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“The Gift of Endurance”
A sermon preached by the
Rev. Douglas M. Donley
LENT I
Today we begin our Lenten observance at UBC. Lent, as you may recall is the 47 days
leading up to Easter. The traditional
church calendar came up with this number to recall the 40 days that Jesus spent
in the wilderness. I guess the 7 Sundays
were added for good measure. Lots of
people look forward to giving something up during Lent. It’s usually some indulgence like chocolate
or ice cream or caffeine.
While that may be well and good, I’m not going to encourage us to do
that this year. Instead of giving
something up, why don’t we claim something instead? Specifically, why don’t we claim the gifts
that God has given to us? What a great
way to honor God and at the same time maximize our potential.
Think about the gifts that you have. I’m not talking about monetary
gifts. I’m talking about talents. I’m talking about perspective. I’m talking
about how our experiences have blessed us with gifts of wisdom. All of these
are gifts to claim. I know there are gifts in this room. Gifts of wisdom. Gifts of patience, faithfulness, music,
fortuitiveness, knowledge, power, recovery, truthfulness, integrity, sexuality,
love, empathy, mercy, compassion, and so on and so on. All of these are gifts from God and deserve
to be nurtured. I invite you to take a
moment and write down the gifts that you have on the paper in your
bulletin. These are for no one’s eyes
but yours. Claim the gifts you have from
God by writing them down.
But you know what? There are
things at times that hold us back from claiming our gifts. There are barriers in the way—walls that seem
insurmountable. They blind us from our
gifts. I want you to think about what
stands in your way of fully claiming your gifts. Take a moment and think about that. Write down on a piece of paper the obstacles
you have to claiming your gifts. .
And remember that this may very well be a barrier to living as God
would have you live—as fully empowered people who know the truth and are set
free by that knowledge. God wants us all
to embrace our gifts without barriers.
Think about those barriers
Jesus had his set of barriers.
Most of us do. For Jesus, it was
comfort, worldly authority and prestige.
In Luke’s gospel, Jesus spends 40 days in the wilderness and finds
himself needing to endure temptation from the devil—the personification of
evil. He had to endure this
temptation.
Let’s look briefly at what he was tempted with—those things which stood
in the way of him claiming his gifts:
The first is primal. Jesus is tempted with food. He’s hungry and the devil says a provocative
thing “If you are the son of God change this stone in to bread”. IF you are the son of God. Jesus didn’t need to prove anything to the
devil. And yet he was hungry and there
were a lot of stones around. I can see
in his delirium, each of those looking like a fine morsel of bread. But Jesus had the gift of endurance. Somehow he was able to remember the words of
his ancestors recorded in the book of Deuteronomy when they were traversing in
the wilderness for forty years: “One cannot live by bread alone, but by every
word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”
Sometimes, we need to simply remember who we are. We need to have the wherewithal to recall a
portion of our own story. Jesus’ story
was knit closely and woven within the story of his ancestors. Their stories would help him get through his
temptations.
The first temptation was food.
The second temptation was power.
The devil showed Jesus all the kingdoms of the world. “To
you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over
to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then will worship me, it will
all be yours.” The devil, evil, says
Luke, has control and authority over all the kingdoms and governments of the
world. How could we not have known this one with all of the wars and economic
strangleholds that we heap upon each other—A world where 90% of the population
cannot make a choice about the shoes that they wear because their poverty is so
great.
And
Jesus was given authority over the nations if he would just worship greed and
warfare and hate. He could really
succeed in this world, maybe even make something of himself. Nice guys finish
last, you know…But Jesus said, “It is written, ‘worship the Lord your God and
serve only God.’” Don’t worship or serve
empire, especially if empire does things against God’s priorities.
By
this time the devil must have been pretty frustrated with Jesus. Most of us
would have probably caved in by now. But Jesus held his ground. You see, Jesus
was not only in the wilderness talking to the devil. He was in there talking to
God.
Jesus
was in the desert perhaps to be tempted, but also to come closer to God. The
closer we are to God, the farther away we are from temptations.
The
first temptation was food. The second
temptation was power. The third
temptation was immortality.
The
devil didn’t actually offer this to Jesus.
It was not his to offer, after all.
But he had fun quoting scripture back to Jesus.
We
all know people who use scripture as weapons. They can take a verse totally out
of context and use it to support any position they want to. That is how slavery
was justified by the church. That is how women have been left out of leadership
positions in church and government. That is how homosexuals are treated these
days with the same kind of proof-texting which is laced with thinly-veiled
hatred and has at its own root evil.
The
devil took Jesus and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple in Jerusalem and
said, “If you are the son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is
written “God will command the angels concerning you, to protect you’ and ‘on
their hands, they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against
a stone.’” The devil tempted Jesus with
glory.
But Jesus answered the devil’s proof-texting saying: “It is said, ‘do
not put the Lord your God to the test’”. And when the devil had finished these
tests, the devil departed from Jesus for a more opportune time.
Jesus used his gift of endurance to beat out the devil. It was a stubborn holiness that he had that
would not be shaken.
I’m not sure I have that kind of holy righteous endurance. But there are things we have all endured.
Think of the things we have endured.
We have endured snow shoveling this morning and yesterday.
Many of us have endured unemployment and underemployment.
Many of us have endured racism, sexism, homoprejudice, ageism, me
first-ism.
We have endured wars and rumors of wars.
We have endured exams.
We have endured pain.
We have endured misunderstanding.
We have endured cold and heat.
As a congregation we have endured the loss of relationship with those
who felt they could no longer minister alongside of us because of how we
interpret the Bible.
Some of us have endured people who we thought we could trust betraying
us.
We have endured denominational strife.
We have endured having our ministry questioned.
We have endured low budgets and sparse programs.
It seems a lot to endure. And yet we have endured. At times this has
taken a power greater than ourselves. We can call that power God.
The endurance we have received is indeed a gift.
Think of the things you have endured.
But don’t think of it with a sense of despair as much as you recognize
the strength you have received from your friends, family and God.
This is the gift of endurance.
It isn’t saying that the pain is good as much as it is saying that the
pain may well put us in touch with a gift from God we never knew we had.
During my Sabbatical, I have told you I participated in a
sweat lodge. It took endurance to be in
the lodge. We were in the dark sweat
lodge four times. Navajos do a lot of things
in fours. They put me by the door, just
in case I couldn’t take it. But I had
just run a marathon and I was arrogant, so I sweated it out. When I asked our host Benny about the reasons
for doing a sweat lodge, he said “Some toxins in your body or your soul cannot
be addressed by medicine or diet. Some
things, you need to sweat out. I have
often thought about this as a metaphor for life. If we can sweat things out, the new can come
out of it with a renewed sense of thankfulness for the balance we need in our
world. Ninety degrees with a slight
breeze felt refreshingly cool as we emerged from the sweat lodge each time.
I found myself thinking about myself and my
relationships. I thought about my
ancestors. I thought about my family far
away. As I sweated and endured, I
focused my energy not simply on my body, but on the souls of those physically
and spiritually near me. None of that
would have been possible, had I not endeavored to sweat it out. What I was sweating out was the distraction and
the narrow-mindedness that so often pervades my life. Sweating it out meant coming closer to God,
myself, and my community.
What stands in the way of our claiming our gifts this
Lenten season?
What lingering doubt clouds our vision?
What insecurity erodes our confidence?
Look again at these sheets of paper in your hands. I want you to think about them as having the
power to keep you from claiming your gifts.
If we are to take God seriously and take our gifts
seriously enough, then we need to take these barriers and say that they no
longer have power over us.
I invite you to consider the power of these barriers in
comparison to the gifts God grants to you.
I invite you to symbolically let go of these barriers.
Since they are not of God, since they stand in the way of
you using your god-given gifts, they ought to be disposed of properly.
Lent began on Wednesday with the imposition of
ashes. Traditionally, people take the
palms from the previous year’s Palm Sunday and burn them to remember that we
are all ashes and that we return again to the ground. It’s a way of penitentially focusing on the
introspection of Lent.
So today, let us add to the ashes of last year’s palms,
the ashes of the barriers we or the world use to keep us from claiming our
gifts.
I invite you to free yourselves of these burdens, if only
for today or this Lenten Season. And see
what God has in store for you as you recognize and claim your gifts without the
things that hold you back.
You may need to cling to Jesus’ power to endure.
Perhaps you have some of that enduring power in you, too.