Throughout the year, the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ reproduces the Daily Lectionary for use by churches.  These are the suggested readings for February 29th:  Exodus 19:1-9a; Psalm 19; and 1 Peter 2:4-10.  I would encourage you to read these short selections as part of your Lenten practice.

Today is Leap Day.  The day is necessary because the earth’s actual rotation around the sun is about 365 days AND six hours.  In four year’s time, those annual six hours add up to a full day.  In order to keep the human calendar and the natural seasons in sync, we have Leap Day every four years.  You may have noticed in the Exodus passage that time is measured by the phases of the moon.  This is far less accurate than the solar calendar.  The Jewish calendar takes this into account so that the Jewish holy days remain seasonal.  The Muslim calendar, however, does not and their holy days roam throughout the year.  We are closing in on Ramadan for the Muslims.  This month can happen anywhere in the year because it is based intentionally on an uncorrected lunar calendar.

Maybe you know someone who was born or who was married on a Leap Day.  They could be 24 years old or celebrating their 48th wedding anniversary, but they can joke that they are really only 6 years old or it’s only their 12th anniversary.  In Ireland, there is a custom that women can reverse convention and propose to men on Leap Day.  When we play with something as fundamental as time, it feels strange, and that can allow for unusual reactions. 

On such a day as today’s Leap Day, the unusual hopes expressed in 1 Peter may be more amenable to us.  In the tradition found in Exodus, Moses is the intermediary between God and Israel.  The people are encamped at the base of Mount Sinai.  Yahweh is believed to dwell at its heights.  Moses travels between the two and reports God’s words to Israel:  “‘Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.’”  Israel will be God’s people, a holy nation, and thus all Israelites will be counted as part of a priestly kingdom, one divinely designated as unique among the whole earth.

1 Peter expands on this promise.  The community addressed by this Epistle may have been located at the frontier of the Roman Empire.  Isolation is a reality in their lives.  We read, “Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people.”  1 Peter offers them a sense of community through their shared faith in Jesus.  They are called into community with words derived from the Mount Sinai experience:  “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people …”  Now, however, God’s people is expanded beyond a chosen nation.  It is an invitation to all people to enter into the sacred community through Christ.

This broadened invitation plays into the unusualness of Leap Day.  Additionally, the entire community of believers is no longer kept at a distance from God because Jesus has broken down those barriers.  This offers an unusual closeness to God, and also an unusual expectation of living the faith, akin to belonging to “a royal priesthood.” 

The only mentioned New Testament priest is Jesus in the Epistle to the Hebrews.  And then there is this broad acclamation of the royal priesthood of all believers.  Faith presents us with the unusual expectation that every believer will live into the faith deliberately and enthusiastically.  A casual faith is not imagined.  This promise of 1 Peter is a great honour and also a thrilling challenge.  On the unusual day of Leap Day, when the unusual becomes more acceptable, maybe we can give this unusual possibility a more attentive reading as Lent strives to draw us closer to Christ. 
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If you’d like, here is the link to the Southern New England Conference’s daily reading schedule:  www.sneucc.org/lectionary.

Throughout the year, the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ reproduces the Daily Lectionary for use by churches.  These are the suggested readings for February 28th:  Psalm 105:1-11, 37-45; Jeremiah 30:12-22; and John 12:36-43.  I would encourage you to read these short selections as part of your Lenten practice.

At our online Bible study group a couple of days ago, we discussed a Johannine passage that has a connection with today’s Gospel where we read, “[F]or fear that they would be put out of the synagogue…”  We were reading John 9’s account of Jesus’ cure of the man born blind.  The religious authorities questioned the healing as from God because it was performed on the sabbath.  To do work on the sabbath, even the work of healing a man born blind, was judged as breaking the commandment of sabbath rest.

The man was not believed.  They brought in his parents to see if they would corroborate his story of being born blind.  They demur because they were afraid of the consequences of opposing the authorities who “had already agreed that anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue.” (9:22) 
During Jesus’ historical ministry this was not the case.  At the time, Jesus could be seen as at the fringe, but Jesus and His followers continued to worship at synagogues, follow the commandments and even journey to Jerusalem’s Temple.  However, following Jesus’ lifetime, as His followers grew more and more distinct from their Jewish neighbours, then a formal separation was enacted.  Rudolf Schnackenburg writes, “If we also take into account that the curse on the heretics in the 12th of the 18 Benedictions was inserted under Rabbi Gamaliel II around 90AD, and that from that date extremely severe measures came into force to ensure social segregation between Jews and the ‘Nazarenes’ and heretics, it is clear that John is writing against the background of his own time.” (John, Vol. 2, p. 250)

The biblical reference in today’s Gospel passage and more so in John 9 help scholars to date this Gospel to the end of the first century.  It is also a clear example that the biblical authors felt no compunction as they inserted contemporaneous materials into their accounts of Jesus’ ministry.  Schnackenburg argues that members of John’s community had experienced personally expulsion from their places of worship.  They were forbidden synagogue membership because they accepted Jesus as the Messiah.  The impact of these expulsions was profound among those to whom John wrote, and John placed these same concerns within the story of the historical Jesus retroactively.  John did so because his Gospel is not explicitly history.  It is evangelism.  It is explaining who Jesus is to his readers.

This is an example within the canonical text of the Bible of the still-speaking Word of God.  The historical Jesus had been absent for some 60 years at the time of John’s composition, maybe more.  And yet, Jesus was not locked into the past.  The Jesus of the historical past continued to speak in John’s present.  This does not end with the last Gospel.  Jesus continues to speak to us today through the still-speaking Word of God. 

The Bible still speaks to us today not when we lock its message into antiquity as if God spoke then and nevermore.  The Bible shares with us unique inspiration.  For Christians, that unique biblical inspiration is derived from a close connection with the historical Jesus.  The New Testament books emerge in the second half of the first century.  They include actual remembrances of historical events and saying from the life of Jesus.  They share the faith of the earliest believers.  And those inspired words that are included in the New Testament continue to speak to us 2,000 years later as we read them, pray with them, study them and apply them to our world – just like John did.  May Lent help us to hear anew the still-speaking Word of God in the Bible, the Word that adapts to speak to us today in a living way.
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If you’d like, here is the link to the Southern New England Conference’s daily reading schedule:  www.sneucc.org/lectionary.

Throughout the year, the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ reproduces the Daily Lectionary for use by churches.  These are the suggested readings for February 27th:  Genesis 22:1-19; Psalm 105:1-11, 37-45; and Hebrews 11:1-3, 13-19.  I would encourage you to read these short selections as part of your Lenten practice.

I have a vague recollection of when I was quite young and looking through a children’s Bible.  I think I even remember in which room I was at our house at the time.  The recollection has stayed with me, I imagine, because I was so startled by the experience.  As I flipped through the pages of a colourful children’s Bible, I came across the picture of an older man wielding a knife above a young and defenseless boy.  The man was ready to plunge the knife into the boy, but an angel held back his hand to prevent this atrocity. 

I recall thinking, before I read the text, that this must be a picture of God intervening to stop an evil man from doing an evil deed.  Then I read the children’s Bible account of today’s Genesis passage.  I must have been really shocked and surprised to read that Abraham was only fulfilling God’s command, that God had ordered this old man to plunge that knife into the body of that defenseless boy.  I think that shock and surprise burned a lasting connection of synapses in my brain somewhere so that this memory has lasted all these decades. 

The man I had seen as evil was deemed faithful by God.  The God I saw as holding back the knife so that such an atrocity could not occur was the God who devised this cruel test.  It must have been that reversal that left a lasting impression.  At an age when I was first encountering biblical stories, before I could filter them through a lens of piety, the violence of this act is what captured my attention.  The reaction to the violence of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac was visceral.

Tradition and piety would work to edit these instinctive reactions from the text.  For example, Abraham is praised by God for the near murder of Isaac:  “‘Now I know that you fear God since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.’”  The Book of Proverbs are sapiential sayings, wisdom sayings, attributed to the Hebrew Bible’s greatest sage, Solomon.  The book begins with, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.” (1:7)  Fear of the Lord equates with reverence and wisdom.

However, before piety and tradition intervene, was the more original context that Abraham literally feared what God would do if he dared to disobey, that Abraham was more terrified of something worse than filicide?  Isaac is passive throughout today’s Genesis passage.  His only apprehension is voiced in the question, “‘Where is the lamb for a burnt offering?’”  Then there is only silence as “the two of them walked on together.”  How could Isaac have not been terrified when he was bound by his father, placed on the altar above the firewood, and his father’s arm was raised above him with a knife? 

We hear nothing of how the child’s reaction.  That is until Isaac’s child enters the story.  It is not found in the written record, but it seems that Isaac passed-on to Jacob a literal fear of God that time could never erase.  The trauma of Yahweh’s test of faith left its scar throughout Isaac’s life.  At Genesis 31:53, we read, “So Jacob swore by the Fear of his father Isaac …”  Isaac had passed on to his son Jacob the reality of the name and experience of God, and it was Fear.  This is a father’s lesson to his son that the son never forgot, that God is Fear.  This literal fear is what seems to lie at the bedrock of this story that comes to define faithfulness. 

I ask you to consider these earliest traditions of our faith as we think about Lent.  It seems more plausible that our human perceptions of God have changed over the millennia rather than that God has changed so fundamentally.  The religious experience was once driven by fear of God.  God was the unknown and the powerful, and these were terrifying forces to the ancient mind.  God could be passed on with words of wisdom to a son as simply Fear.  I will leave it to each of us to consider, but what does it mean to the idea of God as Fear when God in Jesus takes on Himself the fear that is the cross?  The once terrifying God behind Abraham’s sacrifice of “your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love” is now the Son of God sacrificed on the cross and no one holds death’s hand back.  Isn’t this the complete reversal of God as Fear?  Isn’t Lent an invitation to wonder and marvel at God as love?
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If you’d like, here is the link to the Southern New England Conference’s daily reading schedule:  www.sneucc.org/lectionary.

Throughout the year, the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ reproduces the Daily Lectionary for use by churches.  These are the suggested readings for February 26th:  Genesis 21:1-7; Psalm 105:1-11, 37-45; and Hebrews 1:8-12.  I would encourage you to read these short selections as part of your Lenten practice.

Names are important in the Hebrew Bible.  In Genesis 21:1, God’s name is Yahweh.  Some versions of the Bible, such as my New Revised Standard Version, insert The Lord in the place of the name Yahweh so you may not see Yahweh printed at 21:1.  The reason for this is that in the Jewish tradition the name of God shares the holiness of God and must never be treated casually, even by accident.  For this reason, when the name of God is found in the text, it is not spoken.  Rather, the title The Lord is inserted piously in its place. 

Whether the name Yahweh appears in your biblical text or not, it is there.  It has meaning.  Its presence, however, is premature in that the name Yahweh is not revealed until Moses approaches the burning bush at Exodus 3:14.  There, the name is explained as “‘I am who I am.’” God is described as the essence of being, of existence itself.  Even though this explanation comes a full book later in the Bible, it is used already at Genesis 21:1.

In today’s story of Isaac’s birth, it is Yahweh, the one who is being and who shares existence, who allows for 90-year-old Sarah to give birth to her first born.  Before getting to that, let’s talk about the names Abraham and Sarah.  God changed Abram’s name to Abraham as they enter into covenant.  The former name means “exalted ancestor” and the latter “ancestor of a multitude.”  In honour of this same covenant, God changes Sarai’s name to Sarah.  Sarah is the only woman in the Bible whose name is changed by God.  The former name means “my princess” and the latter “princess to all.”  Both signify the divine promise that they will be the ancestors of a great multitude. 

The name of Isaac is interesting in that its source story changes.  Isaac means “he laughs.”  In Genesis 17:17, Abraham fell on his face and laughed at God’s promise that he will have a son at the age of 100.  Sarah laughs as well at 18:12 since she is 90.  When Yahweh hears the laughter, it is definitely understood as laughing at God’s promise.  Sarah grows scared and denies laughter, but Yahweh says, “‘Oh yes, you laughed.’” (18:15)  All of this changes in today’s Genesis passage as Yahweh’s promise is fulfilled with Isaac’s birth:  “Now Sarah said, ‘God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.’” (21:6)

Names have a profound significance in the Hebrew Bible.  If you have the inclination, look at the footnotes throughout Genesis of what the names of God mean (14:19; 16:13; 17:1;21:33; 28:3; 32:30; 33:20; et al.).  The names are attempts to convey the ongoing interactions of the eternal God in history and with people.  As Abraham’s, Sarah’s and Isaac’s names reflect who they are, God’s names represent the changing relationships of faith.  These name changes reflect the Hebrew Bible’s openness to change as part of the divine nature.

The Bible and especially Christian theology struggle with this idea (Mostly because Christian theology used Greek philosophy as its guide.).  In today’s passage from Hebrews, for instance, we read, “But you are the same …”  That “you” is the glorified Jesus.  Unchanging eternity is a concept meant to honour God, but how can the life, death and resurrection of Jesus not change Jesus, and thus God?  An unchanging God seems to be a disengaged God, but Jesus is God’s lived rejection of such a possibility.  Does the holiness of God require an eternal stasis or does Jesus’ life ask us to think otherwise?  Does Jesus’ cross insist that we not only look at it from our perspective, but also from that of God’s?  The cross should change us.  Did it change God too?
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If you’d like, here is the link to the Southern New England Conference’s daily reading schedule:  www.sneucc.org/lectionary.

Throughout the year, the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ reproduces the Daily Lectionary for use by churches.  These are the suggested readings for February 24th:  Genesis 16:7-15; Psalm 22:23-31; and Mark 8:27-30.  I would encourage you to read these short selections as part of your Lenten practice.

Just prior to today’s Gospel passage is the extraordinary account of Jesus’ miraculous cure of a blind man at Bethsaida.  It’s a miracle, so by definition it is extraordinary.  However, this miracle is extraordinary in another way, as well.  This is a miracle that requires two takes.  This is unique.  Jesus’ first attempt at a cure is only partially successful.  The man reports, “‘I can see people.  They look like trees to me, but they are walking about.’” (8:24)  This partially successful miracle requires Jesus to try a second time, and now the man “could see everything plainly and distinctly.” (8:25)

This is a transition passage in Mark’s Gospel.  The man’s cure symbolizes the movement toward clarity as to the nature of Jesus, which is an appropriate introduction to the following events at Caesarea Philippi.  Here Peter declares of Jesus, “‘You are the Christ.’” (8:29)  This declaration is the definition of clarity.  It is the succinct revelation of the nature of Jesus as the Messiah, the Christ, the Saviour sent by God.  It is to see finally who Jesus really is.  It is a process that repeats what happened in the miracle at Bethsaida.  It is a gradual, by stages, clarity of spiritual insight. 

However, and this will have to wait until tomorrow’s sermon, problems remain.  With the hindsight of an established faith in Jesus as the Christ, there is a 20/20 clarity to Peter’s declaration.  In the verses that follow, though, we soon realize that in the immediacy of the moment Peter’s statement had harboured profound misconceptions.  His words were clear, but his intent was muddied by his own predilections.  Jesus as the Christ meant one thing for Jesus and something completely different for Peter.

It is one thing to say the words our faith expects, but it is more important to grasp who Jesus is.  Words can be memorized, but Jesus needs to be experienced with a constancy of conversation and an openness to discovery.  This Jesus-experience is a Lenten opportunity.  During these sacred weeks of spiritual introspection, Jesus says not only to Peter but to each of us, “‘But who do you say that I am?’”

If you would like to join us at worship tomorrow as we take this reading one step further, and where we have a chance to focus our attention on Jesus’ question “‘But who do you say that I am?’, I invite you to walk through our church doors and into our church community.  If that is not possible or uncomfortable, you are more than welcome to join us online by sending an email to [email protected].
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If you’d like, here is the link to the Southern New England Conference’s daily reading schedule:  www.sneucc.org/lectionary.

Throughout the year, the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ reproduces the Daily Lectionary for use by churches.  These are the suggested readings for February 23rd:  Genesis 16:1-6; Psalm 22:23-31; and Romans 4:1-12.  I would encourage you to read these short selections as part of your Lenten practice.

I appreciate the honesty of today’s Genesis passage, but I find it hard to be inspired by it.  Of course, there is always the message that God is able to work for good no matter the situation, but oh my gosh the humans in this story are unpleasant. 
Today is a Lenten Friday.  These are times when Good Friday’s cross is at the center of our field of vision.  Jesus endured the cross’ scandalous execution for all people.  When Jesus asks God to forgive His torturers (Luke 23:34), we see that the cross is unconditional love.  Jesus loves us all, even the unpleasant.

More information is being shared about the mass shooting at the Super Bowl Victory Parade in Kansas City.  According to the County Prosecutor, the mass shooting began when Lyndell Mays got into an argument with a stranger.  As the argument escalated, Mays drew his gun.  Mays did not know the other person from Adam, but because of words exchanged over but a few moments, Mays felt justified to gun down the other person, to intentionally harm or kill this complete stranger because of words shared over a few moments. 

Missouri has extremely lax gun laws.  Guns are prevalent.  When Mays drew his gun, others in the celebratory crowd drew theirs.  One was Dominic Miller who is accused of killing an innocent bystander.  Both Mays and Miller are juveniles.  Others are going to be charged as well. 

Has the Super Bowl shooting already passed from your attention?  Has this sort of gun violence become normal for us in America?  Has the idea of two teenagers, strangers to one another, who have so little respect for life that they are willing to shoot and murder someone because of words exchanged, become typical?  What about the fact of spraying the bullets randomly so that tens of people are shot without care or concern?  How do children turn into this and how does a society allow for this? 

Maybe the unpleasant characters in Genesis hit too close to home. 

And yet, Jesus cares for us all, saint and sinner alike and everyone in between, and loves us so unreservedly that the cross is endured for all people, even the most unpleasant.  If you turn in your Bibles to Luke 23:34, you may see “‘Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing’” within double brackets.  The brackets indicate that biblical scholars are uncertain as to the authenticity of this verse.  It is included in the biblical text, but scholars acknowledge that it is absent from some ancient sources. 

I believe that it is authentic, but that it was so disturbing a sentiment that some scribes could not copy it.  It is difficult to believe in Jesus’ unconditional love because it’s hard to apply to unpleasant people, so how could Jesus forgive the ones who literally nailed Him to the cross?  This is one of Lent’s greatest challenges, to see in the cross God’s love for everyone.  This is not a logical love.  It is not one that is deserved or earned.  It is given freely because God loves by nature not by condition.  And this is Jesus’ love, and that makes all the difference.
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If you’d like, here is the link to the Southern New England Conference’s daily reading schedule:  www.sneucc.org/lectionary.

Throughout the year, the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ reproduces the Daily Lectionary for use by churches.  These are the suggested readings for February 22nd:  Genesis 15:1-6, 12-18; Psalm 22:23-31; and Romans 3:21-31.  I would encourage you to read these short selections as part of your Lenten practice.

Sometimes it just takes faith.  Abram (not yet named Abraham) was promised an astounding future by Yahweh.  “In a vision” Yahweh converses with Abram.  It is not possible to define such an experience because the vision occurs at the threshold of worlds, while our experiences and language are earth-bounded.  We read in Genesis of this vision’s revelation: “[Yahweh] brought [Abram] outside and said, ‘Look towards heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.’ Then he said to him, ‘So shall your descendants be.’”  This experience reminds me of Paul’s vision where the apostle, who is seldom at a loss for words, relates not once but twice, “[W]hether in the body or out of the body I do not know.” (2 Corinthians 12:2, 3) Such ecstatic experiences must be amazing, but also terrifying as we will get to in a moment.

Before that, however, this vision-revelation about countless descendants is spoken to an aging man who has no physical heir.  It is becoming less and less practical for Abram to imagine anything other than his DNA ending with his demise.  Visions live at the boundaries of worlds, but procreation is inherently a physical reality.  Which future will Abram invest in?  Yahweh’s vision or the obvious reality of an aging body?  It is with this unspoken question in mind that Genesis continues by saying, “And [Abram] believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.”

Abram believed, trusted, Yahweh’s promise, and this belief/trust is recognized by God as righteousness.  In other words, to live rightly (righteously) is to believe in God’s truth.  This need not be practical, logical or experiential.  To believe is to venture to that threshold between worlds that we cannot approach except through the rarest of extraordinary interventions.  And these boundaries can be terrifying, which we can now discuss.

What is the difference between Abram’s awake-vision where Yahweh takes him outside and then this even less explicable encounter that Genesis tries to explain as:  “As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him.”  This imagery draws Genesis’ reader back to 2:21 when God “caused a deep sleep” to fall upon Adam as Eve was about to be created.  Both of these are creation accounts.  The Adam myth is about the physical human creation.  The Abram myth is about the creation through faith of the people of God.  Both are mysteries that are part physical and part mystical, and the dual nature of both can only be seen through belief, through trust.

Paul synthesizes the Adam and Abram myths by teaching that in Christ all creation (Adam) are the people of God (Abram).  He writes for us today:  “For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith.”

On June 4, 1988, Mother Teresa visited the Massachusetts state prison in Concord.  She told the inmates that she would never forget them, that they were all precious to her.  After her visit, a reporter asked her at a press conference if the inmates were sinners.  She answered, “We are all sinners.  And that is why we need the tender mercy of God.” (https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/02/17/metro/mci-concord-prison-closing-stories/ )  Adam, Abram and Jesus are all stories of renewal, of renewal based on belief, on trust.  May Lent help us to see the unseen threshold that Jesus promises to all of us because all of us are known and precious to God.
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If you’d like, here is the link to the Southern New England Conference’s daily reading schedule:  www.sneucc.org/lectionary.

Throughout the year, the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ reproduces the Daily Lectionary for use by churches.  These are the suggested readings for February 21st:  Psalm 77; Proverbs 30:1-9; and Matthew 4:1-11.  I would encourage you to read these short selections as part of your Lenten practice.

I have mentioned previously my preference for Mark’s willingness to engage with the reality of Jesus’ humanity.  His human nature is Jesus’ connection with us, which is the whole reason for Jesus in the first place.  We need to be cautious when that connection is challenged.

Mark 1:13 is the entirety of the earliest Gospel’s story of Jesus in the wilderness.  Mark serves as the scaffolding for the later Gospels of Matthew and Luke.  Matthew grows Mark’s temptation account from one verse to ten, and Luke from one to twelve.  The story does not appear in John.

In Mark, there is mention of the 40 days, Satan and temptation.  These are then expanded upon in the two later accounts, filling in details that Mark was not aware of some ten years earlier.  Also, Matthew and Luke differ in their accounts.  Scholars believe that they are sharing the same source since the accounts are so similar, but the order we read today in Matthew (a steady rise in elevation from wilderness to Temple to mountaintop) is changed by Luke because Luke customarily emphasizes Jerusalem and thus places it as the site of the climactic last temptation. 

What this adds up to is a basic telling of the story in Mark, a later addition to the story that Luke further adapts for theological reason, and then much later its complete absence in John who is unaware of this account or more likely disagreed with it and chose to keep it out of his Gospel.  This is not so much history as it is biblical theology.  There is most likely an historical kernel at the source of all this, and it is the basic idea that Jesus had to struggle with the meaning and implication of that blast of revelation or realization that struck Him after His baptism in the Jordan River.  However, the most important aspect of the temptation account is the theological matter of how Jesus moved from carpenter to Messiah.

2,000 years ago in a more mythical age it may not have provoked much of a reaction as Matthew shares the news that the bodily devil carries the bodily Jesus to Jerusalem where the two of them stand “on the pinnacle of the temple,” or that Jesus is then whisked off through the skies to a high mountain, but I have to admit for me this all sounds like more than is needed.  For me, it actually interferes in the reality of Jesus’ temptation.

Rather than Satan tempting Jesus from without, what if the temptation story is the mythical representation of Jesus’ inner struggle to discover who He is and what He is to do?  Jesus is acknowledged as Son of God at His baptism.  Is that a relationship to be exploited, that Jesus should expect His own needs to be a priority – as in turn these stones into bread if you’re hungry?  Does His Sonship grant Him privilege so that Jesus can demand of God a release from the vulnerability forced upon all other human life – as in jump down from this Temple tower because God will not allow you to be harmed?  Is His last temptation to simply walk away?  The first two were temptations to pervert His calling as Son of God, but the third is to abandon that calling completely – as in don’t worry about God but rather choose to deny God as did Satan?

These are deeply spiritual and psychological issues that Jesus of Nazareth would have to deal with before He could ever emerge from His isolation and begin His public ministry.  These seem so much more powerful and relatable as Jesus struggles with His calling.  This whole idea of how any of us respond to our conscience, to the inner voice of God, is at play here.  Satan is a distraction.  May we use Lent to listen more attentively for God and may we engage in asking what it is that we expect of faith, and may the Jesus who emerges from these tests in the wilderness help us to choose what may be the more difficult path that our faith calls us to.
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If you’d like, here is the link to the Southern New England Conference’s daily reading schedule:  www.sneucc.org/lectionary.