Grace, mercy, and peace to you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Come and See. That’s been a sort of unofficial motto that I’ve been using at St. Luke’s for the past year or so. That phrase is used throughout the Gospel according to John as a way of pointing towards the glory of God made manifest in Jesus. The way we’ve been using it at St. Luke’s is as both an inward summons for us to go deeper into our faith so that we might come and see more fully the grace of God and as an outward invitation to use to bring other people to St. Luke’s so that they might come and see the love of God in the community and worship of this church.
As evidenced by the inside cover of your bulletin this morning, that phrase “Come and See” is becoming more official. A group of parishioners, commissioned by the Vestry, has been meeting over the past several months to think about St. Luke’s in terms of strategic long-term planning. The first thing that we realized is the truth of the wisdom in the book of Proverbs – “without a vision, the people will wither.” We didn’t try to come up with a mission statement, as the Prayer Book already tells us that the mission of the Church is to “restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.” Instead, what we were after is our identity as a parish because you can’t figure strategy if you aren’t clear on identity. Who are we? What is the particular identity that God has given us in this city of Salisbury in the first quarter of the 21st century?
After prayer, discernment, and approval from the Vestry, we landed on what you see on the inside cover of your bulletin as a statement of our identity: Come and See the difference that Christ makes through abundant grace, intentional worship, and beloved community. There are five Sundays in Lent, and each Sunday, the sermon will be a conversation between one aspect of this identity statement and the readings. Our hope is that this identity will be one that we grow into at St. Luke’s, and so we put this graphic and statement in a place where you’ll see it regularly.
When it comes to the first Sunday in Lent, we always have a Gospel reading about the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. And when we come to this text, there are three things that we see in the temptations. The first is the temptation is to turn stones to bread, but Jesus says “One does not live by bread alone.” Later in Luke, Jesus will say “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing.” Certainly, this is about trust in God to provide that which we need.
More than that though, in the rebuttal to this first temptation, we see that we need more than bread. St. Augustine said that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. Right now, our culture is hungering for meaning, for purpose, for connection, for transcendence. While there are certainly people in this world who lie awake at night and worry about where their next meal will come from, not many of us live in that reality. Instead, what haunts us is the specter of meaninglessness. So often though we focus on the bread – the physical objects that might fill our souls. So we chase things like a big bank account, or a home that could be featured in a magazine, or a wardrobe fit for the runway, or hobbies that make us more interesting than the average Jane or Joe. But the physical will never fill the needs of the spiritual, only God can do that, and so Jesus reminds us that “one does not live by bread alone.” There is more to come and see.
The next temptation is about idolatry. Jesus has come to bring peace, justice, and reconciliation to all the world. And so the offer of having all authority over all the kingdom of the worlds is quite tempting, not necessarily because Jesus has an inflated ego and wants to have power, but because if Jesus had full authority over all the kingdoms of the world, he could actually bring about all the things he wants to do much more quickly. The catch is that he would have to worship the devil.
Jesus refuses, saying “Worship the Lord alone.” We’re really bad at multi-tasking, aren’t we? Studies have shown that though we think we can do two things at once, our performance suffers whenever our attention is divided. Do we chase the glory of God, or our own? Though we think we know what we need, we are invited to come and see what we have been given in Christ.
The third temptation is about putting God to the test, to which Jesus says “Do not put God to the test.” It’s about whether or not we trust God. How many prayers have been offered along the lines of “If you do this for me, God, I will do that for you”? Or maybe it’s more of a “If I like what the preacher says, I’ll go to church,” or “If people are friendly, I’ll join the church,” or “If they have programs for my children, we’ll go there,” or “If the priest visits me, I’ll write them a check.” What we see here is that all “if-then” propositions are rejected when it comes to faith. In other words, it’s all about grace.
In today’s epistle, St. Paul writes “The word is near you.” And then he goes on to write “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Now, I know that really sounds like an if-then equation, it even starts with the word “if.” But to read this as an if-then equation is to misread the passage and to misunderstand the entire Gospel. It is to come and see the wrong thing.
And if we keep reading in Romans, we’d read that Paul makes the very point that our individual proclamation of faith is always dependent on others. But even more than that, the phrase that Paul uses to introduce this proclamation is “The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart.” As we know from John, “In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God and the Word was God… and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”
Jesus stands behind all religious language. Jesus is the foundation upon which all Scripture rests. Jesus himself is the proclamation that saves us. And this Word, this Jesus, is near us. It’s been put on our lips and in our hearts. So when we say that Jesus is Lord and trust in his Resurrection, it’s not even our choice, as those words which point to the eternal Word have been given to us by God’s grace. In short, none of this is about us, but rather what God has done for us in Christ.
And that’s also true of these temptations which Jesus goes through. They are his temptations, not ours. The truth of the matter is that if you go head to head with the devil, you’re going to lose. How many of us, if a loved one was on their deathbed, wouldn’t reject God if it guaranteed a full recovery? How many of us don’t imagine living a more glorious life where we had more power, fewer setbacks, and more adoring fans? How many of us don’t think that if people would just do as we say that the world wouldn’t be a better place?
These temptation stories are not in the Bible to inspire us to withstand our own temptations. These stories do not teach us how to withstand the assaults of the devil. Instead, they reveal to us the grace of God – namely that Jesus has withstood the temptations for us and has already defeated the forces of evil. We do not need to earn our salvation by conquering sin because Jesus has already done that.
When Paul writes “if you confess that Jesus is Lord and trust that God raised him from the dead, then you will be saved,” it’s not the magical incantation that so many Christians assume that it is. God has done the heavy lifting on this. We do not need to muster up faith because the Word is near you. We do not need to find the right words because the Word is on your lips. We do not need to live perfectly because the Word is in your heart.
Paul’s declaration of faith and the temptation stories about Jesus are not examples for us to follow, rather they show us the gifts of God given for you, the people of God. The line from Romans isn’t “say this and you’ll be good,” rather it’s “look what God has done for you – he’s been crucified and Resurrected.” And the temptations of Jesus aren’t “follow in my footsteps and you too can have your best life now,” instead it’s “look what Jesus has already overcome for you, so you don’t need to fight the battles that he’s already won.” It’s not about what we need to do, it’s about the gift we have been given.
And this is why the phrase “come and see” is so helpful. Vision is passive. When something is put in front of you, you have no choice but to see it. And we’ve all heard people say “once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it.” That’s how the gracious gift of God is – it is given to us as something to behold. Yes, we have a part of play in it, but it’s passive; it’s about reception, about recognition. If you’ve been given life, or health, or peace, or love, or joy, you might think those things are happy coincidences or the result of your hard work. But that’s an attribution error.
All blessings flow from God. It’s as if you find a $100 bill on the street and pick up and think that because you picked it up that you earned it. But what if the truth of the matter is that someone put that $100 there for you to find. Whether or not you recognize it as a gift, it doesn’t change the fact that it is one. We get so busy with life that we might become blind to the fact that the Word is near us. The world is so full of temptations and distractions that we might not see what is right before us.
Our identity is always rooted in the gracious invitation of God to come and see. Come and see the love that will fill your yearning. Come and see the only thing worthy of our worship. Come and see not what God will do for you if you do the right thing, but rather what God has already done for you. This week, come to prayer and ask God to show you this love out of which were made and invite someone you know to come and see this love for themselves. Come and see, for the Word is near you.
