The Difference Makers – Marilyn Zehr – Feb. 21, 2010

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I enjoy watching the Olympics.  And whether you enjoy watching the games or not, it’s hard not be caught up in the intensity of the struggle of these athletes to persevere, to be their best, to take risks, and to express both the joy and the anguish of it all as they succeed in varying degrees to reach their goal.  These two weeks we get a small glimpse into a very tiny part of the lives of the athletes.  And if you watch enough of the coverage you get to see the back stories of a small handful of them when the producers show us documentary clips called “The Difference Makers”  -depictions of the people and events that surround the athlete and make a contribution to their lives and training.  Somehow early in their lives they discovered that part of their identity included some significant athletic skill, (a fundamental self understanding of who they are and what they might be capable of) and what follows is the where, what, how and why they continued on their journey to athletic excellence.  And as I’ve watched some of these I can’t recall a single back story that does not include significant challenge or adversity.  From discovery of their identity, through adversity, we are privileged to get a glimpse of their journey towards a goal that may or may not culminate in success at the Olympics.

Today’s scripture text – Luke 4:1-13, is a significant part of the back story of the life of Jesus and among other things it is a story of adversity.   Jesus is led into the Wilderness by the Holy Spirit where for 40 days he fasts, prays, lives in solitude and is tempted by the devil. This part of the story – Jesus in the Wilderness, is just a few frames of an ongoing video.  I’m going to start with these frames of the video by describing what the wilderness might have been like.  Then I’m going to rewind the video to the part of the story that comes just before this part to examine Jesus’ identity, and then I’m going to fast forward the video beyond the wilderness to the parts of the story that show the beginning of Jesus ministry (his mission) so that the larger picture might answer the questions, “how was it possible for him to endure? What were the difference makers?”

The frames of the video that make up the wilderness for Jesus could show us different things.  If we pan with a wide angle, the wilderness from afar looks formidable, hot, dry and life-sapping. What creature could possibly endure long days in the wilderness of Judea?  But Jesus spent many days there, 40, we are told and in the Bible this number 40, whether days or years, means a God infused time of reorientation, regeneration and renewal. If we zoom in now both in distance and time, and our familiarity with the details grows we might begin to notice the vegetation – there is some – it’s short and scrubby and created especially for this environment – created to absorb the daily dose of heaven’s dew just enough to sustain the life in the plant, for itself and for ants or lizards or humans, if one knows or has learned how and when to collect its precious drops.  And again if we look closely and with increasing familiarity afforded by time and solitude we notice that there are crevices in the rocks that provide much needed shade in the heat of the day and other places where at night one could curl up against warm rocks that radiate back into the darkness  the heat they had absorbed during the day  – again not much, but maybe just enough to keep one warm during the cold and dewy nights.

In these frames of the video we are invited to see Jesus holding on or holding out in this environment that in its harshness will just barely sustain him.  And in that place he begins to struggle with  –

inner demons?

with an exterior manifestation of the devil?

I’ll let your imagination fill in these frames of the video.  

In any event, the struggle is real.

First, he is tempted to use the God infused power of the Holy Spirit to change rocks into bread, – food.

Second, he is tempted to gain dominion over all nations of the world by a using a certain kind of power – a power that bows to the evil forces in this world.  Jesus is being tempted to claim a certain type of authority.

Third, he is tempted to ask God to keep him safe (if he should choose to throw himself off the top of the temple).

In the extremity of his wilderness experience Jesus is tempted by the devil to claim only the things that are rightfully his to claim as a “Beloved” of God – food, authority and safety.  This is often why this text can seem confusing.  Aren’t some of these things good things?

And in this struggle, Jesus, infused with the power of the Holy Spirit that led him there in the first place manages to stay focused on the very source of his identity  – the God of whom he is Beloved.  When Jesus quotes scripture in reply to the devil, perhaps he is not the clever rabbi, but rather the lost child who clings to the only presence of God in this dreadful place, the internalized Word of the Spirit that pleads for us when we cannot. And by the power working within him, he quotes the Hebrew Scriptures he learned in his childhood, youth and young adulthood.

“Scripture has it,” Jesus says, “that we shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.”
“Scripture has it,” he says again, “that
we shall worship the Most High God and God alone will we serve.  And it also says, ‘Do not put God to the test.’”
And the Devil, defeated for the moment, left him to await another opportunity – possibly the opportunity that presented itself as agony in the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus says, directly to God this time,  “Not my will but yours be done.”

Rewinding the video, this trip into the wilderness was preceded by a profound realization of his identity -who he was and therefore what he might be capable of. In all three of the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus’ identity as the Beloved Son of God was revealed to him at his baptism in the Jordan and it was immediately after this time of certainty about his identity in God that the Holy Spirit, led or drove him into the wilderness where the full implications of this reality had a chance to sink in.

And then if we fast forward the video to the time immediately follow the wilderness experience, we see that the Spirit compels him into fulfilling his identity and call. For Jesus this means a life of ministry that begins with preaching and teaching in the local synagogues.  In the synagogue in Nazareth he reads a passage in Isaiah:  in which the clearly intended implication is that the words foun
d there apply to him. The Spirit of God is upon him and it has anointed him to bring good news to the poor, it has sent him to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind and to let the oppressed to go free and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.

So if we take as given that the wilderness experience was part of a much larger picture, how does that help us to understand what the wilderness experience was all about?  What were the difference makers?  How did Jesus endure, and what were the insights that were instrumental in carrying him through everything that followed (his ministry among ordinary people, conflict with Jewish and Roman authorities, death as a victim of Roman Torture and resurrection at the Hand of God)

One of those indispensible insights was that all of this, his chosenness as Beloved of God, the wilderness experience and his ministry were wrapped up in and held in God.  All of it was about the God who anointed him and all of it was about the fact that his life was caught up in an intimate relationship with God, with a God who loved him and raised him up to the status of Son of God.  It was also  about God’s work of salvation in the world – a world where the poor would have good news preached to them and the blind would see and the people would be liberated from their bondage.

The wilderness experience solidified Jesus’ orientation towards and around God and God’s desire for the world.  With this orientation towards God, then and only then could Jesus live out the implications of His God given identity.

Ironically as Jesus began to live out of his God given identity he did begin feeding the poor the food they had a right to eat – both the food of the Word of God and actual physical bread.

Also ironically, Jesus began to act with authority and invited others to act with the same authority that God bestows on all of God’s beloved.

All of us are invited to claim our identity as God’s beloved and for many of us at different times in our lives this has meant shortly thereafter a trip into the wilderness.  What that wilderness might look like whether from a panned distant shot of the video camera or up close only you will know.  You may even still be there.  A wilderness is anywhere that one feels lost or alone and/or confused – bewildered.  The environment is likely to be harsh, a place where one feels emotionally, physically and spiritually that you can barely survive and to exacerbate the pain it is a place where one often feels alone.  But the primary difference maker is precisely the recognition that the sense of aloneness is a fallacy.  It’s false.  We are never alone.  For we are the Beloved of God.  That is the truth of our identity, no matter how we feel or what we are experiencing.

The other difference makers for Jesus were probably his spiritual practices, prayer, fasting, and his familiarity with scripture.  The best spiritual practices do not ultimately separate us from our world, by taking us out or away from the things we know and love, but only separate us from our habits and assumptions that cause us to limit or doubt the divine presence. Our spiritual practices have the potential to help us find God by opening us up to the reality that God is precisely everywhere we are afraid or lost.  And this is our safety.  It is not a safety that guarantees we will not suffer .  The ultimate experience of Jesus, the apostle Paul and so many others through the centuries, including our Anabaptist forbears, reveal to us that sometimes suffering is the result of living out the implications of profound convictions about God.  But we can be assured that we will be kept safe from the evil powers and principalities and temptations that seek to separate us from the Love of God and from God’s desires for us and the world.

Psalm 91 (another important text for today) talks about this kind of safety.  It is an important Psalm of assurance for anyone who knows the fear and seeming isolation of a wilderness experience.  Its power to reassure is even more powerful because the last few verses of the Psalm are written in the first person singular address – as if from the mouth of God to the one who hears:

Because you love me, I will deliver you;

I will rescue you because you acknowledge my Name.

You will call upon me, and I will answer you.

I will be with you in trouble;

I will deliver you and honor you.

I will satisfy you with a long life

And show you my salvation.

If you are there in your own wilderness right now or when you are there, I invite you at those times to cling to your identity as Beloved daughters and sons of God, sisters and brothers of Christ and each other.  Time in the wilderness is never an end in itself, though the struggle may feel like it at times.

Finally, as Christians and particularly as Mennonite Christians with Anabaptist forebears, all three parts of the story that I focused on today are important.

First, Discovering our Identity as Beloved sons or daughters of God, just as Jesus discovered his,

followed by a time of reorientation and/or regeneration and renewal possibly experienced as suffering and trials in a wilderness experience,

followed by the experience of feeling compelled into living out the implications of our identity whatever that might uniquely mean for each one of us.  For us these are three inseparable parts of the Christ Story.

And beyond that we deliberately seek to live in the light of the whole story of Jesus as we seek to live as his disciples.  This is why it makes sense for us as Mennonites to observe the period of Lent, the 40 days that lead up to Palm Sunday, Good Friday and Easter.  The period of Lent can be for us an important time to focus reflectively on the life and ministry of Christ.  It becomes an opportunity to walk with him and discover again the life and light of his life that were so opposed by the evil forces of his time.  And finally it becomes a time to make that journey in light of the knowledge that those forces of darkness ultimately were not more powerful than the light and love and power of God that resurrected him from the dead.

May our reflective journey through Lent together as sisters and brothers of each other and disciples of Jesus be difference makers in our own lives.  Let us hold on to and remember that it is our Identity as a Beloved sons and daughters of God that will ultimately hold on to us come what may as we pursue our goal of faithful living in Christ.