Sunday March 9th, 2025 Worship

If you aren’t familiar with it, Psalm 91 is the basis for the hymn, “On Eagle’s Wings.” This hymn is one of my favorites, and it makes me cry every time I listen to it because this has been one of our family funeral hymns on my mom’s side. It was played at the funeral for both of my grandparents and my uncle. Despite its difficulty to sing, it is one of the popular hymns for funerals because it encompasses so much of the hope and the trust that we have in God. Ultimately, we know that challenges and hardships will happen for all of us, yet this hymn reminds us of the trust that we have in God. I encourage you to listen to it afterwards if you aren’t familiar with the hymn… [I’d sing part of it for you, but I don’t think I would be able to do that this morning without crying.]
This sense of trusting in God is what we get in our Gospel reading today too, when we see Jesus being tempted by the devil, and not accepting that temptation to put his trust in the devil instead of in God. Now, I know there are a lot of ways that people talk about the devil working in the world, including Martin Luther, and I’m not going to get into that today, because I know that there can be differences culturally and regionally. Instead, I want to focus on what these temptations of Jesus can teach us about trust as we look at the temptations in our world today too.
Now, often when we talk about temptations, we hear it in the context of not having cookies, chips, candy, you name it at home in case we are tempted to eat it all. Temptation really gets brought into the narrative of our diet culture, which also needs reshaping and would be a whole different sermon. But, when I talk about temptations today, I’m not talking about food or the desire to skip work on the first sunny days of the year to be in the sunshine instead. I want us to think about the larger temptations in the world, the ones like what Jesus is being offered here, of turning toward ourselves, others, or objects to be the center of our world and the source of our salvation. I’m talking about the temptation to accumulate wealth and power for ourselves, to disconnect from our communities because we live only for ourselves instead of for each other. I’m talking about the temptation to ignore the lived experiences of others because they are different from our own so they cannot possibly be true. I’m talking about the temptation to lean into violence and hatred, instead of love and justice. The temptations I’m talking about are not just personal ones that have minimal consequences in the world, but the ones that tempt us because they feel like the easier way. They are the temptations that place us, as humans, in the position of God, wanting to control anything and everything instead of trusting that God in fact does still care about us. I’m talking about those things that tempt us away from God and our neighbor. Those temptations that tell us that we are better than this group or that group, that we deserve more than they do because of our superiority. There are so many of these temptations surreptitiously operating in our world today, and we can’t even see them because this feels so natural to the world we live in. These are the things we are surrounded with day by day.
I find the dialogue between Jesus and the devil in today’s Gospel to be fascinating because the devil seems to try all the things that would reasonably tempt a human: providing for their immediate need, giving them absolute power and authority, and proving that their faith is true and valid (Luke 4: 1-13). Yet, we get the reminder today that there are often strings attached when something seems too good to be true. Like when the devil today says, “To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours” (Luke 4: 6-7). So many of those things that we are searching for, the things that provide us instant satisfaction require more of us than we may realize at the outset, including turning away from the things we hold dear, whether that be our loved ones or our values.
Yet, I say all this knowing that it can be so incredibly difficult to hold onto our faith in times of distress, challenge, or hardship. When we want answers to why certain things are happening in our lives, especially those things that cannot be explained, it makes sense that we would be tempted to turn to anything that can provide us with even a little bit of relief. I think this becomes even more challenging when we hear things like at the end of today’s reading when Jesus says “It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test’” (Luke 4: 12b). Like I’ve said before, this doesn’t mean that we don’t get to have our doubts or our laments. Those things can and do exist as a very important part of our faith. But, when we think about testing, it is often done with a very specific outcome in mind. It puts God into a box that is defined by who and what we want or need God to be for us in the given moment. I think about all the tests I had to take in school, whether it was multiple choice or an essay exam, the intention was that we answered it in the way that our teacher wanted in order for us to get a good grade. When we test God, we put our ideas of who God is onto God, instead of letting God be God. None of this says that we don’t have the freedom to still ask God why?!
When we look at the stories from today, it all comes back to trusting in God, even when it doesn’t seem easy to do so. Part of how Scripture inspires us to continue doing so is by reminding us of God’s faithfulness and trustworthiness throughout history. From recalling the history of the Israelites in Egypt in Deuteronomy (Deuteronomy 26-11) to the promises of God’s care and protection in the Psalm and the example of Jesus’ trust in God in Luke’s Gospel, the layout of our Scripture follows that same pattern today. The reality is that there will be so many things in life that seem like they will be more satisfying, that will be easier, than trusting in God, especially when this, that, or the other thing will give us what we want now and God might not. But, ultimately, these readings also remind us of the strength that we have when we are grounded in God, who has been shown to be faithful and trustworthy throughout the arc of our Scriptures. This is the relationship that God is calling us to, not one that is fleeting whenever we decide that it is convenient to trust in God, when ultimately the things that tempt us away let us down. But, ultimately, it’s up to you to decide what is meaningful in your life and how you want to remain grounded in that, even when, or perhaps especially when the temptations of this world try to shake those beliefs.