First Sunday of Lent

Romans 10.8b-13; Luke 4.1-13

This Lent we are looking at our own personal relationship with God, our own individual spiritual journey; what it means to be a disciple, a follower of Christ. Because I believe that the season of Lent is a gift to us by the Church to take some extra time to think about our own standing with God and not only to believe in Him but to get to know Him. The two are different. And our readings today, this first Sunday in Lent give us the opportunity to begin that work; because getting to know God demands work, the work without which, 'faith is dead' as St. Paul said.

And that's highlighted by what St. Paul says in that little bit of his letter to the Romans that we've read this morning - 'The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim); because 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'. You could say that 'confess with your lips' is the work and 'believe in your heart' is faith. So faith and works are necessary for that getting to know God. To put it in simple terms, if you want to find out about a place, really get to know it, it's no use just believing that the place exists because you've seen it on a map or somebody's told you about it, you've got to go to the trouble of travelling there. Faith and works - and the same is true of the Christian life. You've got to believe and then you've got to actually go to the trouble of living it, and with ALL the demands it makes, not just picking and choosing which bits you like the look of and which are usually easy. And you've got to make it a life time's commitment. I'm afraid that being a Christian isn't like learning 'Greek in a week' or 'seeing Wales in a weekend'. Being a Christian is a life time's work because it's God we are getting to know. So we've got before us this commitment to faith, to believing and to doing the work that faith demands. And I just want to linger a bit longer over that, and tease out what it might mean. It's important we take our time at this early stage because we are preparing the ground for what might come later as we make our way through Lent.

The gospel reading for this Sunday, which at one time was the first day of Lent before Ash Wednesday was put in place by the Church, is always the one about Jesus in the wilderness. And it's Jesus' time in the wilderness that we use as our model for Lent. This particular episode in Jesus' life happens immediately after He is baptised. And that's the first important thing we note as we think about faith and works. Our baptism is our initiation into the Church and into the Christian life. It's the point at which we receive for ourselves, the grace of the Holy Spirit. We receive that Spirit in faith; and then comes the work. And the Spirit of God is there with us in that work. Notice, here in St. Luke's gospel it says the Spirit, the Spirit of God, led Jesus into the wilderness. In St. Mark it says that the Spirit 'drove' Jesus into the wilderness. This is God's testing time for Jesus, after He's taken that step of faith and been baptised. And so if our Christian life is the same as that of Jesus, which it's bound to be if we are committed to the Christian life, then after our baptism we can expect to be tested as to our faith and our faithfulness to God.

People run away with the idea that once we are Christian then all should be sweetness and light, all our problems solved. And that's why people fall away from the Christian life because they've got it all wrong, I'm sorry but they have. It's not the Christian life that there's anything wrong with, the error is with them. They ditch it because its demands are too tough, or the assurances it holds out aren't realised immediately, or the promises are a very long time coming, or indeed prayers seem to be unanswered. What is true about being a Christian is that it is far from an easy ride. It holds no less a call then for our own will to be replaced and supplanted by the will of God. And it's far harder to change the human will than it is simply to train a dog to it's owner's will. And God isn't in the position of a trainer, He never forces His children into anything, He works with us in a sort of partnership where our will gladly submits to His will out of love for Him. The turning of our will to God's will is a response of love, not an animal response like that of our dog, merely out of fear and submission to authority.

But having gladly submitted to God's will out of love, the testing is still there, always, and we see it in Jesus here in this time in the wilderness and the testing can be both subtle and very unsubtle. And a warning now that the language we use here is graphic and not to some people's taste. It's just a way of speaking which I find most helpful, but you can put it into more contemporary language of psychology if you like, it's still the same. It's the devil's job to separate us from God, to stop us living according to God's will, and he has different schemes as weapons in his armoury, one or two in particular.

'If you are the Son of God', the devil says to Jesus - 'If'. The greatest weapon in the devil's armoury is doubt. Plant the seeds of doubt in your mind and the devil has you for ever. The devil doesn't deal in certainty, he deals in doubt. Atheists are easy for the devil, so much so he ignores them in favour of doubters. There's no work to be done there. It's doubt that is the opposite of faith you see. Doubt is a wasteland of mirages, where nothing is real, all is illusion. It's a place where all is possible and nothing is possible and all is unknown. Doubt is a place of fear and torment and horror. And we've all been there and not just in things concerning God or the Church. Who hasn't said 'what if?' about a situation, what if this should happen or that should happen, and lived with the psychological and emotional torment of 'if'? So the devil says to Jesus 'If, you are the Son of God', let's plant that seed of doubt, to undermine everything, most of all Jesus' faith.

And then the devil uses another subtle weapon; untrue perceptions, erroneous points of view, lies instead of truth. 'All this dominion I will give you', he says, as if it's his to give. The world is not the devil's to give. The devil plants the suggestion in the lie though, that it is, and never underestimate the power of suggestion, which can easily trick the human mind into believing a lie. One of the longest and most difficult periods of the Church's history is those early years when the Church was hammering out what it really believes about God and all sorts of points of view were put forward and in the end rejected as error. And those errors are still put about today in one modern form or another. And the devil just wants you to be in thrall to one of those, it doesn't matter which as long as it's not the truth. You can believe a lie and live a lie in the same way as you can believe and live the truth. And believing and living a lie is paying homage to the devil, and separating us from God, as he wanted Jesus to do.

And then finally, another lure into the realm of doubt, the temptation to put God to the test, just as the devil wanted Jesus to do. 'Oh this stuff is no good, it doesn't work, I've been to church it's a load of rubbish'. How many times have we heard this from people who've put God to the test, in their own minds anyway. If you put God to the test it feeds your doubt, always. We have faith in God and love God when we live His life by His commandments and stick to it. And then the life itself is the answer to our doubts, not any so called miracle that may happen along the way - 'turn these stones into bread, jump off this parapet and angels will save you'. 'Just give me a miracle, God, then I can believe in you'; most of us have said it at one time or another. Those so called tests that the devil suggests, aren't pleas for reassurance or faith, they are taunts to cast doubt, to keep us in that wasteland of not really knowing or understanding or believing. People of faith don't need and don't ask for miracles, only people who doubt want miracles.

So doubt and illusion are probably the two most effective weapons in the devil's armoury as he seeks to separate us from God. They can be subtle and soft weapons but no less lethal to our whole life, lethal in very real physical, psychological and spiritual terms to mind, body, soul and spirit. And we need to be ever mindful of them throughout our Christian life, from beginning to end. The final sentence in our gospel reading today says, 'So, having come to the end of all these temptations, the devil departed, biding his time.' The devil's work is never done.

I'd like to conclude with a reference from one of C.S. Lewis's books 'The Screwtape Letters, Letters from a Senior to a Junior devil', which is highly recommended reading especially in Lent, it's quite funny as well as being very serious, it's very easy reading with short chapters and you can now get it with pictures. You just need to know that the Enemy that Screwtape talks about is God. He writes: 'You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts'.