St. Paul's On-the-Hill Episcopal Church

The Rev. Stephen C. Holton, Rector

February 10, 2008; Lent 1

Matthew 4:1-11

CELEBRATION OF NEED

Keys to the Kingdom

We need each other. We need each other to get through life. We need each other to love each other. We need each other to be loved by each other.

This is Lent – to Celebrate our Need, to say it is a good thing, to explore it; for in exploring it we find God, who supplies us in our Need.

When we do not Explore it, we do not find God who supplies us in it. When we avoid it, or medicate it with other things, we avoid God and we medicate ourselves so that if we ever found God we would not feel his presence for we would have medicated ourselves to the extent that we would not feel his presence.

In turning to other comforts to avoid the sensation of pain, we will have turned to other comforts and avoided the presence of God, who heals that pain.

And so in Lent we turn to God. And in order to turn to God we turn first to our need of him, and we reject all those things that usually fill that need.

What a counter-cultural thing to do! What a weird thing to do. No pie for me, thanks; no cake, no booze, no cigarettes, no – whatever it is I've given up. I want to expose myself to the presence of God.

Well that's not so weird. People might understand that. I think all people understand that too much booze or food or other substances are a way of hiding from life; and a temporary, even harmful way at that.

What they don't understand is that there's another possibility besides grim endurance of life's problems or hiding from them. It is that in facing them, you also find God's help. As Christians we know this. It is that in facing a Crucifixion in our lives, we will also find a Resurrection in our lives. In facing the world we will find God Incarnate and present in the world.

In avoiding the world and all its problems and its promises, we avoid God who came into the problems, and also gave the promises.

You know, when I was in college Christians were accused of needing a crutch to get through life. Well, it seems to me that it is better to have a crutch than to be on pain killers, or in constant pain. And most people self-medicate!

In Lent we give up the personal pain killers just long enough to remember that we do not need them, for we have a crutch we can turn to, a crutch who happily came into the world so we could lean on him.

The crutch comes into all our needs, all the places that we need him, even the places that cause us the most shame, the places we're most likely to turn to other self-medications because not only are we ashamed of ourselves before other people, we are also ashamed of ourselves before God.

But he finds us there, and holds us up even there, perhaps to help us walk through and out of those dark places.

I have a set of keys. And it has a new key fob. It is this little cross that someone gave me – from Ethiopia. It is a wonderful little cross and it reminds me of my friend and of Ethiopian Christians and, of course, of Christ.

It did not get here by very holy methods. The other day I was really angry at something and I reached my hand into my pocket and I threw my key chain across the parking lot and the old fob broke. Actually it chipped. And I knew that whenever I used those keys again I would be reminded of that anger, and I didn't want that. Paradoxically it had the word “Peace” on it. And I had broken it. So I was not that good at keeping the Peace all by myself.

So I took off the old fob and found this and put it on. It worked out well because I used to carry this cross in my pocket independently because it was so pretty, but it kept falling out because it was so light and little. Now it stays in there because it is weighed down by this mortal coil, as it were, these ordinary and mundane keys.

Perhaps Christ is better at keeping the Peace than we are – even being there when we are angry.

And of course Jesus is present in our ordinary and mundane life, as ordinary and mundane as car keys to a Dodge Neon.

When they're in the car, it reminds me that Christ is just as much with me there as if I rode in a Jaguar – my aspiration of choice. I would not be any more comfortable there, in an existential way, than in my Neon; for Jesus would be in both, with me. Any other comforts would not matter.

He is with me whether or not I have a dish of ice-cream; but when I don't have the ice-cream I'm more likely to think of him than the fudge vanilla swirl with the nuts on top.

He gets deeper inside of me than the glass of wine, but if I do not have the wine I am more likely to feel his presence and touch that soothes the pain that the wine cannot reach (if I invite him in).

But if I cannot manage a holy thought at the worst of times, I am at least likely to turn to a normal person to talk with or be with. And I will find that that normal person does at least as good a job at healing me as that dessert or that drink would.

They might even lead me to considering a long term fix, a long term support for me to use instead of always putting my weight on a broken leg or a broken soul or a broken heart. How about Christ our crutch?

You know, I almost routinely mistype 'church' as 'chruch,' reversing th 'u' and the 'r.' Perhaps that's not so bad. Perhaps if you don't yet know that you can lean on Christ, whom you can't see, its obvious that you can lean on your friends, whom you can see.

And perhaps, when you, when we go forth from here, people can lean on us, and eventually ask us how we manage to stand up so straight even in the worst of circumstances.

We can because we can lean on him. We lean on him because we know our need of him, and avoid the self-medication that keeps us from the crutch.

We lean on him because we know he's here, not in heaven someplace.

He came into the world, just like us. He was tempted by Satan, just like us – tempted to turn stones to bread to fill up that empty hole and get away from his need for God since man does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. He didn't turn away from God and God's word to the bread. We do.

He was tempted to enlist God as his own personal body guard so he could do any foolish thing he wanted, like throw himself down from the temple, or putting his life and soul at risk in some other way. He didn't. We do. Curiously he was more in touch with his humanity and weakness than we are.

He was tempted to control the world so he and everyone else could have a good life according to his whim. He didn't fall victim to the temptation. We do. We do whenever we do anything a little unethical to get a little extra money, sacrifice our family more than we should to get a little farther ahead in that job, tell others to do what is not good for them, since it is good for us.

We do it because we are afraid that God is not there with us, not here with us; that we are here alone with the Devil, and he might be right.

He's wrong. God is here with us. He survived the temptations even if we don't, and he walked back from the wilderness, and through the Crucifixion to the Resurrection, and on into the world of cities and people that we inhabit.

And he is with us still, ready to be turned to, tugging at our sleeves in those times of temptation saying: 'try me instead. I will always be with you, even to the close of the age.'