Sermon — March 6, 2022
The Rev. Greg Johnston
As people have followed the news from Ukraine recently, I’ve seen a number of different ways to try to understand what’s happening by telling the stories of the past. It’s something we often do. Is this, one might wonder, closer to what Germany did to Czechoslovakia in 1938, or is it closer to what Germany and the Soviet Union did to Poland in 1939? Is it more like what Russia did to Georgia in 2008, or what Russia did to Ukraine just back in 2014? Or, if you’re not so familiar with the dates and times of 20th-century European history: Is this, as one headline said, a “David and Goliath story”?
It’s interesting, the way we try to understand, as if picking the right story about a situation can tell us something about the way it will unfold. “David and Goliath” is the perfect example. After all, nobody ever claims to be Goliath, because “David and Goliath” doesn’t just distinguish between “small and big,” it separates those who are small, scrappy, and untrained, but righteous from those who are big, powerful, incompetent, and wrong. And “David and Goliath” aren’t just characters, but a story. We know the beginning, the middle, and the end. And we know that it’s not the story of a small but righteous child slowly crushed, despite his best efforts, beneath the inexorable power of a giant. It’s a story in which the determined, innocent boy overcomes the hardened warrior by the grace of God and by the power of his goodness. To claim the David and Goliath story for oneself is to claim that one will have victory, as unlikely as it may seem; and in fact, by giving courage to your friends and attracting compassion from the world, the telling of the story itself shifts the plot of reality toward the victory. It’s not a magic formula. It doesn’t guarantee you’ll get what you want. But it’s a legitimate strategy, and it sometimes really works.
We often call Lent a penitential season, a season in which we repent, as one of our liturgies puts it, for “the evil that enslaves us, the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf,” and we try to repair the damage. It’s also a season of fasting, which is something different. Fasting—whether from certain foods or from alcohol or from anything else we choose to give up during Lent—is not a form of repentance. We don’t give up chocolate or wine or whatever because they’re evil, but because they’re good. And it’s not a punishment, a way of somehow making amends for our sins by forsaking something we like. It’s a workout for the soul, a way of practicing our resistance to really serious temptations by resisting things that aren’t actually bad to do. Along with repentance and fasting, Lent is also a season of preparation: not only of our preparation for the joy of the resurrection on Easter, but, traditionally, a season in which new Christians were formed in the traditions of the faith as they prepared to be baptized at Easter.
Lent is a season of repentance, and of fasting, and of preparation; but it’s also a season of wandering in the wilderness. The forty days of Lent symbolize the forty days of Jesus’ fasting and temptation in the wilderness, which are themselves an echo of the forty years the Israelites spent wandering in the wilderness generations before. And this is the part of Lent I’m really feeling the most this year—not repentance, or preparation, or even fasting (although, ask me in a few weeks)—but that story of the wilderness.
The wilderness is an interlude in the story of the ancient Israelites. It should just be a couple days’ journey from Egypt to the Promised Land, and yet this wilderness stretches on for a long, long time, the Promised Land always tantalizingly just around the bend. Much like the last two years. We’ve left behind an old way of living, and we haven’t quite reached the new one yet. And it turns out that this wilderness time hasn’t just been empty time. It’s been a time of transformation and change and reimagination. It’s not just the gap between Point A and Point B—it is, itself, point B in a much longer alphabet of change.
The Book of Deuteronomy is written as a speech by Moses at the end of this wandering time, forty years after he parted the Red Sea so they could escape slavery in Egypt. Moses reminds them of the law that God has given them, and tells them what to do when they finally make it there: “When you have come into the Land…and you possess it, and settle in it, you shall take some of the first fruit of the ground…” and go to the altar of God, and say, “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor,” and retell the story of their people, of their ancestors’ own ancient wanderings, of their enslavement, and of their liberation. (Deut. 26:1-2, 5)
Immediately after Jesus’ baptism in the same river Jordan, he is led out into the wilderness to be tested, and stays there for forty days, a miniature version of their forty years. And each one of his responses to the devil’s tempting offers is a quote from that same Book of Deuteronomy: “One does not live by bread alone,” and “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him,” and “Do not put the Lord your God to the test” all come from that same moment in the people’s story. (Deut. 8:3, 6:13, 6:16)
Jesus’ wilderness time is at the beginning of his ministry, not the end. But it comes while his people are still enduring another wilderness, not forty days or four decades but four centuries and more of foreign rule, of occupation and oppression. And when the devil tempts him with offers of bread, and power, and safety for himself, Jesus quotes Deuteronomy, recalling the whole story of the people’s time in the wilderness and their entrance into the Promised Land. The devil offers a single hungry man a loaf of bread; and Jesus calls forth the story of the God who fed his people with manna from heaven every day. The devil offers him power over the kingdoms of all the world, and Jesus recalls the story of a people who’ve had enough of being ruled. The devil offers him protection, but Jesus calls forth the God who parted the sea and dashed the chariots of Pharaoh, the tanks of the ancient world, into bits.
These words have power. When we quote a beloved text, or we give a ritualized address, when we recite ancient prayers or we write a news headline about a “David and Goliath” struggle, we write ourselves into the story, and that story becomes real in our lives.
Paul writes to the church in Rome that “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.” (Romans 10:9) It’s not a magic formula. It’s the retelling of a story. Like the Eucharistic prayers that evoke the story of salvation, like the Great Litany that echoes with five centuries of the prayers of the past, it draws upon the strength of the experience of Christians in ages past, and their stories begin to shape our lives and our choices as we live the remaining chapters of our stories. And in fact this retelling doesn’t just call forth the stories of our ancestors; it’s brings God to us. When we tell those old stories, Paul quotes Deuteronomy to say, “The word is near [us], on [our] lips and in [our] heart.” (Rom. 10:8, Deut. 30:14) The uppercase-W Word of God is near us. The Word who became flesh is near us. When we tell these stories, and pray these prayers, Christ is near us, whether we can sense him or not, and he is writing the rest of the story for us as leave this place today.
Only a few words of this service today came from me, or from you. More came from the generations before us, fifty or five hundred years ago. And more still came from generations long past, from those who lived in a far-off live two or three thousand years ago. But their stories are our stories. Their God is our God. Their wilderness is not our wilderness, but their wandering is our wandering, and it feels like we’re getting awfully close to the Promise Land. We don’t know what God has written for us in the next chapter of our story, but we do know where God’s story has brought us in the past: from a wilderness of spiritual fasting to a land flowing with milk and honey; from enslavement to liberation; from the cross to the empty tomb; and together with all those who live among us, we can give thanks to God and “celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord [our] God has given to [us].” (Deut. 26:11)
Amen.