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Lent is the long haul. It is grounded in Jesus’ forty days
of fasting and being tempted in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1-3; Mark 1:13;
Luke 4:1-3), which was followed by the great trio of temptations questioning
and trying to undermine his divine sonship. Forty days is a long time. One
of the questions posed by Lent is: do you have staying power?
The lection from the Psalms is brimming with assurance at the
abundance of God’s providential grace: “do not forget all his benefits—who
forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your
life from the Pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy” (Psalm
103:2-5a). Verses 6-11 continue this litany of divine blessings. The epistle
lesson (1 Corinthians 10:1-13) recalls God’s provision for his people
Israel in the wilderness. This is vividly expressed in terms of the rabbinic
tradition of “the following rock”(4). God’s miraculous provision
of water for his people when Moses struck the rock at Horeb (Exodus 17:1-6)
is given continuous application when Paul says, not that the Israelites came
to the rock, but that the rock followed them. It is given Christian application
when Paul takes the further step of saying: “and the rock was Christ”
(4). A warning note is indeed sounded against idolatry and immorality (6-11),
and not least against self-confidence (12). Even so Paul assures the Corinthians
that God provides sufficient strength to resist temptation.
In the gospel lesson (Luke 13:1-9) the note of hope may seem
to be drowned out in verses 1-5, with the references to the calamities of
the Galileans slaughtered by Pilate in the Temple, and those killed by the
collapse of the tower at Siloam. But what Jesus is doing is cutting through
the thicket of Judean-Jewish conceit which believed that, since (in their
minds) bad things happen only to bad people, they themselves were secure and
immune. The note of hope is that repentance is available to all (5). The same
note of hope is present in the parable of the barren fig tree (6-9). Fruitless
as it has been for years, it is given another chance.
The theme common to all of these lections is the provision God
has made, not only that people need to fail, but that even if they do they
are not treated as instant write-offs. Even so, the accent falls emphatically
on the former: “The Lord knows how to rescue the godly from temptation”
(2 Peter 2:9, nasb).
How God did this for Moses is the theme of the Old Testament
lection (Exodus 3:1-15), which will constitute the text of the sermon.
From one point of view there is no need for us to engage the
text. Rather, it is the other way round: the text engages us. Temptation is
such a universal fact of life that no one can be blind to it. Yet it is precisely
because it is a fact of life, that temptation can be ignored or sidelined.
Universals are the more readily overlooked precisely because they are universals.
It is those features of our landscapes that we see every day that we pass
by unseeing. This is even more the case with temptation because it is so easy
to accept surrender to it as inevitable. “The best way to get rid of
temptation,” said George Bernard Shaw, “is to give in to it.”
The need is for us to allow the text to shake us awake from such moral slumber
and show us what temptation is: allowing ourselves to be lured from God’s
way to the Devil’s, lulled to unspiritual insensibility.
In each of the lections, while the reality and intensity of
temptation are recognized, the point of emphasis is on the sufficiency of
God’s enabling strength. “No testing has overtaken you that is not
common to everyone. God is faithful and he will not let you be tested beyond
your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that
you may be able to endure it” (1 Corinthians 10:13). In the light of
prevailing ways of thinking, these are staggering words. The last word in
temptation is not with the Devil but with God: “he will not let you be
tested beyond your strength.” Not only is the last word in the strength
of temptation with God; the last word in dealing with temptation is with him
too: “he will also provide the way out.”
The question is simple. How do we respond when we are in the
wilderness? The wilderness by definition is the place of deprivation: of the
comforts of life, even of the necessities of life. In the sermon we shall
find Moses in the wilderness: dejected, defeated, a spiritual dropout. In
the wilderness we find the children of Israel: hungry, thirsty, complaining,
ready to trade their freedom for Egyptian cucumbers. Worst of all, ready to
trade the God who had delivered them from the house of bondage for the gods
who knew nothing and could do nothing. The Corinthians were a parallel case.
Moses and Paul then and now, call believers in Christ to faithfulness to the
presence of God, faith in the promise of God, and life in the power of God.
(For a sermon example
from this text go to www.preachersmagazine.org and click on “Sermons”)
The power of the narrative drives the sermon as well as supplying its main
stages. The bush which burns but never burns out connects readily with our
current idiom of ‘burnout’. The awe with which Moses is told to
keep his distance heightens the drama. A third stage might well be found in
verses 7-9 in the “declaration of the redeeming purpose of God.”
This is present in the sermon summary by implication, but does not receive
explicit treatment.
However, all of the aspects of the narrative come together in the central focus upon Moses, as the larger context (3:1—4:15) shows. It is this which validates incorporating the story within the Lenten sequence. As such, it underscores the wilderness motif, posing and responding to the questions: Why does God charge us with such enormous tasks? What resources are available to equip us to carry them out? The story both raises and answers these apprehensions, and it is on these that the emphasis of the sermon must fall.