Ash Wednesday Sermon, Mr. Laubach, "Escape into Lent", 1964-02-12

it's been the story of jesus'

temptation in the wilderness is the traditional text for a sermon on ash wednesday the forty days of his wilderness experience gave rise to the forty days of the season which the christian church calls the season of light you heard the story of the temptations as they were read this evening as our scripture lesson i think there are two things which need to be said about the first is that the retreat into the wilderness was not for jesus an isolated event the retreat came in response to an affirmation jesus had just been baptized in the jordan and he had just heard that call which was to mark the beginning of his ministry and so his retreat is not a turning away from the call but it is rather an opportunity for him to work out what that call will really mean for him what kind of a ministry he will fulfill

in both the story of the baptism and of the temptations the gospel writers are trying to describe a profound psychological and religious experience and lacking the vocabulary to do this they choose the form of physical images and a baptism experience they tell about a ghost from heaven and a voice from the clouds which gives approval to christ and the temptation the images are different the figure is not that of the dove of peace but of the prince of darkness and the words that are heard are not the blessings of approval where the mocking voice of detector now however you look at the experience in the wilderness whatever form you may think the temptations to work and whatever they may mean to you i think the experience comes to us as a time of

revelation it seems to me in this moment we can see three things their we can see jesus discovering what kind of a messiah he would be we can see god revealing what kind of a relationship he is seeking to have with men and perhaps most important of all we can see something of what you and i are called to be a flock of these things one at a time to begin within his wrestling in the wilderness jesus discovers what kind of a messiah he won't really be he establishes the basis of his ministry and the bases is this that he will be a man among men and that he will be what he preaches that we arrive at these conclusions only through long and painful struggle and arrive at them he experienced temptations of three different kinds

and the first one the devil reminded him that he was hungry and suggested that surely if you were the son of god that would not be difficult for him to turn the stones all around him into bread now i'm sure that there was a great fact during this experience but if what we know about the master is true then his own physical hunger is probably not as important in this experience at least for him as his understanding of the plight of his people for the jews were conquered nation they were a nation burden down with taxes by their copper they were in economic and physical need we might call them a depressed area today an area in which starvation was not an academic question it was a day by day reality for me well where there were a few very rich and many very poor

and almost no one in between the first temptation that jesus had was to use his powers to relieve the physical and material needs of his people in his second encounter with a temper jesus was shown the kingdoms of the world and it was suggested to him that he could become the leader and ruler of all of these if he would simply exercises power in the right way again it's hard to believe that this was the temptation for personal power and it is easier to understand this temptation in the light of the jewish political situation where the deals were conquered an occupied people their masters were the romans and their masters' demanded immediate obedience are the consequences or death as in any occupied country there was a widespread underground movement and jesus would know that only a few years before this had erupted into violent and bloody

warfare which had been quickly put down by the romans in their usual efficient way the persons involved had been executed on process which on the road in public view for miles around surely there must have occurred to jesus or thought that he could become the champion of political freedom but he could win liberty from rome for his people the third temptation was that if jesus was really the son of god you could demonstrate it before the people by performing states that would be possible only to one upheld by the power of god himself for instance if at midday if jesus were to leap off the highest pinnacle of the temple at a time when thousands of people would be watching and if after his leave god should bear him up so that he survived the experience without harm then surely there would be no doubt in anyone's mind here indeed was the son of god someone special someone able

to do wonders the messiah himself if jesus was to demonstrate who he was he could scarcely do it in a more dramatic way than this now these were the three temptations and these were at the heart of all the wrestling which jesus did in these days alone we know what we know about them because in each case jesus was able to push back the temptation and to come to a new understanding of what it meant to be god's man in man's world out of this experience he knew clearly that he was not called upon to fill bellies however much this might be demanded of him by the people nor was he called to lead armies no matter how much the people might expect this of him and if you will look ahead to their terrible disappointment on palm sunday you will

know how much of a temptation this must really have been and he understood to that he would not resume that got special interventions would get him out of every difficulty he faced he came to know that he was a man a man among other men about his power would not come from himself and who he was his power would come from god himself and his ministry would not be to attract men to himself but to point b on himself to god and when he knew this he knew what he had come into the wilderness to learn and he could go from the wilderness began his ministry the temptations stories tell us about the kind of the messiah jesus wants and they tell us also a good deal about what kind of a god god is and this may not come as

new information to most of you preachers have been telling us a good deal about what god is from pulpits for generation after generation but somehow the message still needs to get through oh god is may seem like an academic question in a world where we seem to be able to get along fairly well without god of all most of our ideas about god no longer seem to be able to fit into an atomic universe in a sunday school class recently not our only i had a group of teenagers was asked if they agreed with the statement it is possible there are different dogs who will light engage of the different galaxies of space and their response was total agreement there was no dissenting voice that teacher was shot amazed that young people would have a concept of god

as a purely local agent operative only in one small section of the vastness of the universe but it is only shocking when we realize that we live in a scientific age with scientific concepts of the universe but we live in a spiritual age which takes many of its concepts from a pre scientific world the men of the old testament in many ways new level of science but they understood gotten exactly this way a local agent of great power they understood got in terms of demonstrations of that power mountains balch fire and earthquake shook the land and the lord was speaking but when i got outside their own wine they were not too sure there were other deities there who seem to hold control these deities rolled in their individual territories and they were continuing power struggles for

supremacy and the temptation narratives we see not only jesus seeking his identity but in a very strange way the curtain which pales got from our eyes seems to be drawn back and we see some very important things about the nature of god himself for here we see a god who choses deliberately that he will not act of his power but you act out of his love his strategy toward men is not one of dramatic core issue but it is a strategy of theories the stubble low he stands not over and against the world but he identifies himself with the world and with it forever now if this is true it would seem to imply that perhaps we have been looking at all the wrong places to find where god really is revealing himself

helmut to like either german theologian in his book of sermons on the parables says it's almost as if we were expecting god to come in the front door when all the time he has been at the back and he comments on the parable of diabetes and lazarus you remember how lazarus that the baker is dying literally dying of starvation at the backdoor of diaries house and pleading for crumbs from the rich man's table until iggy is saying to us that this is exactly where god is he says this we have only the word the word made flesh and crucified but shamelessly quiet word which came to us as one who was as poor and despised as his brother lazarus and that's why there could be no brass bands to march before him and that's why he renounced old royal pomp and show and that's why he had to risk the effect of ambiguity and forgo the

demonstration of his power he wanted to be the brother of the poorest and in this way show them is love no one would have believed his love and brotherly knows if he had come in the splendor which human imagination is accustomed to blow the image of god well here we are reminded that it's god himself who has chosen to reveal himself in this way it is his choice not ours he comes into our world quietly and naturally and works within our world through the power of this irresistible love and this means that power can break for anywhere at all at any moment and in any act someone speaks and suddenly the words begin to make sense and suddenly we see the meaning of life better than we have ever seen it before or

someone opens his heart to us at a difficult time and others gesture we begin to understand the way god comes toward us in in seeking love or we come through an incident which seems ordinary at the time but later in retrospect we begin to feel it was divinely planet in this incident god i was seeking to show us a new way and i knew it and the struggle of jesus in the wilderness we see the patient purposes of god who suffers with us rather then manipulates us to achieve his purposes and this is the kind of god we serve the third thing the story tells us i think is what kind of people you annoy our call today we are called to be the kind of people who refuse to accept life as it is

because we understand what god means like to be that is the inner meaning of the temptation experience in each one of the three temptations jesus was presented with an opportunity to do something that would be of raul immediate benefit to his people they would be fed they would be free from their oppressors they would be given a leader there is nothing wrong with any of these goals nothing wrong with them unless you are testing them against an ultimate goal none of these things would really give people what they really need the power to live in the fullness of what god has planned for those who love him now it is very easy for us to get seduced by the world in which we live there are so many things which seem so good in themselves and we seem to want so many of them but our grade for things can obscure

the real things to which god is calling us most of you i think will remember tom delay the medical doctor who literally gave his life to really physical suffering and pain for the people of layoffs his days were brief he was carted off by cancer before you really have an opportunity to achieve much of what he had dreamed but he knew what was asked of him and he knew what he would have to sacrifice in order to get it on one of his last that this to the united states he told reporters this sure i would like to stay here and drive the convertible and drink scotch on the rocks and pinch pretty girls but i keep seeing those broken swollen human beings and in one of his books he wrote in college we were taught the ubiquity of god but to see god in all things when you're plunged into a blatant materialism is sometimes hard

i certainly can't see god when i look at a mercedes benz convertible but in the jungle it is easier we can see him in the tropical rain the monsoon my god is more intimately present with us than we ever realize the crucial issue for each one of us is whether land shall become for us an opportunity for an escape we can use it for the most wonderful kind of escape in the world if we want to and my real fear is that some of us will give out candy that we don't really want or desserts that we probably don't need we will try to cut all smoking for the surgeon general is not for bad or that we will begin to focus on the hundred little things that will enable us to fulfill the religious rituals of the season and will also enable us to digest a larger

emptiness of our lives leno to ten pm est but it can also be an opportunity there is no time in the year when we are more vulnerable than when we faced the cross on which a savior hangs in loving death to see him there becomes intolerable for most of us and we want to turn away get away from this site go anywhere escape anyway we can but if we can avoid of escaping perhaps we will take the time to ask ourselves maybe for the first time why his death is so intolerable what do we have to do with it but it is easier to push it from us to hide in the subterfuge as we know so well to barricade ourselves with a familiar rituals even churchgoing her bible reading can be turned that selfish purpose if we

want to be we can take the fantastic news like the resurrection of our lord jesus christ and protect ourselves from its meaning by a pull string it with easter eggs and chocolate bunnies and flowery hats we can avoid facing all of the realities of the living christ if we can escape into the little details by which we can avoid them so i challenge you this lenten season but you might engage in a struggle and whatever wilderness is part of your life a struggle in which you may decide whether you are called to participate in the ministry of this christ or whether you can escape such participation whether you will share in his

responsibility for the world or whether you will run away lent upon us the demand that we look at we stand before the light and the death and the resurrection of our lord long enough that we know who he was and who knew that god is who has been revealing himself through this man and who'd you and i are called to be in whatever wilderness years' struggle takes place you will determine in this holy season where you escape from god or whether you open yourself to let us pray together it may rejoin in the prayer of consecration and in your

bulletin granted all morning that are years which have heard the voice of my songs maybe close to the voice of all on where the clamor and dispute that our eyes which have looked upon the symbols of my love may ever look to before light and gardens that our tongues switch of song by prays may ever speak the truth in love that our speech which have walked in by courts may walk ever in the way of righteousness and in the paths that lead on two piece and grant that our hearts which have waited before the maybe ever open to buy coming through jesus christ our lord the

power trip