First Sunday in Lent: How do we trust in God when the world is a mess?

A sermon based on Luke 4:1-13 and Psalm 91

Today is the first Sunday of Lent.  Lent is the 40 day period (or 46 day period if you count the Sundays) that leads up to Holy Week.  Holy Week is the week where we tell the story of Jesus’, suffering crucifixion and resurrection.  

In mostly long ago times, new Christians prepared themselves to be baptized during Holy Week  and they would use these 40 days of Lent to reflect on their walk with God and prepare for Holy Baptism.  Today, we build on that tradition of using this time of Lent as a time to draw near to God and dig down into our souls, to think about the kind of people God calls us to be.

The first Sunday of Lent, we always hear this story of Jesus in the wilderness.  There are three slightly different versions of this wilderness story that we rotate through each year, but in today’s version, Jesus and Satan have a conversation out there in the desert and in that conversation, a much beloved Psalm gets quoted.  That Psalm shows up in our assigned readings for today. 
 
Over the course of history, a lot of people thought that Psalm 91 was a magical formula that would protect them from danger. Clearly, Jesus was experiencing some danger out there in the wilderness when the devil came and tempted him, so it makes sense that one of them would bring this Psalm up.  The psalm talks about how God is our protector in times of trouble and danger. God keeps us safe. These well worn verses show up in a song some of us might recognize called “On Eagle’s Wings,”

You who dwell in the shelter of the Lord
Who abide in His shadow for life
Say to the Lord, "My refuge, my rock in whom I trust!"

The person who wrote the psalm writes that God will deliver you from the snare…and sickness, that God will cover you with her pinions, and under her wings you will find refuge.  God’s faithfulness, the composer of the psalm writes, is a shield. 

And in fact, the writer of this psalm says,
 

Because, you have made the LORD your refuge,[b]
    the Most High your dwelling place,
no evil shall befall you,
    no scourge come near your tent.

Moreover, if you ever even come close to tripping, the angles rescue you--you won’t even stub your toe on the rock!  Folks would write portions of the psalm on slips of paper and enclose them in amulets to be worn as protection from any and all evil. They are powerful words: Of how God protects us. The tell us that when we trust in God, no evil will befall us. Nothing bad will ever happen to us. At least, that’s is exactly the devil describes the psalm to Jesus. 

“Look,” the devil says, “God’s not going to let anything bad happen to you, so throw yourself off the roof of the temple here and let the angels catch you.  Just trust God.”

The problem is, even when we are trusting God at what feels like full capacity, even when we are on our knees in prayer sometimes, terrible things happen in our world.  
Sometimes, there are violent wars. 
Sometimes loved ones tragically die.  
Sometimes sickness strikes.  
Sometimes people are unbearably cruel.

Sometimes…we take in the state of the world and we want to speak to whoever’s in charge around here, we want to speak to the manager…of the universe!  Where is God’s protection? Have you seen the strain and anxiety around here lately? Did you notice that nation is rising against nation? Have you seen the cruelty and indifference running rampant, who is running this world, anyway!?

Sometimes terrible things happen. 
And people fall...and the angels don’t catch them.
Sometimes, it seems that God fails us.

When the devil tosses this psalm at Jesus and urges him to test God’s protection, Jesus doesn’t say, “Okay, challenge accepted! Take me to the pinnacle of the temple roof and let’s see what happens!”  Instead, he quotes different scripture back at him and says “don’t put God to the test.” Does that mean that Jesus doesn’t trust God to actually catch him?

If you find yourself balking at the theology, consider your instincts a good thing.  There is a lot of scripture in our bible that shows us that God is a lot more than a lucky coin in our pocket.  A lot of people (including us) have a long history in the world of invoking God’s name in moments of victory (on the football field,  on the battlefield, when we’ve A’ced the test, when we’ve landed the job) and we continue to speak this way because it feels good to have God on our winning side. 

Some years ago, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams wrote about a Jewish woman, Etty Hillesum.  Etty was a young woman in her 20s when the Germans occupied Holland and she watched with horror as the world turned upside down around her.  Before the war, she wasn’t a particularly pious or religious young adult.  In her early diaries and letters from 1941-1943, which were published decades after her tragic death, she mused about her life as a young woman: she wrote of spending time with friends, the different people she dated, tutoring and odd jobs where she made some spending money, and her time as a young law student.  I looked up and read some of her diaries and letters. She seemed to have a bright, warm and slightly irreverent style—which I liked.  But later on, as the war continued, she was pretty clear-eyed about the unstoppable horror descending on Amsterdam around her.  A horror where some might say, God’s protection had dissolved. When she was eventually imprisoned in Westerbork before being sent to Auschwitz, she wrote, “there must be someone to live through it all and bear witness to the fact that God lived, even in these times.  And why should I not be that witness?” 

This young twenty-something woman trusted deeply that God’s hand was alive in her life and there with her in the suffering.  In her words, in the face of unspeakable horrors, “she took responsibility for God’s believability” and lived her life in a way that illustrated her trust.

The word “rescue” is in our psalm today.  In the psalm God says, 

when you call to me,

I will answer, 
I will be with you in trouble, 
I will rescue you and honor you. 

That word “rescue” can mean a couple of different things. Yes, it can mean to extract someone from suffering: to pull them out of a tough situation, to dissolve their pain. And, it can also mean equipping someone to endure hardship.  In this sense, it means something like suiting someone up with protective armor.  In today’s parlance, we might say something like, “giving someone the tools to endure hard things.”

In this sense, trust in God is about trying to loosen our grip on the fear that awful, catastrophic things are going to annihilate and dissolve us and instead cultivate the knowledge that even in the desert, even in the wilderness, God is with us. This was at the heart of Jesus’ response to Satan in their encounter in the desert.

God knows that suffering is indiscriminate. It doesn’t care if you eat a low carb diet or have a million dollars in the bank.  Suffering doesn’t care if you have the perfect job or family and can happen to any of us at any moment.  But, like Etty Hillesum put it in the way she lived her life, even in the valley of pain and despair, there is nothing in this world that can cause God to abandon us, and even in the desert, we are beloved to God.

Her witness, gives me strength.  

Our world is a mess right now.  Archbishop Williams wrote that when we look at the faith of people like Etty, We see them and we say, “I want to live like that. I want to be a part of a world like her world.”

Her letters told of how she keep a spring in her step while walking by the fence at evening in the camps. How she had a kind word for those she interacted with. How, with God at her side, she refused to let anyone break her spirit.  As she put it, in the face of unthinkable suffering, she “took responsibility for God’s believability.”

Her legacy calls us to do the same, even when we feel like our faith or trust aren't rock solid.

So, how do we make God believable in our tortured world? 

How do we live our lives that demonstrates our trust in God? 

How do we interact with people in our families in our work places out in the world in a way that shows that God is alive? 

How do we look on people with generosity instead of contempt, 

with a passion for what is just and right instead of apathy?  

How--even in times of suffering and stress and strain--does the way we live our lives bear witness to the truth that God lives?

God is an abiding presence.  
Ever with us.
Our still waters.
Our mother hen.
Our light in the night.
And holding that truth close, we do our best to quiet our terror in the face of the world’s pain and suffering around us.  For god is here.

Like Etty Hillesum, someone must bear witness to the truth that God lived during these times.  

Will that person be you?