The Promised Home
Deuteronomy 26: 1-11, Luke 4:1-13
Ms. Lee Cheek, preacher
Greetings, my friends on Zoom and my friends here in Crissey Farm in the town of Great Barrington, MA, on this 6th day of March, 2022, on the 11th day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, on the 424th day since the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol Building, 403 years after the first ship of enslaved Africans landed on this continent in a British colony, about 2050 years since Pontus Pilate was the Roman governor of Judea, and some 3700 years since “a wandering Aramean … went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien.”
Luke, the Evangelist, is careful to distinguish his Gospel from mythology by placing Jesus’ ministry into human history with specific dates, rulers, and events. This happened then. Even in his genealogy of Jesus, which is inserted in the verses between Jesus’ baptism and his time in the wilderness, Luke lists many names mentioned in the Hebrew scriptures, ending with Adam, son of God. All the way back to the beginning of human history there is an unbroken chain of progeny. Luke is very specific about the time being exactly right in the big picture of history for God to be with us to save us from our self-destruction.
After Jesus is baptized at the Jordan River, known to all Jews then as the place where the Israelites were asked to make the choice for life with God in the Promised Land, he prays. During his prayers, God’s “Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove.” When I imagine this scene, I can feel the settling of a peaceful spirit in Jesus’ physical body. Maybe you can, too. His body relaxes into the affirmation of God’s pleasure. To me, the holiness of this spirit conveys to Jesus the truth of what Rowan Williams calls “the peaceful worthwhileness” of each person.*
Even at rest, Williams writes, human individuals are worthwhile. In fact, Williams declares that “the most fundamental spiritual education for our children”—or in fact for each of us no matter our age—is the “conveyance of the sense of ‘peaceful worthwhileness’ to each person.”
So having made the choice for life at the Jordan, Jesus leaves, filled with God’s Holy Spirit of Peaceful Worthwhileness. Yet instead of proceeding on to a promised homeland like the Israelites before him, Jesus is led back to the wilderness of human insecurity and doubt to learn how to bring every one of us out of the devil’s great net of lies about who we really are that have been tormenting humans since Adam.
When the first Adam is denied ownership of all the fruit in God’s garden he concludes that God must be wrong. Adam takes what he believes to be his. His defeat is redoubled in the next generation when his son Cain kills his brother Abel in a jealous rage for sole possession of God’s preferential blessing.
Like the Israelites in their wilderness time, Jesus will meet the most unpeaceful part of humankind in a vulnerable moment of physical hunger. But where Adam was defeated, this Son of God, this new Adam, refuses to take the shortcut of relying on his title to stave off human hunger. Jesus realizes that humans require a different kind of bread to defeat evil. They will need the bread of forgiveness to guide them to their inherent worthwhileness in the eyes of their loving Creator. May we come to the table today with anticipation of receiving again—and again and again—the Holy Spirit of peaceful assurance of our uncontestable, inherent worthwhileness.
In the first temptation, Luke wants us to understand that it is the purpose of God that Jesus will undo the harm that has ensued from the sin of Adam. In the second temptation we are to understand that earthly kingdoms are places where the temptation to throw any stray person under the bus to secure some kind of “peace” has been acted upon. Today’s news confirms this.
Jesus’ refusal to separate himself from God to anxiously grab his kingly inheritance scandalizes the devil who then cunningly recasts his strategy in the third temptation to make Jesus doubt that he even is the Son of God: Prove that God loves you so much! Prove that Love is a power greater than I! Prove that you are different from other mortals! Prove you are not simply an ordinary creature here on earth! The diabolic voice always exhorts us to separate ourselves from God and others.
Still filled with the Holy Spirit of Peaceful Worthwhileness that is not in rivalry even with the devil, Jesus has no need of proving anything about Love. Jesus’ mission is to pick us up and bring us home, nearer God in our ordinary human life where we can exercise our liberty to forgive others and relax into non-rivalrous existence.
Of course, this is all a rehearsal for Jesus’own drama of human vicissitude that plays out during his passion. The tempter’s voice and body is not that of a theatrical, costumed creature with horns, but the voices of fellow human beings so lost in the wilderness of their own unworthwhileness that they must participate in removing Jesus as both the cause and solution to their crisis.
As Tina said last Sunday, the church has gifted us with a forty day season of stepping back from the noise and disinformation of the world so that we may recover the spiritual gift of our peaceful worthwhileness. Peaceful because it is not in competition with the world or against the world, but always for the world, no matter if we are washing dishes, feeding the cat, or shopping.
The three temptations in Luke’s Gospel give us the diabolic playbook for making us doubt that being ordinary human creatures loved by our Creator is not enough.
You are not loved. Your personal existence is not essential to the dream of God. Love and caring for each other is questionable. You are only self-made.
When we are tempted to believe these lies, we will be motivated to strike out at others or ourselves. God’s gift of life to us includes by definition the absolute necessity of our existence for the life of all. That’s how it works. When we truly embrace Jesus’ gift of the spirit of peaceful worthwhileness, we are home, the promised home.
During February we sang many selections from the great heritage of Black Church Music in America. These songs have always conveyed a deep sense of the spirit of peaceful worthwhileness even in the face of a dangerous white culture that disputes this worthwhileness. Singing out the assurance that everybody is God’s somebody is a generous way of spreading the Good News so that anyone can believe it.
With great respect for those who sang these songs to survive in a hostile world and with care for those who sing them today, Grace Church made a donation to the Clinton Church Restoration in Great Barrington which seeks to create a center of African-American History and Culture. It will not only be a historic site for all Americans, but also a special place where Black families can proudly share with their children the achievements of their ancestors within and beyond the Berkshires.
At God’s table, everyone is invited to eat the bread of heaven, and experience for at least a moment or two the peaceful assurance of our inherent worthwhileness. Today as we approach, eat, and depart from the table, we’ll sing a Negro Spiritual that tells of the promised home where we can relax into the reality of who we are: the undivided community of God’s Beloved.
Maybe, maybe here today, at the table, you will be astonished by a vision of who we really all are, because beyond all doubt, we are loved just as we are right now.
Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and author, had such an experience himself when he was out shopping in downtown Louisville Kentucky on March 18, 1958. He wrote:
“In Louisville, at the corner of 4th and Walnut, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs. It was as if I suddenly saw the beauty of their hearts, the core of their reality as loved by God. And if only everyone could realize this! But it can’t be explained. There is no way to tell people that they are all walking around, shining like the sun.”
In Great Barrington, in the banquet hall at 427 Stockbridge Road, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs. It was as if I suddenly saw the beauty of their hearts, the core of their reality as loved by God …
May it be so. AMEN.
*Rowan Williams, Where God Happens, Boston: New Seeds, 2005.