with that unitive love of God. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

Well, obviously this unitive love of God that Jesus has for us and which he also wants us to express and live and give to others is not foremost in our thoughts and actions all the time. It’s not at the top of the priority list, it isn’t the motivating factor for everything we say or do or think. If it were, then truly everyone would know that we are disciples of Jesus witnessing to the resurrection. Even in this secular Pacific Northwest none-zone if we had this God-love for others, it would stand out and be noticeable.

This Love requires being in the now, not some memory of the past, not some hope for the future, but being in relationship right here and now, otherwise it’s not the kind of love that Jesus is talking about and commanding of us.

Until we love one another as Jesus commanded us to do we will continue to place our ideas, opinions, goals, personal self-interest, desires and discriminations, likes and dislikes, and personal preferences above our relatedness one with another.

Until we love one another as Jesus commanded us to do, we will have tears and death and mourning and pain and not see that the home of God is among mortals here and now.

Until we love one another as Jesus commanded us to do the world will not know our witness to the Resurrection.

Beloved, let us love one another.

Sermon for Holy Tuesday, Emmanuel, Mercer Island

Reflections on Isaiah 49:1-7, 1 Corinthians 1:18-31, John 12:20-36

Perspective: We look at life through the limited lens of our own intelligence and experience, and so our perspective is necessarily limited and full of ignorance –ignorance of all the places we have not been, and all the people we have not met, and all the books we have not read, and all the news we have not heard.

Even the wisest of all human beings is still limited in perception. That is what the Apostle Paul is saying in the epistle reading from 1 Corinthians. God’s perspective on everything is, of course, much vaster, the whole picture, not a part. We simply can’t think big enough, and so our wisest and strongest and best is hardly able to measure up to the wisdom and strength of God.

The ancient nation of Judea was expecting a messiah, and God knows they needed one! Living under the oppression of a foreign ruler, and having their economy raped by the oppressor’s taxes, their life support sucked out of their hands, their expectations of a messiah were too narrowly focused.

They did not remember the words from the Prophet Isaiah in which God was saying, “You think it is a huge task to restore what had been taken away into exile while you were under the foreign oppression of the Babylonians. You think it is hardly possible to raise up again the tribes of Jacob and restore the survivors of Israel. Well, I have news for you! Your thinking is too small. I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

And so in John’s Gospel we see this coming to realization.

It is the Greeks, the foreigners, those outside of Israel, who come to the disciple Philip, the one with the Greek name, and say those words that blow out the walls of exclusiveness, the limitations of thinking too small, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” And Jesus says, “Now the hour has come.”

And what he says next is the foolishness of God, what is a stumbling block that confounds those who are wise in their own eyes within the limits of the world they think they know. The foolishness of God that is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness that is stronger than human strength –Jesus, God’s anointed One, executed, cut down in the prime of his life, ending an incredibly vibrant and vital ministry of healing and teaching, Christ crucified, the Power of God and the Wisdom of God.

Jesus said to his disciples, “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also.

Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth… Well, that is what the purpose of the seed is for – to get planted. …unless it falls into the earth and dies… Once planted that is the end of the seed’s existence as a seed. What comes next looks nothing like a seed. …unless it falls and dies, it remains alone… The seed remains singular, isolated. …but if it dies, it bears much fruit. The purpose of the seed is to bear fruit, wheat 30-, 60-, a hundredfold on the stalk, harvested and winnowed and ground into flour to become bread for life support, to become the Bread of Life. The death of the seed is a birth into a new and more abundant, fruitful, effective life.

There is a parallel drawn here between the seed and those who would follow Jesus. So I have to ask the question: Do we want, like those Greeks, to see Jesus? Do we want to be disciples? Our purpose as followers of Jesus, what it is that God wants from us, is that we bear much fruit, that our lives are fruitful in the qualities and characteristics of the Kingdom of Heaven, that our lives are lights to others bringing them also into the Kingdom. That is the fruit that we are made for and intended to produce –very pragmatic and utilitarian. But it would appear that the process of producing such fruit of being thus useful is by dying.

“Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”

These are hard words; they confront us, but we would do ourselves a great disfavor if we avoided looking at them, as we often would like to do. These words are too important spiritually to let them pass by unexamined.

What is the life that is to be hated, that is, the life to be renounced? What is the life that we turn our backs on and walk away from?

It is that which we have linked with our self-identity, that which we have claimed ownership with regarding who we say we are. It is how we answer the question, “Who am I?”

Now we may not see this, or realize this, but our self-definition for the most part is built on a fantasy, not reality when it comes right down to it,

because our self-definition is conditioned by implicit conformity to the mind-set of the culture in which we live. It is the perception of ourselves that is so conditioned by the attitudes of the world with all its values and goals that are off target, that go astray from that which we call the Kingdom of God.

Actually the Kingdom of God is another way of saying - Reality.

We are so closely identified with a serviceable illusion of our self-definition that then when we encounter that which breaks through our illusions, such as an encounter with Jesus, or an encounter with the Reality of Creation, we contract away from it, because it seems threatening to the security we have sought to maintain in the world mindset.

Does this way of life, the world culture, work? No. For thousands of years we have tried to make this culturally constructed idea of our own reality work, and instead we continually fail and end up in war, war with those who don’t think as we do!

How do we get clear of the illusions we have about ourselves so that we can see the Kingdom of God, so that we can see the truth of our being?

How do we let the seed fall into the earth? This is the path of discipleship, which is the way of the cross.

By the example of his own sacrifice, Jesus reveals the secret of bearing fruit. In surrendering himself to death, he becomes the source of new life.

Lifted from the earth on the cross, he draws all people to himself. He shows us that clinging to life causes life to decay; but the life that is freely given, is eternal.

So it is that Jesus models discipleship for us, so that as he is, we may be also. The path of discipleship is the way of the cross. Great. Follow Jesus, get crucified, die.

But what dies is the falsehood of self-identity based in the cultural climate. That is a veil covering our eyes and keeping us from seeing what is real.

We are not able to remove that covering from our eyes by ourselves, however. That is the work of the Master, the Teacher, the One who was lifted up on the cross who draws all people to himself.

Jesus said, “I will draw all to myself.” And the word for draw in Greek means to draw a sword, to un-sheath it.

The veil of illusion covering our eyes, the self-identity we cling to, will be stripped away from us by the action of the cross. What is left is our true identity in Christ.

The Apostle Paul wrote – I die daily. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives within me. Paul was describing this process at work in him, a process he himself was not accomplishing on his own, but was being worked out in him by the Resurrection of Jesus.

We do not accomplish our own death in this spiritual process, but we can cooperate, we can let the seed fall into the earth.

One of the ways to let the seed fall that I can describe is what has worked for me personally: meditation, sitting still long enough to begin coming awake. Meditation is the process of removing the clouds from the sun. Meditation, we could say, is like a profound auto-immune disease. It is a means for getting the self in position for transformation so we no longer are limited in our seeing; it is setting the stage for a radical shift in perspective.

Here is another way to let the seed fall, one that I present to you for consideration now: The focus now is Holy Week, where we can see the Mystery of how this dying to self comes about. Walk this Holy Week as a disciple identified with your Spiritual Master, your Teacher.

As a disciple during Holy Week place identity in Christ and participate in the full range of liturgies commemorating the last few days of the earthly life of Jesus. Participate in all of the Triduum, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and the Easter Vigil. This is both a beautiful act of devotion and also seeking the reality of the Kingdom of God, wanting to see Jesus.

All of this is so that where he is, we may be also.

May we thus be brought to all the glorious, radiant brightness of the Glory of God, so that, as good disciples, we may bear much fruit, and become also bread of life for others.

Sermon for 5 Lent, Emmanuel, Mercer Island

Mary of Bethany washed the feet of Jesus with fragrant and costly nard and then wiped his feet with her hair touching her head to his feet.

This was a lavish gift of love poured out on Jesus in a very personal way to the embarrassment and consternation of the disciples, especially Judas.

Did you know there is a version of this story in all four gospels? This is a story I have consistently been drawn to. The story resonates deeply with me. At the heart of it all is the personal attraction of Jesus.

What I want to do this morning in this brief bit of time is to share with you my personal love for and devotion to Jesus.

Now this is where I take some risk, when I talk about why I am still in the church, because I am tapping into others’ motivations also for why you yourselves are here.

It’s okay if you are not here for the same reason as I am.

But there’s a risk for me because talking in this way about Jesus is often seen as the height of evangelizing, and that is something about which Episcopalians are characterized as avoiding like the plague.

Stereotypes about evangelizing and Jesus talk have unfortunately given Jesus a bad name for many.

This has blocked many from making for themselves incredible discoveries about just how extraordinary, how revolutionary, how incredibly and intimately personal he can be, and how enlivening, liberating and empowering this can be for us.

So it is a dilemma for me to speak about this, but the fact remains that if it weren’t for Jesus, I wouldn’t be here - and his Presence revealed through the sacraments: For me the Eucharist is the altar call, coming to the altar to receive and consume the Body and Blood of Jesus. Repentance and redemption is all there in this altar call.

So I am confessing quite frankly here before you all in a very un-Episcopalian-kind of way that I love Jesus. Some of you might remember back in the late 60’s and early 70’s the phenomena of the long haired hippy types who were high not on drugs, but on Jesus.

One might say that I am an aging Jesus Freak.

And so I want to share with you this morning this love for Jesus, and the Epistle reading for today really helps me do that.

It is about a basic, fundamental relationship to Jesus, and identity with him in baptism, of being in him, in whom we live and move and have our being.

The Apostle Paul says, “I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.

For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish,…”

Well, that’s too wimpy of a translation.

The word means dung, human excrement actually.

Paul says that he not only regarded everything as loss but on account of knowing Jesus he has lost everything.

Truly, after the road to Damascus his whole status, credibility, viability, and reputation within his religious community was lost, destroyed, as he now identified with the heretical sect of the followers of Jesus.

So Paul says, on account of the far greater value of knowing Jesus experiential knowing, heart knowledge, I regard all that as in the toilet “in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith.”

So we need to talk about righteousness. What is righteousness? another hot button word for many, often heard as self-righteousness.

Righteousness is to be in right relationship to the Law-Giver, to be in union with the wholeness of the Law Giver, the life of walking by the Spirit through grace rather than through self will or out of the illusion of separateness, but as one, in union with the Creator; righteousness is the state of one who is as one ought to be; righteousness is a way to characterize being a New Creation.

This righteousness is not something that we ourselves can accomplish by scrupulous adherence to the law.

Paul’s righteousness, and ours, comes through faith.

And this faith is not faith as holding a particular belief system, or theology, but faith as deep trust and a surrendering to God, an entrusting of self towards union with God.

So we have this righteousness, verse 9 tells us, through faith in Christ.

That is how most translations put it, but literally in Greek it is the faith of Christ and in this context this makes much more sense.

“…not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law,” Paul says, “but one that comes through [the] faith of Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith.”

It is Jesus’ utter surrender, the complete emptying of himself, which is the ultimate act of faith that brings him the title, Jesus Christ the Righteous, in 1 John 2:1.

His faith brings us that same righteousness as we are found in him.

So this righteousness, which one could say is a process of being saved/redeemed/whatever you want to call it, is not about expectations by ourselves or others about keeping rules and being good, but for me is the discovery of such a gift that I must respond.

Faith, we need always to remember, is a gift of the Holy Spirit, not a self-generated attitude or a focus of belief.

It is an infusion and flowering in the heart and mind of the very life of our Lord.

Faith for us is not possible without the uniting love of our Lord.

Jesus does the work in us bringing to our self awareness that we are indeed the child of God.

Our righteous comes not from our own effort but through the faith of Christ.

And so Paul continues in verse 10: “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection …”

“I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection.”

What a beautiful aspiration!

I hear those words, and my heart responds with Yes!

That is the deep desire of the heart, the pull of uniting love.

“I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.”

Paul is speaking about a spiritual process which he does not yet claim as complete within himself.

A process of growing awareness of identity in Christ in which all his own sufferings – and Paul had a few –were all swallowed up in the Cross.

A spiritual process not yet complete, a goal and so he says, “I press on” to cooperate with this process at work within him.

“I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.”

So Paul is willing to and open to leaving behind all, seeing as it all has as much value as poop, leaving it all behind to the point of even forgetting – Can you imagine forgetting all your past accomplishments, all the work you have done at making yourself noteworthy or useful or successful or good –

Pressing on toward that goal of a full realization of knowing God knowing God’s love, “the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.”

So for all of us, what would be included in “pressing on”?

Prayer, and meditation, are primary examples of how to press on, and offering our worship together, and studying the scriptures, and serving one another in love, and carrying out our various baptismal ministries.

The church is called out of the world culture into wakefulness of the infinite, radiant, creative potency which is manifest in Jesus and through Jesus as the word of God.

How deeply do we feel this and recognize this?

What is the spiritual hunger of your heart?

Why we come here to church is different for each.

What keeps us here at church together is Jesus addressing each one’s unique needs whether we are conscious of his ministry to us or not.

So we come to the last part of Lent, and this epistle reading can be a key passage for entry into Holy Week, and therefore I want to strongly encourage you, to urge you to participate in the rich offering that Holy Week has for us, especially:

Palm Sunday…

Maundy Thursday…

Good Friday…

Easter Vigil…

Easter Day…

All of this, our Holy Week commemorations of the Passion of our Savior, provides a rich source here at the heart of our faith and worship.

These are our high holy days – please come to them all, and see what happens.

Press on and may we all discover more of Jesus to liberate our hearts and empower our lives.

Sermon for 1 Lent, Emmanuel, Mercer Island

Here we are at the beginning of Lent, a season of intensified spiritual discipline in preparation for the celebration of the Resurrection.

Lent serves the purpose of addressing and meeting our core need as human beings to draw near to and encounter God. Lent is a valuable gift the Church gives us for addressing this innate inner longing.

And as always the 1st Sunday’s Gospel is about the 40 days fast in the wilderness and the temptations. Why? What are they all about?

The purpose of the temptations in the wilderness is to show that Jesus is ready for and has the authority for leadership in ministry.

Now, Jesus wasn’t the only one who spent 40 days fasting in the wilderness. Moses did that going up Mount Sinai and came back with the Law carved in stone tablets. Elijah did that and came back with a clear mandate about who would be ruling what kingdom.

When Jesus comes back he doesn’t bring anything back except himself, and he begins to proclaim that the Kingdom of God has come.

This Gospel reading is a demonstration for us of Jesus’ alignment with the will of God to indicate his capacity to rule. The role of the devil is to test Jesus’ readiness and reliability, his authenticity.

After Jesus has finished his fast, when he was hungry, then the devil says to him: So you’re the Son of God – a God-realized person, eh?, totally enlightened, then you certainly can change stone into bread and take care of that hunger of yours.

But Jesus replies, quoting from Deut. 8:3, which reads: “He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.”

Turn stones to bread? No need for that. The Gospels record 6 times when Jesus took a small amount of bread, blessed and broke it, and then fed THOUSANDS.

Test #2

Luke 4:5 Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. Luke 4:6 And the devil said to him, “To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. Luke 4:7 If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.”

Notice - The devil is claiming all authority. Interesting. I think the devil is lying. He’s been known to do that. After all that’s what the name Satan means: liar.

But what he is presenting to Jesus is not the plan for Jesus, not the kind of Messiah he is in this invitation to buy into messianic kingship over all the temporal nations.

Rather – we read at the end of Matthew’s Gospel: Matt. 28:18 And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Matt. 28:19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit…

Do you see how this is different from ruling all nations?

The test or temptation is around moving from one orientation of reality to another, moving from what is centered in the self and brings power to the self to what transcends self and serves self-emptying instead.

The devil says, Luke 4:7 If you, [then,] will worship me, it will all be yours.” Luke 4:8 Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’”

Worship expresses the relationship of serving, not ruling. In worship we are not feeding our ego, but acknowledging another as Lord. Right? Isn’t that what we are about when we come here for a worship service?

Temptation #3

Luke 4:9 Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here…”

Well, Jesus was continuously at risk for his life, someone was usually out to get him, and he did not ask to be spared. In the Garden of Gethsemane he prayed:

Luke 22:42 “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done.”

If he is going to fall and die in the falling, then so be it. In fact, THAT would be the plan – the Cross.

The temptation was to see whether God is present or not. To test God’s presence is to doubt God’s presence. But Jesus was utterly integrated in conscious awareness with the divine presence.

You can’t put God to the test if you are AWARE that God is always with you. Well, so much for tempting Jesus!

So Luke 4:13 When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.

That opportune time comes much later in Jerusalem.

Luke 22:3 Then Satan entered into Judas called Iscariot, who was one of the twelve; And Jesus at that time, at the Last Supper, also tells his Peter and his disciples: Luke 22:31 “Simon, Simon, listen! Satan has demanded to sift all of you like wheat, Luke 22:32 but I have prayed for you that your own faith may not fail; and you, when once you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.”

Simon Peter has had some sort of idea about preserving Jesus from crucifixion, and he follows him into the courtyard of the high priest, where he then fails miserably as he ends up denying our Lord 3 times.

Two who would resist Jesus’ plan of complete self-emptying on the cross: Judas and Simon Peter. How do we also resist that?

And so that takes care of the temptations – Jesus expresses perfect self-emptied clarity about his mission and ministry.

Then if we were to go on with the next verse after the Gospel reading for today, we would read: Luke 4:14 … Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and … to his home town: Luke 4:21 Then (in the synagogue) he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” The truth of the writing of old is now being lived in your presence.

This is the outcome of the 40 days’ fast in the desert.

Now we are entering another Lent, another 40 days in the desert, a spiritual desert this time, a spiritual space for encounter with God’s revelation, and discernment regarding our own clarity for mission and ministry. Let us make good use of this opportunity of Lent, it being a very good place for spiritual growth and development, there in the sparse environment which is more conducive.

So, how to use Lent, to observe Lent: We are doing that here as the gathered community liturgically and musically for these 5 Sundays of Lent, creating a sparseness to enhance and support the spiritual work.

Individually we can also create an inner desert/sparseness to foster our spiritual practices of prayer, meditation, scripture study, fasting, alms giving, self-denial and penitence, to help us in facing the inner demons testing us about our own clarity of mission and surrenderedness to God.

Now is the opportune time.

MAKE GOOD USE OF IT.