Martin L. Smith, an Episcopal priest from Washington DC, reminds us that “taking refuge in God means entering into the heart of holy vulnerability: God’s track is away from immunity into solidarity with the broken and abandoned and leads to being ‘numbered with the transgressors’.” (SOJOURNERS, March 2019:48) Our several excursions with The Tempter urge us to forget the despair of yesterday and rejoice solely in our possessions of today–but our thanksgiving is hollow if we won’t recall how deeply we had sunk in the Pit, and how greatly God ventured to extricate us.
Deuteronomy 26:1-11 gives us a formula for worship in the Land of Milk & Honey: when the priest receives your offering of best produce you must then acknowledge God’s deliverance. We can’t save ourselves with modern stuff, no matter how educated and technical we are! So Lent is an intentional camp in the desert, just to keep things in perspective. Wanderers all, our possible self-satisfaction puts us at risk of squandering our Holy Places. Those who’ve received asylum are especially enjoined to celebrate the bounty given by God by joining with and embracing “the Levites and the aliens who reside among you”.
The passage from the Letter to the Romans, 10:8b-13, comes from the greater saga of Paul painfully acknowledging that many of his beloved Jewish family were not buying into the Christian experience. He indicates that a person is overcome with Faith, and thereby justified; and then come various expressions of an ongoing and generous relationship with Christ, which is seen as sanctification. (Who said that Paul wasn’t a Wesleyan!?) And to our current Untied Methodist Church, we might paraphrase: “For there is no distinction between Straight and LGBT; the same Lord is Lord of ALL and is generous to ALL who call on him. For, ‘EVERYONE who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved’.” ! ! !
Thousands of good sermons have been given on the Temptations of Christ, this year read from Luke 4:1-13. To which this poor preacher can only add that our dependence on God is reinforced by a sojourn in places of hunger and despair. The main danger Israel of the Exodus faced is to forget that YHWH is still needed amid their newly domesticated freedom. Through the ages, our prosperity dulls our prayer-edge–it surely has for me!–and our Temptation is to forget how God has brought us through. The devilish whisper of self-reliance pokes at us in so many ways… Shakespeare wrote, “An evil soul producing holy witness is like a villain with a smiling cheek…” (MERCHANT OF VENICE?)
Claudia F. Hernaman wrote in 1873, Lord, who throughout these forty days for us didst fast and pray, teach us with thee to mourn our sins and close by thee to stay.
God Bless Us, Every One Horace Brown King
My encounter with scripture passages assigned to the upcoming weekend can be found every Tuesday at this spot on Facebook; or at horacebrownking.com
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