Awkward Tools

The dorm I lived in at IU had a weekly newsletter called the Collins Columns, and for a time my friend John and I were its editors. It’s been long enough now that I don’t remember a lot of details, but a few things stand out. For some reason I wrote a travel guide to Mammoth Cave National Park. We also published an advice column called “Ask Dan,” written by this weird dude named…Dan, who let’s just say is not the kind of person you’d normally approach for advice. Sensing this, no one in the dorm actually submitted a question for Dan to respond to, as far as I remember, so John and I manufactured dilemmas for Dan to adjudicate. So as far as I know, no one was harmed by our publication of Dan’s dubious counsel.

But the thing I remember most clearly about the experience is this. John and I produced the Collins Columns in a basement computer lab loaded with early 90s desktop publishing software. I don’t know how many of you have experience with early 90s desktop publishing software, but if you did, you know that it was, to use a technical term, bad. This fact became a recurring joke in our “from the editors” pieces. Apparently that touched a nerve with the professor overseeing the whole enterprise, who sent us an email chiding, “A good carpenter doesn’t blame his tools.”

I responded with all of the maturity my 19 years could summon, which wasn’t much, dismissing her admonition. But decades on, the reproach has actually stuck with me.

I mention this today because among a preacher’s tools is the Bible, and more specifically in our tradition, the lectionary, which takes us through most of the narrative of scripture every three years on a weekly schedule. I’ve known for some time these readings are the tools I’d have at my disposal to preach here on the first Sunday of Lent. And these readings are the perfect tools. Our Genesis reading gives us the story of the fall in Eden. Our Romans reading provides the bookend to that story, it its promise that Jesus’s sacrifice is the antidote to the poison of the serpent’s deceit. And the gospel prepares us to know that we have company in our 40 days’ fast, reminding us of Jesus’s own 40 days in the wilderness.

But for St. Stephen’s, New Harmony, this isn’t an ordinary first Sunday of Lent. You’ve just received the news that your rector will soon be ending her ministry among you. That’s news I received not that long in advance of you, so for a dozen days or so, I’ve been wondering how to apply these tools, ideal for kicking off our penitential journey to the joy of Easter, to this pastoral moment. They are awkward tools, perhaps, but I will not complain about them.

Now, just to be clear, we all know that your rector is not your savior. Jesus outranks Dr. Beth.

Those of you who have been around the church for a while are well acquainted with the tensions the Christian calendar requires us to hold. That even as we enter into this season of introspection and self-denial, the world goes on, all but unaware of what we’re up to. The third Sunday of Lent, for instance, will coincide with Hollywood’s high holy day and its sequined red carpet procession, and I hereby give you permission to go to an Oscars party, if that’s the kind of thing you’re into. Living liturgically doesn’t mean denying what’s happening around you any more than Lenten abstention means that Christ hasn’t been raised from the dead, that Easter hasn’t already happened.

Or to put this more simply, I invite you to fully observe a Holy Lent, to fully celebrate St. Stephen’s ministry with Dr. Beth, to be fully sad that that joint ministry is reaching its conclusion, and to fully look with hope to St. Stephen’s future. And I invite you to do all of these things simultaneously.

There’s an interesting detail in today’s gospel that surprises me every time I notice it. The flashiest part of the story, of course, is Jesus’s temptation by, and rebuke of, the devil. The story demonstrates that the authority of God in Christ is not found in worldly power. That’s a subject for another sermon, and the lectionary will provide other chances to take a crack at it this season, on Palm Sunday and Good Friday if not before.

But there’s a curious thing within the first few words of the story, “Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.” By the Spirit.

Leading God the Son to an audience with the devil seems like a weird thing for God the Holy Spirit to do. But then the Trinity is infamously mysterious and confounding.

Asking why the Spirit would do this is a worthy question, but more important today is the fact that the Spirit did it. Jesus did not go into the wilderness alone, unencouraged, and unaccompanied. Jesus went with the full backing of the Lord, the giver of life, who has spoken through the prophets, who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified.

My colleague Canon Kristin White is fond of quoting Esther de Waal, who summarizes the rule of St. Benedict in a simple sentence: “God is not elsewhere.” It puts in a nutshell Benedict’s critique of monks and other faithful who had a sincere longing for God, but were always looking for him over the next horizon, rather than right where their feet were planted.

When Jesus went into the desert, God was not elsewhere. As you go into your Lenten fast, God is not elsewhere. When New Harmony’s founders cleared the wilderness forest and laid out these streets, God was not elsewhere. God was not elsewhere when St. Stephen’s cornerstone was laid. God was not elsewhere when Dr. Beth began her ministry among you, and neither is God elsewhere today, nor will God depart from you in the days to come.

God was not elsewhere when the devil tempted Jesus with all the kingdoms of the earth. God was not elsewhere when Jesus said no. And God was certainly not elsewhere when at the end of his 40 days of fasting and powerful temptations, angels came and waited upon him.

We stand today just a few steps into our annual journey into Lent. It will take us with Jesus to Jerusalem, to the foot of the cross, and beyond, where we too will find angels waiting for us, ready to remind us once again of a love and a life too powerful to be contained by any tomb.

Hold on. Take a breath. God is with you even in the toughest days and most uncertain hours. God’s angels wait for you. You have every tool you need.

—

Sermon preached at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, New Harmony, IN

Lent 1 (February 26, 2023)

Readings: Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7, Psalm 32, Romans 5:12-19, Matthew 4:1-11