Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

Luke 4:1-13

Beloved Ones, congratulations. You’ve sprung forward!

Ron Warren died last month. He was the Lutheran bishop who filed misconduct that led to my removal as a pastor in the ELCA because I began a relationship with my husband, Darin. Ultimately, we were reinstated when the policy that required queer pastors to be single was eliminated, and our denomination opened its doors a little wider. As news spread of his death, I received many messages that reflected a tendency to remember that time of trial as a conflict like the one that takes place in the wilderness between Jesus and Satan, one of us on the side of good and one on the side of evil.

I know some of that reflects the pain that the policy inflicted on so many people. The anger about the injustice is real. Some of the wounds may never be healed. Yet placing either one of us so clearly on one team or the other isn’t right. It reminded me that when the trial was going on, the congregation I served planned a series of worship services that were patterned like Holy Week; from foot washing on Thursday, the night the trial began, the night in which he was betrayed, to Friday prayers around the cross to a Sunday morning Easter-like feast of victory. Barbara Lundblad rightly sensed the risk in that approach, beginning the opening sermon by saying, “Bradley is not Jesus.” Maybe we should have added, “Ron is not the devil.”

Early in the process after I refused to resign, before he decided to file those charges, both of us became comic book characters for the media and for narratives others wanted to tell, usually with a goal to stir someone up. Increasingly, I was being asked to comment. I don’t remember what I wrote or said, but one day Bishop Warren indicated that he had seen something where I talked about those enforcing the policy as Pharisees. You know, those who blindly, rigidly, and self-righteously follow the rules. He said that being called a Pharisee hurt. I remember my face turning red as I realized that I had fallen into a kind of name-calling. We agreed to speak respectfully of one another. I realized then that the only way truly to win was to refuse to play a game that drew a line between us and them. David vs. Goliath. Hero vs. villain. Jesus vs. the devil. When Ron heard that I was called to Gloria Dei, he told a member of this congregation who has connections to his family, “You’re getting a wonderful pastor.”

In a strange way that only makes sense to the Spirit, we were wandering in the wilderness, marked with the cross of Christ, trying to figure out what it meant to be people of faith, called into pastoral ministry, walking into an uncertain future. If both Jesus and the devil were there in that time of trial, they were speaking within both of us.

I tell that story today because there is a risk when we tell the great stories of the world around us, we tell them in the ways we have often been schooled to believe the world is structured, with forces of good battling the forces of evil, a narrative where there are clear villains and a clear heroes, and we know exactly who Satan is. If you heard the temptation story read today and one person, or even a few others, came to your mind, like it did for me, as clearly identifying that one who is willing to use power to serve the self, eager to do anything to be worshiped and glorified, strategically introducing doubt and confusion in order to be the true savior, sent by God, we may be missing a larger point.

Christianity itself has been drawn to this big-time wrestling way of telling the story. Quick to identify some as evil and some as good; removing any nuance, complication, or empathic twinge so that we keep clear about who is the “other;” willing to accept that the only way you can know you’re saved is by being certain who is not; willing to use fear of failure and damnation to keep the troops in line. It’s a powerful tool. It works best in times of crisis when you’ve been led to believe you’re dying of hunger and there’s not enough to go around, or you think someone is going to push you over the edge. Anxiety and manufactured need can make us click and buy and vote.

When faced with those moments, Jesus grounded himself in another voice; the one he heard coming up out of the water: You are my chosen one, my beloved. The text says that Jesus was filled with the Holy Spirit when he was led into the wilderness. To him, that meant there’s enough, God will provide; God is already at the center, and this God who is still speaking is trustworthy. For 40 days, Jesus must have struggled with how he had been formed by the narratives of power and wealth, realizing that to be anointed as part of God’s project to heal and set the world free was going to require an entirely different way of being, doing, and telling the story.

The wilderness in the bible is always the place for practicing or learning or preparing. Daniel Erlander calls the desert of Sinai the “wilderness school.” After the children of Israel had been liberated from slavery, promised a land flowing with milk and honey, they felt chosen to be a nation that would structure itself differently. One that practiced sharing instead of hoarding, lived by laws that guarded the ones who didn’t have power to make the laws, a community that organized itself to be equal, a whole nation that put love of God and neighbor at the heart of every question, issue, and struggle. What would God’s reign look like if we practiced it personally, socially, economically, ethically?

The tools that the devil offers Jesus in the wilderness were the tools of Pharoah, the tools of every empire that has ever existed, including our own: power for self, having control over other kingdoms, sowing seeds of doubt about the trustworthiness of goodness, kindness, vulnerability, and love.

It took 40 years of wandering practice before they were ready to cross the Jordan and enter the land. Even then, it would prove risky. Note the first reading. It was one of the rules from the wilderness about giving thanks, offering first fruits, as way of countering the narrative that all that sweet honey and that beautiful milk was deserved, or owed to them, and not a gift of God. They must remember that “a wandering Aramean was my ancestor.” If they forgot that they had been without much of anything; that they had been an enslaved people; lost and crabby most of the time; that they had once been outsiders, there were at risk of becoming yet another Egypt.

And so here we are, again in a wilderness. Living in a time when many voices are calling for our loyalty. A time of crisis. A time when we are faced with what values will guide life and policy. What story will we construct about one another? What story will we remember about where we come from, what we have, and where we’re going? What are the tools that we will use to do good? Is it worth using the devil’s tools, even if they are for good reasons?

We’re not always saved from the time of trial. For some, that means the political one going on right now. For others, it’s a diagnosis; or a family crisis; or an addiction; or long-festering conflict; or the death of our most beloved. There are times of trial in so many ways.

I say that, not as a downer, but with hope. Yes, times of crisis are the opportune moment for the devil to reappear. Yet it is also the opportune moment to find that what we need is here: the power of grace, living water, the presence of the Spirit, Jesus, who doesn’t come and go but sticks with us like the cross made on our forehead at baptism. Not one of us enters the time of trial without all the gifts and power of baptism: the spirit of a different kind of wisdom and a new narrative for understanding the world around us; the spirit of guidance that comes from trusting that there’s going to be enough and it’s going to be okay; bearing a kind of might and power that is sacrificial, generous, and kind, and a whole set of stories that remind us that the people of God have always wandered in the wilderness; there has always been suffering, loss, even death.

And there has always been a resurrection. We are always on the way to a new expression of Easter. We’re learning to trust that dying and rising is a deep and consistent pattern, as constant and as trustworthy as the coming of spring. Maybe the real role of getting away into the wilderness, or having a season like Lent, our own 40 days, is because we need a change in landscape to see the signs, to notice that in that wilderness, the place of crisis and death, is also teeming with life, new ways of being are imagined, new tools are forged, and even now, whether we have heard it yet or not, a new story has begun.

In the end, ironically, we ARE Jesus, the body of Christ, anointed with Spirit, raised to be signs of a life that is yet to come. So congratulations, people of God, you have already sprung ahead.