First Sunday in Lent

Deuteronomy 26:1-11
Luke 4:1-13

For as long as I can remember, black and white photographs hung on the walls of my grandparents’ house at Buggs Island Lake. Most of the pictures on the walls were snapshots from my mother’s childhood, together with her brother and sister, but there were a couple of older portraits too and pictures of my grandparents’ travels out west and to China. On a bookshelf there were more photographs in albums that told the story of how they had built their house, room by room, year by year.

My grandmommy is the person who got me interested in our family history. Computers and the internet were still relatively new technology for any of us who weren’t engineers or computer scientists, but she had carefully printed notes that recorded the generations of my grandfather’s family back to their arrival from Yorkshire, England. In the decades since, I have added to her notes and shared our ancestors’ stories with my own children.

This kind of recitation of stories and preservation of memories is at the heart of today’s reading from Deuteronomy. The last of the five books of the Jewish Torah, or Pentateuch, Deuteronomy retells the stories of the covenant relationship between God and God’s people in a series of speeches and acts by Moses.

Our text this morning is part of one of Moses’ last speeches to the Hebrew people before his death and their entry into the promised land without him. Here he is recalling God’s generosity to them and instructing them about making an offering of first fruits when they enter the new land. As part of making their offering, he tells them to recite their history as God’s people, beginning with the words, “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor….”

Tracing their family’s ancestral history of Jacob’s flight to Egypt during the famine, through slavery to the Pharaoh, their escape across the Reed Sea and their exodus in the wilderness, they would not quickly forget where they had come from and whose shoulders they stood on. With repetition, the story of God’s generosity and salvation is woven into each person’s identity and becomes part of the warp and weft of the fabric of the community’s identity, too.

In the same way, the promises of God that we have been given are woven into our identity at our baptism when we receive the promise of forgiveness and new life in Christ.

Lutheran pastor and author Nadia Bolz-Weber once told the story that, when Martin Luther himself was hiding away in a castle translating the Bible into German so that for the very first time somewhat regular folks could read the Word of God for themselves, he struggled mightily with doubt and discouragement from what he understood to be the devil. And he was known to not only throw the occasional ink pots at whatever was tormenting him and causing him to doubt God's promises, but while doing so he could be heard throughout the castle grounds shouting “I am baptized!”.[i]

In today’s gospel account, we hear Luke’s telling of the temptation of Jesus after his baptism. And, every time the devil questions who Jesus is, and tries to lure him into a lie, Jesus responds immediately with the Truth that he knows in God’s Word. Jesus knows the promises God has made; he is confident in God’s power to fulfill those promises; and he refuses to believe the devil’s lies.

The season of Lent mirrors the forty years that Israel spent in the wilderness before they reached Canaan and the forty days that Jesus spent in the wilderness.  Listening to their stories, I wonder, “How do we respond when we are tempted to forget God’s generosity? Do we take God’s promises seriously?”

Right now, I am listening to a book The Ragged Edge of Night; it’s a story set in the early 1940s in Germany and one of the characters is a former Franciscan friar whose order was disbanded when the Nazi party dismantled Catholic institutions as their power grew. As the man tells his story, he is reconciling his former life in the order where he wore a simple grey habit and cincture, lived in one room and worked as a teacher - where all his needs were provided for - to his current circumstances where his coat is now thread bare, he is living in a village under austere war-time conditions and he is eking out a living teaching music. Even as his faith sustains him in difficulty, he wrestles with the world he is living in and the brokenness that he witnesses. He could respond in anger or self-pity, but he doesn’t.

Remembering God’s generosity doesn’t mean that we will never experience suffering or want; in fact, it isn’t about money or wealth at all. Remembering God’s generosity is remembering that God has chosen relationship over exile, love over judgment and life over death, making us God’s own beloved children.

We don’t have photographs or albums that tell us the story of our ancestors in faith. Our identity as God’s children flows out of our relationship with God, established at creation, affirmed in baptism and nourished every time we come to the table for Holy Communion.  With thanksgiving, we remember who we are as children of God when we hear again the stories of the generations before us and the promises God gave them and we say again the words of our faith in prayer and liturgy and sing them in our hymns and proclaim again God’s love to the world.

Let us pray.
Holy God,
Thank you for our ancestors in faith who led us to You and for bringing us to be fed and forgiven;
Imprint your saving word on our hearts and in our mouths that we can respond with Your truth when we face the devil;
Teach us to respond to the world with generous spirits and hearts that reflect your abundant love.
We pray in the name of Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.
Amen.

[i] https://sojo.net/articles/how-say-defiantly-i-am-baptized, accessed 3/8/2019