The Devil on your shoulder.

The Devil, Satan, gets a bit of a strange rap in the Christian church.  And when we think about him, we think about him as the tempter, the one who goes out of his way to lead us astray. 

We see ourselves as the noble heroes, the warriors, who are standing up against the wiles and guiles of the Devil, who push back against him and his tricks.  We want to do the right thing, like Adam and
Eve did, and we would have been fine without him. Had there been no serpent in the garden, then we would all have still been there.  There would have been paradise for forever, had that serpent not been there, and not been sharing temptation with Eve.

So one of the questions that comes up about the serpent is not just 'how does it talk,' but 'why would God make the serpent in the first place?'  It's a good question, right? If the serpent brought temptation to the world, if the serpent whispered things into the ears of our first parents, then surely, surely, it would have been better and simpler if God had not created that creature at all.

Or would it? This question ought to haunt us more than it does.  It doesn't haunt us too much, because we figure that we don't need to think too much about it.  We're okay, and we want to do what is good and right, and circumstances get in the way.  But if you really think about it, If you sit down and ponder what we're all about, then you'll come to a horrible realization.  And this realization comes to us courtesy of something else that gets a bad rap in Lutheran churches, the book of James.

Luther referred to the book of James as the epistle of straw, criticizing it for its insistence on works, and how we ought to be doing them.  And we Lutherans look at this book, telling us that faith without works is dead, and we naturally bristle against it.  We bristle, we get upset, and we feel as though this sort of talk doesn't belong in the scriptures, especially with our motto as Lutherans being 'grace alone.' We feel as though any discussion of this stuff doesn't belong in the Bible at all.  But here we are, thinking about the book of James, and what it could possibly have to add to our lives.  For you see, the Lutheran church wasn't built up on just the story of Christ, but there were serious questions that people asked, after becoming Christians.  They asked themselves 'now what?'  Once you become a Christian, then what do you do, and who are you? That's why there's all the discussion about works, because it's not as simple as just joining the church and being set for eternity.  You don't manage that, because joining the church, it's just the beginning, not the end.

And when James talks about our temptations, he doesn't do what we would want him to do.  We want him to tell us that we are doing our best, and that the devil just gets in the way of all of it.  We want that to be our narrative, but it just doesn't hold up, and James tells us the dark truth as to why that is.  In our reading from Sunday, James tells us this about temptation, and by extension, sin:

'No one, when tempted, should say "I am being tempted by God," for God cannot be tempted by evil, and he himself tempts no one.  But one is tempted by one's own desire, being lured and enticed by it.  Then, when that desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and that sin, when it is fully grown, gives birth to death.  Do not be deceived, my beloved.'

Did you catch all that? Did you catch what is being talked about?  In this part of the scriptures, James wants to make it clear that the problem isn't that we're being deceived by the Devil into what we don't
want to do.  We have the desire for sin, it's right there in front of us always, and by and large, we go for it because we want to.  If the devil is amongst us, if he is hard at work trying to drag us to hell, then he has a pretty easy job, because what we are tempted into is what we want to be tempted into.  We seek it out, it doesn't have to come and find us.  And if we want to be tempted, we will be, and we will find our way into these situations again and again and again. 

Think of it this way - it's like on the Jerry Springer show, when couples were confronted with their infidelity, and the explanation was 'well, we was drinking, and one thing led to another,' or 'we was drinking, and it just happened,' or whatever.  None of these things 'just happen.'  You knew what was going to happen for sure, before you got to the house.  But you still went in, because you wanted that
temptation.  You craved it, and it was easy to fall into.  You went out of your way to find it, because it wasn't coming  fast enough.  And this is exactly what we do.  Though I'm not going to deny the existence of the devil, I will say that he sure doesn't have to try too hard.  He has, in us, willing participants in our own destruction.  We do the things we ought not to do not just because we are tempted into it from outside, but because we really, really want to do it. 

In that way, our biggest struggle continues to be against ourselves. 

And this is why the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness is such a big deal.  It's a big deal because he was able to resist temptation in a way that we are not.  His nature was not corrupt like ours, he wasn't as prey to disastrous decisions, as prey to errors and mistakes, as prey to sin as we are.  When Satan shows up to test him, Jesus rebuffs him, because he is that lamb without blemish.

Remember, a long time ago, when  Abraham was asked to take his son, his one and only son whom he loves up the mountain and sacrifice him?  Well, that happens, and Abraham dutifully loads his son up with wood, and they walk up the mountain towards the spot where Isaac will be sacrificed.  When they got there, Abraham bound Isaac, and prepared the knife to sacrifice his son. But right before he plunged the knife into his son, a voice called out from heaven, telling Abraham to spare his son, and that God himself would provide the sacrifice. 


And that's what the faith is all about, really.  It's all about God providing the sacrifice. It's all about the new ram caught with his head in the thorns.  It's all about the child walking the wood that he is going to be bound to up the hill where he is supposed to die.  And at the last moment, the knife is turned away from Isaac.  But the spear is turned towards Christ.

The story of the binding of Isaac has a reputation in the church, and outside it, as being the worst one, the worst story.  It has a reputation of being the most contemptible story in the scriptures, based on the request from God for Abraham to sacrifice his son, and based on Abraham being willing to do it.  God says to Abraham 'sacrifice your son for me' and Abraham says 'thy will be done.' And if you're tempted to bristle at that story, might I remind you about the core of the Christian faith, in which we believe that Jesus died for us.  The sacrifice that God promised to Abraham back in the Old Testament, the sacrifice without spot or blemish.  The one who resisted temptation, who resisted the temptations because he did not want to fall into them.  The one who willingly walked his cross up the hill, like Isaac walked the wood up the hill.  Then as Isaac was bound, Christ was nailed in place.  And where the knife was spared from Isaac, the spear was plunged into Christ.  And the biggest thing of all, is why.  When we look at the story of Abraham and Isaac, we get uncomfortable when we contemplate that God would ask someone to give up his son, his only son whom he loves, because he was asked.  But that's exactly what we do.  We do it to God.

What the entire Christian faith revolves around is around the cross of Christ, where he died.  The perfect sacrifice that was promised from long ago, the perfect sacrifice that was offered up for us, the perfect sacrifice that God himself would provide, and God provided that sacrifice.  We said to God, 'take your son, your only son, whom you love, and walk him up a hill for us, and sacrifice him for us.'  And God does.  And Christ dies.  He dies for you and for me, dying for us on the cross, as the sacrifice that God provided.  And his perfection, his resistance to temptation was transferred to us.  We who are sinners inherit his grace. 

If the story of Isaac bothers you, if you read it and it troubles you, and gives you concern, it should.  It should bother you that God would ask for Abraham to offer his son.  But if that bothers you, then you need to think about what you take for granted - that God would offer his son for you.  And that's the centre of the faith.  And this is what Lent is all about, it's about us taking time to think about the temptations that we don't resist, temptations that we willingly fall into, and what cost it has.  The story of Isaac doesn't end on that mountain.  It ends on the mount of Golgotha, where Jesus himself declared that it is finished.  His resistance to temptation has freed you from the consequences of yours.

Everyone is looking for you

Ever accidentally say something true? It's easy to do, since what we tend to do is to say things almost in jest, almost offhand, not really taking it too seriously, but we have a nasty habit of saying things that are true.  There's an old Latin phrase that goes along the lines of 'in vino veritas,' which is Latin for 'In wine, there is truth.'  If you get someone a little tipsy, they're going to accidentally say something true. 

Now, it's not as though this is the only time that people accidentally tell the truth.  There are a great many other occasions too.  And every once in a while, with no prompting, you will tell the truth in casual conversation, with no encouragement, just because that's the sort of truth you had on your mind at the time.

Case in point, the disciples talking to Jesus while he had withdrawn to pray.  He had withdrawn by himself to pray, and the disciples came over to him and said something true.  They said to him 'everyone is looking for you.'

Now, the disciples used that statement in the same way that we do, talking about how just the general people around were looking for Jesus.  When they say 'everyone,' they mean everyone in the same way that we do, that a very particular group of people are looking for him.  But they spoke the truth

on that subject, albeit completely by accident.  They told Jesus 'everyone is looking for you,' and it was true.  Everyone is looking for him, whether they know it or not.  If Jesus is what he says he is, if Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, and that nobody comes to God except through him, then yes, everyone on earth ever would be looking for him.

But there's a snag, isn't there?  Sure there is, and you know what it is.  Jesus came to a very particular milieu, he came to a particular place and time, and he himself was from a very particular place, and from a very particular group of people.  The first century Jews were not exactly known for being the most diverse and inclusive group of people in the world, even for the time.  Have you ever gone through the Old Testament and seriously looked at a number of the rules that they have there?  There's lots of stuff that seems awfully foreign to us, stuff that seems completely unconnected to our world, and to our church.  Seriously, go through the Old Testament, go through the rules that you find in the books of the Law of Moses, and see what the rules are for what you can and can't eat, what you can and can't wear, who you can see and who you can't, how far you can walk in a day, what you can lift, what you can gather, and all that.  Not only will you find all this to be foreign, but something other than that comes up.  You will find that it seems connected to a culture, to a background, to a time and place completely different from your own.

Now, we don't often think about this, but it's true that there's a great gap between where I live (Regina Canada in the 21st Century) and where Jesus lived (1st Century Israel). A lot has changed, and honestly, if I was in first century Israel, it would be completely foreign to me.  Literally.  But we think that Canada, the United States, we're the natural home for the Christian faith, which we for sure aren't.  There's nothing perfectly natural about the Christian faith's home in North America, in Europe, or in South Africa. The only thing that makes it work is the extreme malleability of the message of Christ.

Close to the end of his time on Earth, Jesus spoke to his disciples, and told them that he was expecting them to be his witnesses first of all in Jerusalem, then in Judea, then in the ends of the earth.  They were to go out and make disciples of all nations, all nations for all time.  And for this to work, it means that the message of Christ must be equally at home in first century Israel as it is in 21st Century Canada. How does that work?

Well, it works partially because of what Paul says to us in First Corinthians.  He tells us that his role, his job is to present the Gospel, and to present it all people in the best way possible.  And the best way to do that is to, as Paul says, be all things to all people. 

Now, this doesn't mean that you can possibly be all things to all people, nor that you should deceive people and pretend to be something that you're not, but what it does mean is that we, as Christians who are trying to evangelize, need to take ourselves out of the equation as much as possible.  And this is something we're not great at.  What we do, is we think about how God has spoken to us, what we're good at, and so on, and so what we tend to do is what Christians have done since there have been Christians.  That is, we have insisted that in order to join our church, in order to be part of our fellowship, you have to first be like we are.  You have to take on our mantle, be just like us, so you can be part of the fellowship of the faithful. But Paul is all about taking himself out of the equation in this passage.  He's all about saying that Christ is big enough for all people.  He can meet the needs of everyone, no matter of time or space.  And the early disciples had a hard time with this themselves.  They figured that in order to be a Christian, you would have to be a Jew first.  You'd have to keep kosher, to keep the dietary and purity laws, to keep clean according to the laws of Moses, then you could be a Christian. 

But the vision of Peter says something other than that.  The vision of Peter tells us that Jesus has

fulfilled all righteousness.  He fulfilled all the cleanness, all the purity, and all the cultural hangups.  It opened the faith to a much larger world.  And it made it more about what Christ does, than what we do.  It's not about you, where you're from, what laws you have kept, it's about what Jesus has done for you.  He has become all things for all people, he has become sin for us, who have plenty of sin to exchange with him.  He has become sin for us.  He took on flesh for us.  He became a child, lived and died, to be like us in all stages of life.  In other words, he did, in fact, become all things to all people.

One of my all time favourite things was going to St Joseph's oratory, and seeing the display of Nativity sets from around the world.  Looking at those, you got to see that if you're from Vietnam, your Jesus is going to look Vietnamese.  If you're from Sudan, Jesus is going to look Sudanese.  It's the same as our traditional view of Jesus, our traditional image of him, in which he looks like a white guy with blue eyes.  But he's all things to all people.  The most important thing is that he is like us.  He can be all things to all people.  He can reach a lost and devastated world because he doesn't wait for them to find him.  He doesn't say to the world 'to find me, you must be like me.' Instead, in response to the disciples claiming that everyone is looking for him, he replies 'then I must go to them, for that is why I came out.'

Most of our evangelism, then, just ends up being us getting out of the way, and letting Christ speak to the world without hiding him behind ourselves.  It's tough to do, but that's how Jesus found you, isn't it?  By him being all things to all people, by his Gospel reaching you across the centuries, and being as relevant to you now as it was to the first century people then.  Your sins are forgiven, then as now.

PJ.

Who is the reflection?

Do you remember a time when Kiefer Sutherland wasn't just Jack Bauer?  Remember when he had other roles, like in the Lost Boys, or in Young Guns? Well, they can't all be winners, which is why I want to talk about one of the more slightly less well received Keifer vehicles, that of the film 'Mirrors.'  Never heard of it?  I'm not surprised, given that nobody saw it.  It clocked in at 14% on the tomatometer (which gets funnier if you pronounce the 'ometer' like you would in 'thermometer'), and made pretty dismal box office returns.  But the trailer, seen here, has one moment that I think we can all relate to.  Here, watch it.

I hope you caught that, and I hope I'm not alone in this childhood experience, in which, when looking at a mirror, you had a moment of wondering what happens when you walk away from that mirror?  What happens when you take a stroll, walk away, and aren't looking in the mirror anymore.  And what happens to your reflection?  Does he continue to mirror you in everything in the mirror world, or does he just disappear until you come back? And then you get to thinking about the bigger questions at play, questions including, but not limited to, am I the real person, or am I the reflection and the reflection is real?  Do I have real agency, or do I just think that I do, though I'm locked into slavish obedience to a shadowy mirrory guy?

I refuse to believe that as a child, I was the only one to have these thoughts. You've all been through this, or similar things, right?  Right.  Glad we all agree.  But this experience, these questions, they serve us reasonably well when looking at the concepts that come up in the scripture readings from this Sunday. For in the scripture readings,they talk to you about the desire to speak for God, to speak on his behalf, which is something that most of us will do at one time or another. We will speak for him, we will quote his word to people, we will tell them about the God that we worship and how he affects our lives, and so on.  But even as we have these conversations, we need to check the metric for how we see the word of God that we are sharing with others.  We need to check this out, because there's a good chance that what we're sharing with people has nothing to do with the God of the Bible at all.

Moses, in the Old Testament reading, cautions us that when we speak God's word to people, it had better be that .  It had better not be words that come from other gods, that come from idols.  And yes, this is where we all snicker, and say 'pastor Jim, we don't have idols anymore, not real ones anyway.  Nobody has an altar in their home where they bow down and worship gods made of stone or ivory.'  Okay, fine.  But we do still have idols, and quite frequently, the idol that we worship will speak up, and will hide what it thinks and feels behind speaking on behalf of God.

Have you ever noticed a strange phenomenon with most churches, and with most Christians, that God tends to be strangely in line with their opinions?  Have you noticed this?  Have you noticed that God tends to quite figuratively mirror the opinions, thoughts, and emotions of the person speaking at the time?  All of a sudden, God loves who they love, hates who they hate, feels as though their concerns are the most important thing on planet earth, and generally is obsessed with their obsessions and no further.  This leads us to the superbowl phenomenon, in which both teams are filled with observant Christains, and both teams would proceed to give glory and honor to God should they happen to win.

This meme is helpfully called 'scumbag God' and for good reason. There's a real idea that the most important thing to consider in God's mind is who is winning the superbowl (hint: not Seattle) not him doing, literally anything else.  Here in Regina, the whole town turns into a ghost town during Roughrider football games, and for the people playing in the football game, they have a similar idea that God in heaven turns into this as well - that he will essentially shut down his care for anything else, and get really into the game.

Remember how I talked about idols earlier?  How we don't have idols made of steel or wood or ivory in our homes on altars?  Well, we do have idols in our homes, you know.  Idols placed on altars coveniently called vanities.  Idols of glass, where we see the most important thing in the world staring back at us. Where we come face to face with who often stands in for God in our experience.  And that person is the man in the mirror. 

This is the idol that we all seem to worship.  This is the idol that speaks for God. When we speak for God, when we speak on behalf of him, there's a big question to ask, and it's the same question as we

had to ask ourselves back when we were talking about mirrors earlier.  Who is reflecting whom?  Who is the reflection, and who is really making the decisions?  Well, this is a good question when we start talking about what is and is not important, what is or is not vital for Christians to observe and why what we think is the most important thing of all, then it's important for us to ask if we are actually in any way whatsoever reflecting God, or if the god we are talking about just ends up reflecting us.  And you know, that second one is honestly more likely.

But this does far more damage overall than we think it does.  We think about our perspective on God and what he wants, and we think to ourselves that it doesn't do any harm if we have our own view as to what God would or would not want.  What could it possibly hurt if we add what we want to God's word, especially if it's good stuff that's worthwhile.  What could it hurt if we said that God probably didn't want anyone to drink alcohol, or that a true Christian wouldn't celebrate halloween, or that no true Christian would ever think of listening to any rap music.  And you know, you may have good reasons for abdjuring those things, you may have excellent reasons for skipping all that stuff, but it doesn't mean that God ever said it.  And doubly, if we present ourselves and our metric as what God is all about, then we end up putting ourselves between people and God, and we tell them that if they reject our likes and dislikes, if they reject what we think is important, the things that never came out of the Bible at all, then they reject God and the church.  And that is a real problem for us.

I remember reading some years ago P.F. Berton's  The comfortable pew. And in this book, I can recall Berton complaining about not being able to eat breakfast before going to church so that Holy Communion would be the first thing he would eat that day.  Okay, complain away.  But who on earth told you to do that?  I can promise you that Jesus didn't.  It's not in the Bible, it's not to be found in the words of Jesus or of God, but someone at some point put it forward as a good idea, as something that helped in their religious observance, and then people took it and ran with it, holding it up as the thing you have to do if you want to be a properly observant, reverant communicant.


Paul talks about this in the epistle reading, letting us who are Christians know that if we are to present Christ to people, it has to be taking ourselves out of the situation as much as we possibly can.  It's tempting for us to want to make ourselves be the biggiest thing in the situation, to show ourselves as being vital, our thoughts as being the most important ones, and if we conflate our thoughts with those of the scriptures, then there's a good chance that when people reject our opinions, or our approaches, then they will reject the God of the Bible wholesale.

This is part of the reason why we as Lutherans are so big on the doctrine of Sola Scriptura, or scripture alone.  We are only to have scripture as the source of our doctrine.  If God says it, then we can base things on it.  If he doesn't, then we have to aknowledge that at best, it's our opinion talking.  But this conflation of us with God, of him mirroring us instead of the other way around, of Christ marching in lockstep with us rather than us being imitators of Christ, this is a great deal of what Christ died for.  He died, the Godly for the ungodly, he died to forgive us of our sins, including, but not limited to, our damnable idolatry.  And yes, our idolatry is the cause of and root of so many of our problems.  Were we to quit with our idolatry, a lot of what we run into would fall away. Most of our sin would not be an issue.  If we stopped presenting ourselves as equivalent to God, if we stopped valuing things other than God so highly, then we wouldn't have the problems that we have.  We would be focused on the Lord our God, and we would serve him only.  But we aren't and so we don't.  And this is why decision theology, that talks about you making a decision for your Lord, it's why it doesn't work.  Because your own biggest idol is yourself, and even as a Christian, you end up speaking for God the vast majority of the time.  His words get drowned out by your thoughts.

So this, among other things, is that Jesus died for.  He took up his cross for your idolatry, for your focus on yourself, for your confusing your words with his, for your desire to have the God of the Bible reflect you rather than you imitating him.  That's what he died for. And knowing this means that we can do two things

1 - repent of that and be forgiven, and

2 - actually get to know what he really says about things.

It'll be a difficult and painful process, and the reason many people don't want to go through it is because of what will happen if they actually engage with the God of the scriptures.  If you read through the scriptures, you will find that Jesus disagrees with you on a great many subjects.  He will not back you up on every decision you make.  He will not support all the things you do.  He will ask for and demand so much more than you want to give, and that you are capable of giving.  He will make all these requests which is why most of us don't want to investigate his words too far.  He will push us and ask too much of us.  But if we are serious about being a people of Sola Scriptura, then we
will have one additional gift in all this, which is to know the most important thing that Jesus has to say is not to lecture us about what we ought or ought not to do, it isn't to give us more and more lists of what to do vs not to do, but it is to offer us his grace. It is to remind us that he has died for us, for our idolatry.  He died for the man in the mirror, he died for everyone to forgive them their sins that had dragged them down.  All the nonsense that we have committed, all the prizing of ourselves over and above all other things, all the obsession with ourselves, that's what Christ died for.  He went to the cross for all the sins we have committed, and nailed them to the tree, never to be seen again.  If you ever want to speak for Jesus, then the best place to start is always going to be to tell them of the love of Christ.