Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

On this First Sunday in Lent we find ourselves well into the journey to the great paschal feast. It was an abrupt beginning as the ashes of Ash Wednesday were applied to our foreheads. We were reminded that we are dust and to dust we shall return. Some heard these words as judgement. Some heard these words simply as the truth of our existence. That we are mortal creatures is not the curse of our existence.

We were created by the mouth of God who spoke us into existence (Genesis 1) and who breathed into us the breath of life (Genesis 2). There is no indication that we were meant to live forever. As long as we remained connected to God by the hearing of God’s Word, we were destined for a life of relationship with God and our fellow creatures.

The hymn attributed to St. Francis of Assisi addresses this in verse 5.

And you, most gentle sister death,
waiting to hush our final breath:
Since Christ our light has pierced your gloom,
fair is the night that leads us home. —ELW 835

It is not death that we have to fear. What we should fear is a life that is determined by our fear of death. The only alternative is a life determined by the Word of God which breaks the gloom that dominates life. We think we can live from our own strength and understanding.

Perhaps these are the days that help us to understand that we live our lives by God’s grace whether we realize it or not. We have seen the rise of illusive wealth over the last decades. We have felt powerful, but not because our relationship to God has grown more powerful. No, we trusted in our financial reports. We believed in our military might. We invested our confidence in the American way of life. All the while we prayed, “and lead us not into temptation.”

Well, we are there! After all what is temptation “but the loss of all strength, defenseless deliverance into Satan’s hands (Bonhoeffer, Temptation, p 98). What we hear in the story of the temptation of Jesus is interesting. We are told by the writer of James

No one, when tempted, should say, "I am being tempted by God"; for God cannot be tempted by evil and he himself tempts no one. (James 1:13)

The issue is that we know ourselves to be tempted. It is commonplace during trying times to hear us mumble, “Why has God done this to me.” Is God testing me to see if I have faith? Does God want to find out how much strength I have? But I repeat what Bonhoeffer taught us well. Temptation is not a testing of our strength. Temptation is a time in which we find ourselves with no strength, and we are defenseless against the attacks of anxiety, fear and powerlessness.

When do we experience such times of attack? When the economy falters, we lose our job and perhaps our own selves in the process. We go through divorce, we face the death of a loved one, or we face our own death.

The answer to that is God tests no one. That leaves only one other source which our tradition refers to as the evil one, Satan, the devil. Of course, the evil one has been so trivialized in our culture that we have been left with little means by which to interpret our experience. In this therapeutic age we have caused as much harm by asking people to bear the anxiety of the times as though the fearful attacks are generated from within us. That leaves us with the image that if we can exercise enough self-control, we can beat these attacks. But this is a brutal untruth for us when we realize that we are unable to control or fend off the attacks that come on us with a fury and vengeance. It is at such times that the threat of despair comes all too close to us, threatening to devour us.

So it is that in our rites we have allowed the evil one to have a place among us. We see it in the rite of baptism when we ask the one to be baptized,

Do you renounce the devil and all the forces that defy God,
the powers of this world that rebel against God,
and the ways of sin that draw you from God?

The question that arises is addressed in the readings by the proclamation of the Word of God. This Word comes to us in a particular form which we know as "promise." The God to whom we belong is none other than the God who created us by the Word and who stays in relationship with us by the Word. That Word is a promise. In Genesis God makes a promise not to destroy the world by water ever again. As a sign of this promise God puts the divine war bow in the sky. We have to this day the promise of the rainbow which assures us of God's covenant with us.

The author of I Peter reads Christ and baptism into the story of the flood. The waters of the flood are now the waters of baptism which is not seen as a purification rite. Now it is the proclamation of the Word made flesh. It is “an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ” (I Peter 3:21b). It is not for a good conscience of our own production but it is a conscience that is created through Christ’s own cosmic battle with the spirits that accuse us and those powers and authorities that would seek to enslave us in this world.

In the Gospel of Mark we are confronted with the decisive pattern of God’s own struggle to wrest us from the power of evil and to put us in good relationship with God. That pattern is established in Chapter One with the baptism of Jesus in which the voice of God proclaims, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased" (Mark 1:11). No sooner is the Word proclaimed than we are told that the Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness where Jesus is tempted for forty days by Satan. It is a simple sentence; but, when understood in the biblical context, we can see that Jesus’ being driven into the wilderness is for a time of testing.

The temptation of Christ is not a time of testing his strength. It is a time of abandonment during which Jesus is left with no strength of his own, but only the Spirit and the angels. Together they contend against Satan, the wild animals and the demons that dwell in the wilderness. Jesus is not portrayed as actively fighting, but more appropriately passively trusting in the power of God.

When the time of testing is over, Jesus immediately goes out on a mission “proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near, repent, and believe in the good news’" (vss. 14b-15). In this way we can expect that our own hearing of the Word of God will not result in personal strength, but can result in our testing by which we come to a total reliance on God and God’s power.

Dear congregation, we pray the Lord’s prayer every time we assemble together. That means we pray repeatedly, “Lead us not into temptation.” Still I am not sure that we give much thought to what it means that we ask God not to bring us to a time of testing. Now perhaps we can understand better. For who among us wants to experience the death of our own self-understanding? Who wants to struggle against the powers of this world which promise us life but deliver only death?

Luther explains our prayer in the Small Catechism.

God tempts no one, of course, but we pray in this request that God will protect us and save us, so that the Devil, the world and our bodily desires will neither deceive us nor seduce us into heresy, despair or other serious shame or vice, and so that we will win and be victorious in the end, even if they attack us.

Let us not ask for testing. But when testing comes, let us put our trust in God that we may conduct ourselves in conformity to God’s will. That we do no harm to ourselves or our neighbor, but work toward the good that God wills for us all. Let us believe the promise which is made in baptism that we are God’s children and that we will remain so in the time of trial and tribulation.

And the peace of God which passes all understanding guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.