SERMON Two M’s and an A

The First Sunday in Lent (A) (2008): Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7; Psalm 32; Romans 5:12-19; Matthew 4:1-11

There are "Two M's and an A" -- or more accurately -- "Two M words and an A word" that haunted much of my adult life. At times, they were a mantra. Always, always, they were associated with Matthew's account of Jesus' forty days and forty nights in the wilderness.

The words and association began the summer after I graduated from college and was a teaching intern in philosophy of religion at a New England prep school. One of the assigned readings in the course that I was helping to teach was The Grand Inquisitor chapter from The Brothers Karamazov by the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky. In the chapter, one of the brothers visits another brother with a story that he has written about a grand inquisitor during the Spanish Inquisition. He tells his brother the story.

During a particularly active time of burning infidels in Seville, Spain, in the 1500s, Jesus returns. Humbly, compassionately. He is immediately recognized by everyone. The people flock to him. Children strew flowers before him and cry out the word we do not say during Lent. Being Jesus, he heals a blind man and brings a man's dead daughter back to life. And then he is arrested on the orders of the grand inquisitor, sentenced to death, and imprisoned. The grand inquisitor visits Jesus in prison and explains why he has been arrested and why he must be executed.

And the reason for both stems from Jesus' encounter with Satan during those forty days in the wilderness. As the grand inquisitor explains, Jesus, in his exchanges with Satan, had an opportunity to guarantee believers by giving them bread. Just as he could have enticed followers by throwing himself from the temple pinnacle and tempting God to perform a miracle. He could have locked up as disciples all peoples in all nations if he had only agreed to Satan's offer on the high mountain to take the kingdoms of the world as his.

Jesus had been offered -- here come the "Two M's and the A" -- miracle, mystery, and authority. He rejected all three, instead giving men and women perfect freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil. No carrots, but the freedom to freely choose faith without the enticements of miracle or mystery or authority.

The grand inquisitor tells Jesus that he will be burned at the stake the next day "as the worse of heretics" because the Roman church had, eight centuries earlier, appropriated the miracle, mystery, and authority that people crave and Jesus had scorned. "We are not working with Thee," he tells Jesus, "but with him (meaning Satan] -- that is our mystery." The work of Jesus has been "corrected." In their submission, the flock is child-like, happy, and weak. Gratefully enslaved. A church from whom no secrets are hid and by whom sin is expiated embodies miracle and mystery and holds absolute authority and sway.

This was powerful stuff. It really was. And I was convinced. In those forty days in the wilderness Jesus had forcefully rejected miracle, mystery, and authority.

And this association stuck even as I learned the following fall that what Dostoyevsky terms Jesus' temptation is really, for the Jewish Christian author of Matthew, Jesus' testing. Remember how God tested the Israelites in the wilderness? And how they consistently failed God's tests? The author of Matthew knows his scriptures and the account of God's people in the wilderness well. And he sees Jesus' experience with Satan in the wilderness as a very similar time of testing.

It is similar because the people in the wilderness grumbled about the manna that God gave them to eat, failing to acknowledge that its source is the Word of God. Satan -- whom Matthew calls "the tester" -- tests a famished Jesus by suggesting that if he is the Son of God he turn stones into bread.

Jesus' experience is similar because the people in the wilderness tested God by not trusting him. Satan tests Jesus by taking him to a high pinnacle of the temple in Jerusalem and suggesting that if he is the Son of God, he -- Jesus -- also test God by throwing himself to the ground.

The people in the wilderness abandoned their God to worship the golden calf. Satan tests Jesus by offering him the entire world if Jesus will only worship him.

And in every way that God's people failed their testing, Jesus passes.

In refusing to turn to stones into bread, Jesus quotes Deuteronomy and reminds Satan, "One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord."

When Jesus rejects Satan's suggestion that he throw himself from the Temple, Jesus again quotes scripture and tells Satan what the people in the wilderness had forgotten: "Do not put the Lord your God to the test."

In declining to worship Satan, Jesus underscores what God's people had failed to remember: "Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him."

What we hear this morning is Jesus' ultimate Son-of-God testing. It is about his obedience to his father -- a sharp contrast to the disobedience of Adam and Eve in the garden and that of the God's people the wilderness. It is about the new covenant that God was making with all people in Jesus -- the covenant so movingly described by Paul in his letter to the Romans. It has nothing to do with miracle, mystery, and authority.

I knew that, but the association lingered. Dostoyevsky had convinced me that the church is about the "Two M's and an A"("MMA, for short). I was always, therefore, skeptical of anything church-related that smacked of MMA. Then, fifteen years ago, I was hit. Quite unexpectedly. Through nothing more (or less) than the celebration of word and sacrament, I knew not just cognitively but experientially the reality -- the certainty and truth -- of faith. I called Lee who was already on vacation. Could this be genuine? Or was it just a case of the MMA? He did not know. I joined him and took The Brothers K.

Yet the reality and certainty were there. Really there. I read and re-read the Grand Inquisitor. The reality and certainty would not be shaken.

The reality and certainty won, appropriately enough, in Dostoyevsky's motherland. We returned to the Soviet Union on a second visit in six months in the fall of 1990. Across the street from the Moscow offices of our joint venturers was a church that, after being closed for seventy years, the state had re-opened for religious use the previous spring. I had not been able to go in the church on our earlier visit because I had nothing to put on my head and our escort feared for my safety at the hands of the elderly pious widows who populate Russian churches and spit on infractors.

On our fall visit, I brought a scarf. We went into the church on a weekday morning. Incredibly, and unlike most churches closed by the communists, it had not been dismantled or destroyed. Every inch of wall and ceiling was covered with icons, scene after scene, bathed in gold. There were people everywhere, young people as well as the pious widows. There were people praying. A fully vested metropolitan-type was instructing a group of middle-aged catechumens. Others looked in awe. The beauty of the icons, the candles, the light, the people was breathtaking. The transcendence was real.

All this was nothing less than God's grace. What Paul this morning calls "the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness." Nothing merited, earned, or even asked for. And it was, I realized, a kind of MMA, but a good kind of MMA and not the MMA of the grand inquisitor. The grand inquisitor's MMA consisted of manipulative appeals to superstition and the medieval church's pacts with mammon. Those appeals and pacts are totally unrelated to the miracle and mystery of God's grace or to the compelling authority of the Gospel it engenders. This is a place of good MMA. Come. Partake. Amen

February 10, 2008

Ruth VanDemark, pastor

Wicker Park Lutheran Church

Chicago, Illinois