Today as we know is the first Sunday of the season of Lent. I pray. that these first few days of this season have been blessed for you.

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1 1 The Rev. Amanda Eiman 1 st Sunday in Lent March 4, 2017 Good morning/evening. Today as we know is the first Sunday of the season of Lent. I pray that these first few days of this season have been blessed for you. Perhaps you are participating in a Lenten discipline - maybe taking something on or giving something up for these 40 days. Maybe you are paying more attention to your physical health, maybe you have chosen to read a book or two, or maybe you are making efforts to resist temptation in your life - particularly those that draw you and I and all of us from a deeper connection with God...electronics, foods, the temptation of money, and self satisfaction just to name a few. We might take steps to avoid these things or replace them with others which draw us closer to God or make more space for God in our lives. And today our lectionary helps us examine temptation too - because we are presented in our Scriptures with both the story of Adam and Eve and their temptation and fall in the garden, and the story of

2 2 Jesus' temptation in the wilderness. And each of these temptations not only threaten to bring Adam, Eve, and Jesus away from their creator, but in the Genesis story as scholar David Lose describes, the serpent is "inviting Adam and Eve to fulfill the deep want and need that is at the core of being human...the temptation to be selfsufficient, to establish their identity on their own." How many of us, especially in our culture, are presented with this kind of temptation every day? Whether the source is our own mind or external messages from our culture, we want to be independent. We value self sufficiency. We want to be able to say "I did it myself." We want to create our image, our identity, our life. Autonomy and agency are of course in many regards positive goals for our human existence, but sometimes we forget that our autonomy and agency are only possible because it is God who creates us and energizes us in the first place and gives us the grace to live and flourish each day of our lives. Jesus doesn't forget this however.

3 3 Because when we compare the story of Adam and Eve with the story of Jesus in the wilderness, where he is tempted several times by the devil, the "temptation is the same, but Jesus responds by refusing to establish his own worth and identity on his own terms but instead remains dependent on God." The Devil repeatedly tempts him If you are God, command these stones to become loaves of bread If you are God, throw yourself down and he angels will bear you and, I will give you this world If you worship me. But Jesus repeatedly dismisses the Devil s tempts by quoting scripture and turning his face away So might it be that one of the main differences in the story from Genesis and from Matthew is that part of being human is being aware that we are insufficient, that we are not complete in and of ourselves, that lack is a permanent part of our condition? But that we so often want to fill that lack and need with temptations and choices that are inherently unable to fill us or complete us? And we become restless. Just like Adam and Eve. We eat, but the emptiness remains.

4 4 Because there is no filling of that gap, no permanent erasing that hole, except in and through our relationship with God. Or, as Augustine said, we humans are always restless until we rest in God. Only God and a relationship with God can fill us and fulfill that deep desire and longing that we know at the very core of our being. It's like Jamie, who, all of his life steered clear of anything that smelled of church. It wasn't that he didn't like church or Church people, church organizations,...he just didn't understand anyone who was speaking that "God language". He didn't know quite why he did, but, well, he just felt that he knew better. He could choose better. His life was fine. Just fine. Until one day he found himself compelled, for some reason, to attend a few Holy Week services at his local parish, and suddenly something or someone touched him and spoke to him at a level and in a place that he did not even know existed. And began to fill up a place he didn't even know was empty.

5 5 Jamie was changed that Holy Week and it began a journey with God which continues to this day. Maybe you ve experienced this touch, this filling of a place that is deep within you too. Yet that, David Lose says, "isn't quite the full picture. To be Christian is not to have that hole, that need, that awareness of finitude erased once and for all. Rather, to be human is to accept that we are created for relationship with God and with each other. And that God's grace is sufficient for us. So faith gives us the courage to stand amid hardships, not simply surviving but actually flourishing in and through Jesus, the one who was tempted as we are and thereby knows our struggles first hand. So Jesus invites us to find both hope and courage in the God who named not only him, but all of us, beloved children so that we, also, might discover who we are be recalling whose we are." Part of discipleship and being in relationship with God is knowing that being a disciple, being a child of God, is belonging to God...and that true, honest, relationship with God and with each other and with

6 6 God's grace, fulfills us more than any other thing for which we could ask or imagine. Because we belong to God. We fit. We fit together. That, my friends, is perhaps one of the greatest discoveries we can make in this season of Lent. To shed the temptations that try to tell us otherwise, and to find how we might be in fuller and deeper relationship with God. And, when we open our hearts to God and God s grace, God fills us with what we need to do so. To trust that that relationship with God is actually what helps to define us, not the temptations of the world, and that this relationship allows us to be free, and helps us live into the fullest manifestation of who God created us to be. The way that we make that discovery and the way that relationship grows and flourishes is unique for each of us... But Living like Jesus is trusting like Jesus did, in times of great joy - and in times in the wilderness. Living like Jesus is trusting that God's grace completes us like nothing we can do, or choose, no matter how tempting it is on the outside.

7 7 I invite you and I to live like Jesus this Lent. I invite us to remember to whom we belong. And not to be tempted to settle for anything less. Amen. *Lose, David. WorkingPreacher.org 1 Lent March 5, 2017