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| (photo cred: USA Today) |
Well,
another Super Bowl is in the books; another winning team has been crowned. Another
quarterback’s legacy has been validated, and…another coach has endured a
Gatorade shower. Gary Kubiak, coach of the victorious Denver Broncos, was
doused last Sunday evening with orange Gatorade as the final seconds of the
game ticked down. Those who watch football may understand the significance of
the Gatorade shower: it’s that moment when victory seems definite and the
winning team “sneaks up” behind the coach to pour a whole cooler of Gatorade on
him.
For
many people, the Gatorade shower is the real end of the game, meaning more than
the clock actually reaching zero or more
than the referees’ final whistle. At some point in history it was probably some
team’s spontaneous reaction to a hard-fought win. Now it’s become a necessary
ritual that signals the real end of the battle. In fact, the Gatorade shower is
such a traditional part of American football that bookies now take bets on what
color the Gatorade will beat each Super Bowl. I’ve never had anyone dump a
cooler of Gatorade on me, but I imagine it’s quite a rush. All the bumps and
bruises of the long season are in the past, all the self-doubts and
second-guessing are washed away. You are named and claimed as the winner. Everyone
gathers around you, supporting you, congratulating you, and you are free to do
nothing but beginning to bask in the glory.
Jesus’
life is like a football game in reverse. His Gatorade shower comes at the very
beginning of everything—when he is baptized in the Jordan River—and the
struggle only intensifies from there. He is named and claimed as the winner—the
Son of God—but there are no shouts of joy to accompany it, no basking in glory,
no sudden end to the self-doubts and second-guessing. Immediately after his
baptism, which all four gospel writers mention in some way as the beginning of
Jesus’ ministry, the Spirit leads Jesus into solitude in the wilderness where
he does battle with his enemy. The bumps and bruises are just beginning. He
eats nothing and is weakened by hunger. He undergoes a series of temptations where
the devil tries to lead him astray. His baptismal shower has freed him from
nothing. Instead, it has initiated a life of challenges.
In
Luke’s version of this story, those challenges begin with three tests which
include just about every type of testing a person of faith can experience in
life. One test tries to lure Jesus away through his body by offering to
diminish his intense hunger. Another test attempts to strike through his heart
and sense of ego by laying before him the kingdoms of the world. And a third
test battles his intellect by using Scripture to argue against God’s power. Strength,
soul and mind are all find themselves under siege in the wilderness.
Here’s
the thing: these challenges make it very tempting to look at the account of
Jesus’ temptation and think it primarily tells us about how human Jesus is. That’s
a common reaction. We read it and think, “Look! This shows Jesus knows what
it’s like to be human. The One we call Savior feels temptation. He struggles
with hunger. He understands the lure of power and control.” And that reaction
is not all wrong. Jesus’ undertook baptism, in part, to show solidarity with
humankind, and the fact that he has to contend with temptation, with being
hungry, for example, is part of that solidarity with us.
But
the temptation of Jesus does not ultimately show us how human or ordinary Jesus
is. It shows us how godly he is. It shows us he is not your ordinary human being. He is something extraordinary because
he contends with evil and evil does not defeat him. The great Russian author
Fyodor Dostoyevsky is credited as saying that if the whole Bible were somehow
to be lost and only the account of Jesus’ temptation were to remain, it would
be enough for us to have hope. A Savior has arrived. Someone has appeared on
the scene who can contend with temptation, even in his weakened, isolated
state, and stand down the dark forces that draw us from God.
That’s
who, after all, this devil character is: the one who draws us from God. Those
who constantly want to debate and wonder about what the devil looks like or
whether the devil is a real physical being are missing the point. Scripture
talks much more about things like voice and strategy when it talks about evil. There
are voices and influences and ideas that try to lead us away from the good. There
are influences that tell us lies about the strength of our own autonomy. And in
the wilderness Jesus somehow manages to hear those voices and feel those influences
and not believe them.
The
account of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness traditionally kicks off the
Sundays in Lent, this time of the year when the Church pays special attention
to Jesus’ sacrificial way of the cross. Modelled after Jesus’ own time of
temptation and fasting, Lent is a season of forty days of special prayer and
other spiritual disciplines. It has several purposes, but one of them is to have
us pause and reflect more intentionally on what it means to turn to God. And
this morning we remember that we are only able to turn to God because Jesus has
contended against the forces of evil for us. He is the gift. He is the way. He
stands up to the voices and influences that would separate us from God and,
ultimately on the cross, puts them to death for us.
None
of this is done for us because we deserve it, or because we are distinctly
loveable, wonderful people. God rescues us in Christ Jesus out of God’s great
love and desire to have us back, to grant us a future that of communion with
him. Just like the ancient Israelites stand at their first harvest in the land
God promised them and recount how God brought them out of Egypt into a land
flowing with milk and honey—how God heard their cries of affliction and saved them with a mighty hand and an
outstretched arm, not by any power of their own—so do we stand in God’s
promises of life because of what Jesus has done for us. The battle has already
been won. The gift has already been given. Our life, our journey, is now one of
repentance; that is, learning to receive and re-learn what this great gift
means.
I don’t know if you heard the story this week out of California about the couple
who were getting ready to buy the boat that they’d always dreamed of, that
they’d saved up all their money for, but had a change of heart and ended up
instead using the money to send an entire kindergarten class to college. Navy
veteran Marty Burbank estimates that it will take about $1 million to
accomplish this, so he’s set up a private foundation for Ms. Ashton’s class at
Rio Vista Elementary School. All twenty-six kids speak Spanish at home and
arrived this year not knowing much English or what college even was. Many of
the families at Rio Vista would never even be able to afford college, and for
many of them it may not be the right thing to go to college, but Burbank, after
something he heard one Sunday at church, of all places, decided to take all the
money he was going to spend on himself and instead offer it in some way to the
school he had been volunteering at for several years. The gift is theirs. All the kids have to do is draw a picture or
write an essay every year about what going to college will mean for each of
them and their families.[1]
Now someone needs to buy Marty a boat.
It
occurs to me that that’s an illustration of repentance: a conscious reflection
on the fact that the gift has already been given what it means to you, and how
you plan to receive it. Repentance, especially in the church, often gets
reduced to just meaning your sorry or asking for forgiveness, but really it’s far
more interesting—than just that. Repentance is a process, or a frame of mind, or
a series of movements of the heart and mind that are far too complex to
summarize in one image or action.
In
fact, repentance is the way of Christian life. Martin Luther, in his first line
of the 95 Theses, which is the document he posted to the door of the castle church
in Wittenberg as he attempted to reform the church, says, “When our Lord and
Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent,’ he willed the entire life of believers to
be one of repentance.” Just as thankfulness, for example, may take look
different depending on the situation and the thankful person’s specific
circumstances…just as Valentine’s Day involves different gestures and
celebrations—or lack thereof—depending on the beloved’s mood…so does repentance
take on different aspects throughout the life of a believer.
Sometimes
it does involve apologizing for and confessing sin, but sometimes it entails
something different, like a dimension of realizing your potential for growth in
ways you’ve never noticed before. Sometimes repentance may look like coming to
terms again with your overall helplessness and weakness in this scary world. At
other times it may look like the practice of learning to desire and treasure
the right kinds of things in the right way, and seizing a chance to do so. Each
of the gospel readings this Lent will focus on a different aspect of
repentance, offering up two opposing examples of the choices we might make as
we learn to receive the gift. Regardless of what the life of repentance looks
like today and again tomorrow, it is always a reflection on what Christ has
already done for us, a rejoicing in the triumph over death and sin that Jesus
has already accomplished and handed to us.
No,
I don’t know a thing personally about what a Gatorade dump feels like at the
end of a game I’ve fought hard to win. Nor do I ever want to. But I do know
what baptism feels like, and what it’s like to hear that the battle has already
been won for me. O Lord, may I, like a fresh little kindergartner in Ms
Ashton’s class, always be ready to sit down and at least draw a picture or say
a prayer of what that means to me.
Amen.
The Reverend Phillip W.
Martin, Jr.
[1]
Katie Lobosco, CNN Money, Feb 11, 2016 http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/10/pf/college/free-college-kindergarten/index.html
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