Sermon Notes Dt. 26;1-11, Lk. 4:1-12

February 17 Lk. 4:1-12, Dt. 26:1-11
Our confirmands examined the Ten commandments with some care to start to get a handle on christian ethics. the one that often catches us up is the commandment against an internal state:coveting.We find security in possessions. Dt. 26 deals with its deep roots with the ritual offering of the firstfruits of the soil.Our OT passage gives a valuable antidote or corrective to our grasping nature, the reception of a  gift. Further, they are placed in a narrative to help them see how far they had come. My father was a wandering Aramean. They made the tough transition from being migrants or nomads for a settled existence. (see Breuggeman on the land as gift) You owe me. I deserve this. I worked long hours for this.

Knowing  this pattern, the tempter tries a similar tack with Jesus.Just as in regular life, the first temptations are not evil per se. we have such a childish view of evil, where we expect someone wearing a black hat or offering a decadent cocktail of sex, drugs, and rock and roll lifestyle. Once the choice had been made, the successive choices become more malevolent, but easier over time. The tempter, as his diabolical name suggests wants to twist the good out of shape, one of the fundamental Hebrew notions of sin. The diabolical tempter is willing to use the bible toward his own ends, so any weapon if fair game.  If the moral contortionist  can do his work, then Jesus may be unable to live into the different way that God imagines a world could work.Turn these stones into bread. Would Jesus use his powers for economic gain as well as feeding the body? After all, his constituency would be basically poor. Think of what you could do with such material abundance.Not that long ago, it occurred to me that the temptation of materialism was a potent one for Jesus, along the lines of :think what good you could do with providing all sorts of material goods to be able to deliver to others on a regular basis. It would be along the lines of a pro ballplayer buying their folks a new house and car with the first big contract. (Note CC essay on if. Jesus the new Adam is facing the same test or temptation as the old , original Adam.) Every one of these is a form of putting God to the test.

As Douglas John Hall has said, the great thing about believing in god is that we can dispense with all of the other things that clamor to be gods in our lives. One of hte great gods of our time is scarcity, the dread fear that we will not have enough to live, to do what we want. Such an attitude attacks our sense of stability and security; so we cannot even see sufficiency in our hunger for more, more, more. It certainly attacks its opposite number, abundance.

At the end, Luke says that the tempter waited until an opportune time. We are not told when this is. It could be anytime, I suppose. maybe when Jesus was tired, or overwhelmed by the numbers seeking healing. Maybe it was Judas or any number of times during the close of his life. In Last Temptation of Christ, it comes hene Jesus was being taunted at the cross, and he sees that if he listens to the taunts, he could live a long, happy, healthy life with family and friends around him when he would die an old man, full of years as the Scripture says. The novelist and filmmaker help us to uncover a deep truth. We do sometimes have to make decisions about competing goods, as we cannot have both sometimes.a thousand times a day we are tempted away from the kind of person God envisions and the kind of person we would like to be. Will we skip up? Yes. Will we fall? No. We do not live by ethical power alone, but by the grace of God.