Temptation

Mark 1:9-15

February 22, 2015

Lent 1

So Jesus’ baptism was nice.

The heavens were torn apart and the spirit came down

and the voice of God said “you are my beloved. “

It was a beautiful thing I’m sure.

The Temptation
Corwin Knapp Linson

But Jesus had no time for a baptismal party.

No time for punch and sheet cake

and those little corner pimento cheese sandwiches.

because the nice spirit who just descended lightly on Jesus

just picked Jesus up and threw him out into the wilderness.

When we think of the wilderness it’s nice

Usually a weekend getaway, a respite from our normal life.

But in Jesus time, the wilderness was not

a place people ever really wanted to go.

It was desert.

There were no resources, no springs or streams,

no plants for food, no shelter.

Besides the wild beasts mentioned,

There was also the real possibility of wild people

who were out to do others harm.

The Wilderness represented dangerous, unruly, risky places.

Places that most people would be avoiding.

We could consider the wilderness as

the opposite of “normal and respectable”.

Yet this is where the Spirit drives Jesus right after his baptism.

Right after the anointing of him and the beginning of ministry.

The Spirit sends Jesus into a place that people avoid.

And not only is Jesus driven into this uncomfortable place.

But it says he was there to be tempted by Satan.

Notice that in Mark’s gospel –

what most people think was the first gospel written down --

there is no explanation of what that temptation was,

This whole story is just one sentence:

¹³He was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts;

and the angels waited on him.

When Christianity has defined Temptation,

we often think of vices:

Dessert, drinking, drugs, sexual temptations,

whatever your particular cup of tea is.

Whatever those temptation are –

they’re seen as a deviation from a “normal and respectable” life.

A normal and respectable life is here -

and temptations are there outside.

But are those things out there really our greatest temptation?

In our Adult Ed class last week,

on Christian practices, our video was from a

man named Shane Claibourne, he’s a very young

and up and coming theologian. He’s kind of hip looking.

He was saying that normally, when we testify to Jesus power

to transform lives, we’re usually talking about Jesus

taking people who are outside of our mainstream -

who are not “normal and respectable” -

and following Jesus helps them become “normal and respectable”.

Like people who were once suffering addictions or in gangs

and now they’re like working, family type people.

And, of course, those are great testimonies of Jesus power to heal.

But he said his story was opposite that.

He had a very normal life,

He was destined for “normal and respectable”.

He was homecoming king, had good grades, he was popular

was going to go to college and would

have had a normal respectable career.

But then Jesus came in and messed everything up for him.

He went to India to help children for a year

he gave up all his stuff,

now he lives in community with other Christians

They make his own clothes, grow their own food,

they work and live in one of the worst neighborhoods in Philadelphia.

He does not have what most people would call

a “normal and respectable life”

God called him outside a normal life to something different.

And I think that maybe Jesus temptation

wasn’t chocolate cake, or drinking, or lust or

anything outside the norm.

Don’t you think that his greatest temptation was

just to live a normal life?

At Jesus baptism, the heavens opened up and God spoke,

claimed Jesus as his own, and right then, he had to make the choice

to either have the wife and the 2.5 kids,

open up his carpentry business,

and go to synagogue on Saturday night.

or to follow God’s particular call for him – savior of the world.

And what if that is really our greatest temptation too?

To always go with the status quo, to follow the way of the world,

to do what is “normal and respectable”

and follow whatever the dominant culture expects.

Now I’m not saying that the spirit is calling each one of us

to leave our jobs and family and drop out and live in

communes in poor neighborhoods.

Maybe some of us, but not all of us.

But I do think that God is calling us to be different.

Different than the dominant culture.

-To trust God above our own abilities,

-To not put our trust in the gods of the market system

or the blind pursuit of wealth and security.

-To trust in God’s abundance. To share what we have.

-To not fall in step with the drums of war and violence.

-To not fear those who are different from us.

-To care for other people’s families as much as our own.

-To love and pray for our enemies, turn the other cheek.

We are called to be different than the world.

And that means we often have to choose what is

not seen as “normal and respectable”.

This Lent we are focusing on “Walking with Jesus.”

Walking with Jesus in his life and ministry and

following his steps to the cross.

In our baptism, God chose us for his ministry in the world.

We are called to Walk with Jesus in our lives.

And sometimes that means making difficult choices

God’s call is not easy.

Jesus road was not smooth.

But just like Jesus, we are promised

that God will be with us in the wilderness

as we stumble and fall

and throughout our journey.

Hope for the Journey

Mark 9:2-9

February 15, 2015

Transfiguration

Transfiguration
James Janknect

Today is Transfiguration.
The day that we remember when Jesus and

the disciples go  up on the mountaintop and suddenly,

Jesus is changed, transfigured, he’s pure white,

he’s glowing with light. And he is talking

with two great figures of the faith,

Elijah and Moses. It’s beautiful,

Some say that this is the resurrection story

put in the middle of the gospel.

It has some of those qualities.

Some say it’s a testament to the divinity of Jesus

Showing his relationship with the great prophets

and leaders of ages past. That’s true too.

What it is is a vision.

And this vision was given to help the disciples I think.

The vision is beautiful, wonderful,

so wonderful that Peter offers to build three worship stations

and permanently post their whole ministry right there

at the top of the mountain.

But that’s regarded as a silly thought right away.

Their ministry is down at the bottom of the mountain.

Immediately after this, they go back down the mountain.

Back down to the poverty, the pain, the sickness, the hunger

the dysfunctional and oppressive systems of the world.

They have to come down again.

because there is more work to do.

But I think that the vision that Peter, James and John

received at the top of the mountain,

helped them through when they got back down.

The vision let them know that they were doing the right thing,

they were following the right person.

That Jesus really was the son of God.

That is the power of a vision.

It gets people through hard times.

Now a days, we don’t put too much

credence in visions.

If someone said that they saw Jesus glowing in light

speaking to Elijah and Moses,

most of us would be suspicious,

wonder if that person is in their right mind.

Were they crazy, did they get enough sleep?

Those kinds of visions are not held in high regard today.
But that doesn't mean we don’t have visions.

Today, our visions are our imaginations,

pictures of a better world, a better situation

or they are glimpses of things

that assure us that a better world is possible.

Today, God still gives us visions of pure love,

kindness, community, sacrifice, and joy.

We see people helping other people, welcoming,

standing up for others.

We see people who are in desperate situations,

coming back to rejoin life and the world.

We see peace where there was war,

joy where there was sadness, hope where there was defeat.

Those are visions.

Things that we can come back to

when things don’t look so good for us.

When our lives get difficult, sad, or downright awful.

We can return to our visions of love and beauty and hope

Those things that going through the difficult times.

At Gethsemane, we have a vision.

We have come together and over the last year

the council has written our vision.

A statement that paints a picture of what

we want to do and be in the future.

Our vision statement is:

To empower a servant community that overflows

with God’s grace, justice, and welcome.

Not quite as impressive as Jesus glowing on a mountain,

but it serves in some of the same ways.

To get to that vision, we took what our congregation did best,

what we valued, what we seemed to  gravitate to,

and we prayed and asked God to show us

what we could be if we did all this well.

And over time, we got an answer.

We saw that we would be a community that serves like Jesus served,

that we would empower other people to serve too.

That our community would feel God’s grace so much

that other people would feel it, just by being around us,

That everyone would be welcomed into

our community and know of God’s welcome through us.

And we saw that we would overflow with God’s justice too.

That we would help make God’s vision of the kingdom

a reality in this world:

where everyone was treated like a child of God

and get an equal chance in this world regardless of their state in life.

where people would be fed and housed and clothed.

And our community would have a part in making it happen.

It’s a good vision. It is a great image of what is possible.

But there is still work to be done

We have to make a plan and then after that,

we have to make those plans a reality.

  

And we have to do actual work of ministry here,

down at the bottom of the mountain

Where people are not empowered to serve,

Where people don’t know and trust God’s grace and welcome,

and we don’t know how to share it.

Where God’s justice is not evident, and people still suffer.

But when things get difficult or downright awful,

We always have our vision to return to

to remind us where we need to go, and what is possible.

This Wednesday is Ash Wednesday,

the beginning of Lent.  The difficult time in the church.
The time of the church where we do the hard spiritual work of

examining our own shortcomings and frailties,

our vulnerability and our sins.

And we walk with Jesus through his ministry,

his betrayal, arrest, and his way to the cross.

But before we go there,

we get a taste of glory, a taste of beauty,

a taste of hope, a glimpse of the resurrection that is to come.

We see Jesus on the mountain top,

We see the heavens opened up and hear God’s voice say

“this is my son, the Beloved, listen to him.”

Dealing With Our Demons

Mark 1:21-28

February 1, 2015

So what is a unclean spirit doing in a place of worship?

A church, a synagogue?

Demons aren’t allowed in places like this. Right?

I bet those people that went to that synagogue were mortified.

They have, Jesus, this guest preacher in.

He obviously knows what he’s doing.

A very prestigious person.

And that man with the unclean spirit starts yelling at him.

I mean they probably have learned to ignore the man,

and act like he wasn’t there but to have him yell

The Possessed Man in the Synagogue
James Tissot, 1886

at the visitor like that!

That’s not the image that we want

in our place of worship, right?

In a church, everyone is nice and respectful.

everyone is kind and patient. 

Reasonable and balanced.

We wouldn’t let an unclean spirit 

roam around the church.

We’re better that that.

It sounds silly, but that’s kind of how

people of God have acted

for the last few thousand years.

From the Pharisees to the church ladies.

We’ve tried to act like we’re different in here than out there.

While we’re in church, we’ve tried to

trying to quell every kind of normal thing

that would happen out there-

No coughing, no talking, no crying,

no screaming, no bodily functions.

And definitely not a place to share our

sorrow or pain, fears, and shortcomings.

I remember vividly, at five years old,

my grandmother trying to make me sit perfectly still through church.

Honestly, she scolded me for just fidgeting in my seat.

Up until that point, I had never given the indication

that I would sit still for anything else,

but we were in church. So her expectation went way high.

It’s almost as if the culture of church

makes us want to check our humanity at the door.

We have done our best to act like we’re

set apart from the rest of the world.

Like somehow as believers, we’re not as human as everyone else.

Like somehow we don’t need Jesus.

I wonder how long that man with the unclean spirit

had been coming to the synagogue.
How many outbursts, how much discomfort,

how much sorrow and pain he had to endure alone

as people pretended it wasn’t happening.

How many times did people look away,

roll their eyes, and ignore him -

Before Jesus came in and did something about it.

When I was about 13,

I pretty much stopped going to church

like a lot of people do at that age.

And I used the same excuse that many people use.
The church was too hypocritical.

People were not living out what was being taught.

There was gossip, and bad behavior, lying,

people hurting other people’s feelings,

leaving people out, just like there was in the real world.

I started to become a little self-righteous

(13 is about when people start to become a little self righteous.)

I convinced myself that I would never do that sort of thing.

But I did come back to church.

And looking back,

I have certainly not been perfect.

I have had my moments of unclean spirits,

I have been hypocritical just like everyone else has.

If I could talk to the 13 year old me,

I would tell her that I was thinking about the church all wrong.

(She wouldn’t listen, of course, but I would still tell her.)

The church is not meant to be a place separate

from the rest of the world.

Sanitized from bad activity, pure and clean.

The church is just like the world, demons and all.

In the church, we learn how to recognize demons,

other people’s and our own,

and we learn how to confront them and work on them

with the power and compassion and love of God.

 We don’t come to church just to worship God.

We come to church to be in community with other believers.

We come here to interact with others, to make decisions,

to disagree, to be in conflict, to manipulate,

to slip up and be short with one another –

To have our demons exposed in front of the congregation

and then to experience the power, forgiveness,

grace and mercy of God, through the community.

We are as human as the rest of the world.

And places of worship are supposed to be

the places where we can bring the worst of our humanity

and have Jesus meet us.

It’s the place where we can repent and forgive.

Where our darkness can meet the light of God.

Walking in the light,

doesn’t mean being perfect, or better than others.

It actually means realizing we are not light ourselves.

Letting God’s light rest on us.

And letting that light change and transform us.

Like in that synagogue

this is the place where Jesus meets us,

confronts our demons and transforms us.

And when our demons are confronted by the light of Christ,

in truth, love, mercy and forgiveness,

that is when we are truly changed and set free.