Sermon for the First Sunday of Lent, Feb. 18, 2024

 Sermon for SMHP, Year B, Lent I, Feb. 18, 2024

Mark 1:9-15

               ⁹In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. ¹⁰And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. ¹¹And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” ¹²And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. ¹³He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.

               ¹⁴Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, ¹⁵and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

 

          I want to start with a little mathematics exercise.  Pretty simple one.

          This is a listing from a Gospel Parallel.  A Gospel Parallel lists different stories and where they can be found in the four gospels.  Or often in the three synoptic gospels, which share a lot of stories.

          The three synoptics share the story of the temptation of Jesus, and the gospel lesson for the first Sunday in Lent is always the temptation story from the gospel of the year.

          So last year, we hear the story from Matthew.  How many verses in Matthew’s telling of the temptation story? [11]

          And next year, we’ll hear it from Luke.  How many verses in Luke’s telling of the story? [13]

          Okay.  And how many verses in the version we just heard from Mark?  [2]

 

          Some of us are visual.  Most of us, statistically.  So here’s Matthew’s version.

          And here’s Luke’s.  Same font, same size, for comparison’s sake.

          And here’s Mark’s telling of the whole story of the Temptation of Jesus.

 

¹²And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. ¹³He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.

Matthew and Luke spend a dozen verses, describing in detail the various temptations which the devil puts before Jesus.  Here’s Luke’s version again, so you can see it.

After forty days of fasting, the devil offers Jesus bread.  Then he offers all of the kingdoms of the world.  And then he tempts Jesus to tempt God, by throwing himself off of the pinnacle of the temple.

Matthew and Luke describe these temptations…in some detail.  And Mark has this:  “¹³He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan;”

Really, the temptation story in Mark is three words:  “tempted by Satan.”

So what happened?  Mark wrote first.  How did a story Mark tells in three words become a full blown drama about bread and power and danger?

The short answer is Q, which is the hypothetical source document for Luke and Matthew that scholars believe accounts for things like the birth narrative of Jesus, the Sermons on the Mount and Plain, and other stuff that is in Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark.  John is a whole other story that we don’t need to get into today.

“Q” is an unsatisfying answer, though, and it doesn’t do for a sermon, which is supposed to help us understand what we can learn from a two thousand year old text that is helpful today.  February 18, 2024.  Four days after a city celebration turned into a window into the pain in our nation’s soul.

Mark left temptation to the imagination, but I bet we could name the greatest temptations before us today.  We know, don’t we, how the devil comes to tempt us today.  The devil was working overtime this week, and it was all on display at Union Station, before our city and the world.

Here’s a few:

The temptation to equate intoxication with celebration.

The temptation to solve a disagreement with violence.

And I bet we’ve all had to face one of the biggest temptations out there, in the aftermath of the fifty-eighth mass shooting in this country in 2024, and that is the temptation to wish someone else would just fix this problem.

“Someone…needs to fix this.”  “This is terrible.”  [wring hands]

Mark, with his annoyingly compact style, manages to call that last temptation what it is:  A Failure of Discipleship.  This lesson is the whole Christian life, in seven verses.

Here it is: 

1.     Baptism [first slide].  Baptism makes us Christians.  Adds us to the community of the faithful.  Washes us clean.  So now we’re good, right?

2.     [second slide]  Here’s the most important word in the lesson.  The most important word in this Gospel-slash Discipleship Manual:  And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.  Blow out that little candle, Jesus, because it is ON.  THIS is the baptized life.  Wrestling with the devil, on behalf of all of humanity.  And maybe you’re thinking now, “Wait, that’s not what I signed up for!”  Yeah, sorry.  No take-backs.  Get baptized, dance with the devil.  Alongside a lot of other people who are also dancing with the devil, and who will join you on Sunday morning talking and singing about it. 

3.     [third slide]  And the devil is just the beginning.  You gotta get past the devil to start your discipleship journey.  Which is a journey of doing what?  Proclaiming the Good news of God. 

 

This is it.  The whole of discipleship:  get baptized; fight the devil and win; start proclaiming the good news of God.

Simple?

Not at all. 

It’s a cyclical journey.  We only need to do step one once, but steps two and three repeat, over and over.  We’re spending some time thinking about the dark places in our lives this Lent, and those may be places where you’re still wrestling with the devil (and to be clear, when I say “the devil,” I mean the forces that defy God and lead us away from Jesus.  Not this dude.

Sometimes that wrestling is a necessary step to get where we need to go.  And always, always, we need to think carefully about how we’re talking about darkness.  We’ll talk more about this throughout this season.

Today I just want to leave you with this.  It’s been a rough week, for our city and for many of us personally.  In a time of fear and inexplicable violence, we hold fast to the three things Mark has laid before us this morning:

 

1.     We are God’s beloved, baptized children.

2.     Holding to the promises of our baptism, there is no devil who can defeat us.

3.     Because we know this, we are bound by those promises to share the good news of God with others.

 

Amen