The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
March 1, 2009

1 Lent – B
Genesis 9:8-17
1 Peter 3:18-22
Mark 1:9-13

In Jostein Gaarder’s novel Sophie’s World, Sophie, who is fourteen, comes home from school one day and checks the mailbox. In it she finds a plain white envelope with only her name on it. No stamp, no postmark, no indication where it came from or how it got there. Sophie opens the envelope, and inside she finds a single sheet of paper with only one thing written on it, a question: “Who are you?”

Sophie says to herself, ”Why, I’m Sophie Amundsen, of course.” But then she begins to wonder, ”Would I still be Sophie Amundsen if I had been given a different name, say, Anne Knudsen? Would I still be Sophie then, or would I be someone else?”

The next day, another envelope arrives with this question: “Where does the world come from?” And that is followed by other envelopes with other mysterious questions like, ”Can something come from nothing?” and “Is there a basic substance that everything else is made of?” and “Can water turn into wine?” and “How can earth and water produce a live frog?” and “Why is Lego the most ingenious toy in the world?”

In between these questions, Sophie receives other envelopes with letters from this mysterious philosopher that contain long discussions of all the questions he poses and of how philosophers throughout history have tried to answer them. And the upshot of the book is that the philosopher moves 14-year-old Sophie through the history of the Western world’s search for knowledge and meaning, from Democritus and the atom in ancient Greece to the Fermi Lab and top and bottom quarks in Illinois.

Who are you? What is reality? Why is the world the way it is? And why are you the way you are? And these are the selfsame questions, good questions all, that Satan was asking Jesus those forty days in the wilderness.

Earlier, at his baptism, a voice from heaven had declared that Jesus was the Son of God. But later, in the wilderness, Satan tested Jesus about who he was. “You are hungry after forty days out here, Jesus. If you are the son of God, then turn this stone into bread and have a meal. Act like a real god!”

Then Satan led Jesus to a high place and showed him all the kingdoms of the world. “It’s all mine,” said Satan, ”and if you will worship me, I’ll give you all its authority and splendor.”

Finally Satan led Jesus to Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the Temple. And there Satan tempted Jesus a third time, ”If you, Jesus, are who the voice from heaven says you are, if you are the Son of God, then throw yourself down from here, for the Scriptures say that ‘the Lord will command his angels to guard you, and they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’”

Who are you, Jesus? If you are who they say you are, then why not use your power to provide food for the hungry, and why not throw the bums in Jerusalem out and seize power and rule your people yourself, and why not put an end to all the questions about you? Put an end to all our doubts. Walk across my swimming pool. Give the angels a chance to show their stuff. Jump off the Temple and let them catch you. And when everybody sees that, they’ll all know for sure that God really is, and that you are God’s Son. They’ll have the religious certainty they crave.

But each time, Jesus resisted. Perhaps Jesus resisted because, after all, he had heard it all before.

Perhaps, when Satan tempted Jesus to turn the stones into bread, Jesus was remembering that earlier day when the people had said to Moses: “Moses, why did you bring us out into this wilderness where there is nothing to eat? It would have been better if we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt. At least in Egypt there was plenty to eat. If the Lord is God, let him give us some bread.” But Jesus knew that all the bread and quail the Lord had provided in the wilderness had not prevented the people from forgetting the Lord once they reached the safety and plenty of Canaan.

And when Satan tempted Jesus to seize political power, perhaps Jesus remembered that day when the elders of Israel went to the prophet Samuel at Ramah and said, ”Samuel, you are old, and your sons do not walk in your ways. We need a new leader. We want to be like all the other nations. Appoint a king to lead us. We want power.” But Jesus knew that all the kings of Israel and Judah combined had not been able to lead the people to live as the Lord had hoped they would live.

And when Satan tempted Jesus to give the people the religious certainty they longed for, perhaps Jesus remembered the longing of the ancient prophet for a sign, ”Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, Lord! Oh, that the mountains would tremble before you and the nations quake before you, as they did when you did awesome things we did not expect!” But Jesus knew that the miraculous and the spectacular had never been able to save the people, because every time, once the show was over, the people had forgotten the Lord their God.

And we’ve heard it all before, too, haven’t we? We remember how Jesus spoke to Peter when Peter said, ”God forbid, Lord, that you should be a God who will be rejected, and who will suffer and die just like us! What good is a God like that? No bread, no power, no sign, no glory? That mustn’t be the way it is with you. God forbid it!” And we remember, don’t we, how Jesus turned to Peter and said, ”Get behind me, Satan, Tempter, Adversary! You think as men think, not as God thinks.”

But isn’t a powerful, spectacular god the kind of god we all tempt Jesus to be? Tempt him to be a god who provides the meat and potatoes of life, preferably without too much trouble on our part. Tempt him to be a god who takes charge of the troops and punishes all those other people who don’t think right or act right, but who, of course, rewards us because we do. And tempt him to be a god who doesn’t keep us in suspense, but who does miraculous, spectacular things so that we don’t have to wonder if he really is who people say he is.

You know, the Scriptures are really not concerned about the philosophical question that comes up from time to time in Sophie's World. The Scriptures do not ask, “Does God exist?” The Scriptures assume the existence of God. The question the Scriptures ask is: “What kind of God is God?”

And that is what Satan really wants to know. “Who are you, Jesus?” Satan asks. “Will you be for us what we want you to be? Or are you another kind of God, a God, like Yahweh, who hides his face from us and keeps us wondering about Him?”

But Jesus doesn’t explain who he is; he just shows us. Jesus’ resistance to our temptations reveals his vocation. In refusing to be the god we want him to be, Jesus shows us his Father, the God the Scriptures speak about, the God of justice and steadfast love who calls us to nothing more, and nothing less, than “to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God.”

Bishop Stanley Atkins, who was Bishop of the Diocese of Eau Claire, in Wisconsin, when I was in seminary, said something in a sermon that has stuck with me through the years. “Jesus was not sent to make the world a better place,” he said. “That’s you’re job, and mine. Jesus was sent to make the world different.”

Providing food for those who need it, using the power of politics to achieve just ends, using the resources God has given us to make the world a better place – those are our jobs, our vocations, not Jesus’ job. Jesus’ job, Jesus’ vocation, is to be Jesus.

And that brings us back again to Jesus there in the wilderness in Judea and here in the wilderness with us. Perhaps Jesus – there in the wilderness in Judea and here in the wilderness with us – was remembering who he was. Perhaps he was remembering that his father was a wandering Aramean who had gone down into Egypt with a few people, and who had lived there and had become a great nation, but whom the Egyptians had mistreated and enslaved. And perhaps Jesus was remembering that it was the Lord, not a king of Judea, who had brought us out of Egypt and who had seen our misery in the wilderness, and that it was the Lord who had fed us during those forty years, and who had brought us safely to the Jordan.

And perhaps Jesus was thinking, ”My job, my vocation, is to remember all that. My vocation is to remember that the Lord God, One who loves his people, and who is always with his people, and who faithfully delivers his people, and who calls us but “to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with Him.” Perhaps Jesus was thinking, ”This is who I am as well. I am one who, in my life and in my death, is called to trust that God will be with me now and in the future even as he was with us in Egypt and in the wilderness of Sinai. I am one who is called to remember that, and to offer the first fruits of my life for the faithful grace and mercy of God.”

And that brings us back to Sophie, and to us. Who are we?

What Jesus knew, and what all the saints know, is that you can have a full stomach and still not know the answer to the question, “Who am I?” And you can be king of the most powerful empire on earth, and still not know who you are. And you can have the certainty of all the knowledge of the universe, from atoms to protons to quarks, and you can have a universal theory that explains all phenomena of the physical universe, and you can even be certain of the existence of God, and yet remain spiritually hungry, not having a spiritual answer to the question.

The possession of all the political power on earth, access to all the bread and steak and potatoes you want, and even the certainty of the existence of God, can still leave one spiritually hungry, if you do not also understand what kind of God God is, and if you do not know how God relates to you and how you relate to God.

All the food and power and religious certainty in the world, in other words, cannot answer the spiritual and moral questions of life, because the question, ”Who am I?” when asked as a spiritual question, is a question of the heart. It is a question that asks: What is my story? Who are my father and mother? Who are my brothers and sisters? What is my relationship to them, and to God?

Jesus knew that. All the saints know that. And that is why Jesus resists our temptations for him to dazzle us or to overwhelm us with power, just as God resisted the temptation to show Moses his face.

Instead, Jesus says to us, as he said to that Satan long ago, ”Do not put the Lord your God to the test. The ends do not justify the means, not even if the end one seeks is faith in God. For faith ceases to be faith if it is coerced, just as love ceases to be love if it is coerced. What spiritual good is it even to do the right thing if it is achieved through manipulation? If you chain a vicious dog to a tree so it won’t bite anyone at the picnic, does that make it a good dog? If an act is coerced, even if the end it achieves is good, does that make the act itself, and the person who does it, good? Can a man be good if it is not possible for him not to be?”

So Jesus resists our temptation for him to offer spiritual satisfaction through miraculous political or religious dazzle. Because the good end that God has in mind for us is a spiritual end, and the only means appropriate for achieving a spiritual end are spiritual means. Because we do not live by bread alone. Nor by power. Nor by dazzle.

And that’s why Jesus says to us today, as he said to Peter, and as he said to the Tempter in the wilderness, ”Get behind me, Satan! For you think the way the world thinks, not the way God thinks.”

And so, thinking as God thinks, in the wilderness of our temptations, Jesus turns his back on the manipulative and coercive ways of the world, and he sets out resolutely to walk the way of the Cross, because that’s what Jesus knows his vocation to be – to remember who he is, one who offers the first fruits of his life in thanksgiving for all God has done for us.

At its deepest level, the question “Who am I?” is not an economic or political question. It’s not even a religious question. It’s a spiritual and moral question. And no economics or politics or science, not even any religion or church, can answer it for us. At the spiritual level, the question “Who am I?” is a question that asks: What is my story? Who are my father and mother? Who are my brothers and sisters? Who are my children? Who do I love? How am I to live in thanksgiving for what God and they have done for me?

And the good news for us today is that, for our sake, by resisting the temptations of economic and political power and religious dazzle, Jesus calls us to remember, as Teihard de Chardin remembered, that “we are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a human experience.”

Jesus leads us to ask the important questions of life spiritually: “Who are you, Jesus?” and “Who are we?” For if Jesus is to save us, he must save us from asking these questions only in a political or economic or religious or scientific way. Political and economic and religious and scientific questions are big questions. They reveal a wonderfully big world. But it’s not big enough! Our vocation is to ask those questions spiritually as well. That’s what Lent is all about.

“Who are you?” we demanded of Jesus, even as he was hanging on the Cross. “If you are the son of God, come down from the Cross and save yourself. Come down from the Cross and save us as well.”

But he just hung there, because

He came as Savior to his own,
the way of love he trod;
He came to win us by good will,
for force is not of God.

Not to oppress, but summon all,
their truest life to find;
In love, God sent his Son to save,
not to condemn mankind.

-- the Epistle to Diognetus, c. AD 150
Hymn #489

Jesus just hung there, resisting temptation, being who he is and leading us to wonder, leading us to ask the spiritual questions of Lent: ”Who are you, Jesus? And who are we?”

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.