Transcript
When you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. Please be seated.
There’s a social media post going around, especially in clergy social media circles, and yes, that is a thing. It features a dialogue between a churchgoer and a pastor. There are a couple of different versions, but generally it goes like this.
The churchgoer says, “Pastor, why don’t you preach more on sin?” Pastor replies, “Good idea. What are your sins so I can preach about them?” Church go, “Oh, no, not my sins.” Pastor thinks, “So you want me to preach on other people’s sins?” Churchgoer says, “Yes, exactly. I already know all about my own sins.”
We already know about our own sins, our own shortcomings and temptations, those things that prevent us from being the best version of ourselves. And yet, I’m curious, if you had to come up with a list of your top 10 temptations, those things that lead you astray, would you be able to? And what would they be?
Of course, we can come up with the easy ones for me. sugar. Oh goodness. I try to eat healthy, but ice cream and conversation hearts are just way too good. Maybe for you the easy temptations are alcohol or a good TV show or a bad TV show or social media or a thousand other things that we like to do and do often until it starts to take over and then it becomes a hindrance to other things which we know we should be doing but aren’t because these temptations are just so much more fun. After all, eating dessert or drinking a glass of bourbon or watching TV or scrolling on Facebook, they’re not bad things to do. In fact, they’re quite fun. But when they get to be too much, when they start to take over, well, then yeah. Okay.
It’s easy enough to name the basic temptations, but what about that next level? Things like, I don’t know, gossiping or lying, hoarding or laziness, jealousy or boastfulness. And I don’t mean the harmless kinds, you know, like when your great aunt Matilda gives you a sweater and it’s exactly the style that is not your style and you still say, “I love it so much. I can’t wait to wear it.”
I mean at the deeper levels, the levels that start to become very elements of your identity. To always want more, always need more, to always be angry or jealous because someone else has more or whatever it is that tempts you. I’m going to pause and say I’m I’m starting to get a really good list going for me. Hope hope you all are, too.
Finally, I guess the hardest level of sin, the hardest level of temptation comes from that very core of who we are. Made in the image of God but fallen. The very fall that we hear in the Old Testament reading from the second creation story and that we hear in the epistle to the Romans as sin came into the world. the fall Jesus refuses to yield to.
After all, could you imagine if Jesus turned those stones into loaves of bread, how quickly would hunger disappear from the world? And I mean, later on, we all know Jesus feeds 5,000 people simply by multiplying fish and loaves. And that’s just because they forgot their lunch. So, why not change rocks into bread and feed millions?
Because the intention wouldn’t be in the name of God. It wouldn’t be through love of God and love of neighbor. Jesus is hungry. It says so right in the reading today. So for Jesus to turn stones into bread, especially at the behest of quote the tempter, it wouldn’t be out of love. It would be out of a carnal need to satisfy a temptation, a temptation for more.
Perhaps that’s why a common practice during Lent is to give something up like chocolate or candy or alcohol or social media. Not because we’re trying to prove our quote goodness, our closeness to God because we can be like Jesus too and say no to temptation. Perhaps we give things up because we see ourselves needing a chance to step back and reset, to reassess where our energy is going and what we use to satisfy our needs. A chance to refocus on the call God has for each of us. A call to be to be made in the image of God, to be loved by God, to be loving of God and loving of our neighbors.
Yes, Lent can be about denying ourselves of pleasure, but I can’t imagine that a loving God wants us to suffer. So instead, what if we use Lent to focus less on ourselves and more on God? Yes, we can look at our own sins. But what if instead of focusing on how bad we are because we sin, what if we focus on how good we could be if we spent more time with God, with our neighbors, doing what we are called to do, feeding, serving, clothing, housing, loving, especially since sin, yes, is bad, but it doesn’t make us bad. It simply makes us human.
In his letter to the Romans, which we heard today, Paul writes about a free gift, especially the free gift of grace from God. The free gift of grace given to each one of us through Jesus. The free gift of grace which erases all the condemnation of sin and the fall that happened that fateful day in the Garden of Eden.
In fact, the passage we just heard is actually the beginning of several chapters about grace and salvation, about the assurance of salvation having been freed by sin because of Jesus Christ, because of the gift of grace through Jesus Christ given to all because all have sinned and all need grace. And God has determined that all deserve grace. All are worthy of grace.
Can you imagine simply for being you? Fallable, fallable, tempted and sinful and yet saved because God wants you to be saved. Goodness, we are saved despite those lists of temptations and sins we come up with about ourselves. Despite those limitations and failures we face, despite those times we choose something not quite as good or holy or pure or whatever it is we’re supposed to choose, despite the fact that to be honest, if it was us with the devil and not Jesus or if it was us in the garden, we would probably be tempted and we would probably sin. And despite that, despite all of that, we are saved because God wants us to be saved.
So I must ask, if God wants us to be saved, then why do we keep talking about sin so much? Why do we f focus so much on where we are lacking? I mean, we spend an entire season of the church year focused on how we are sinful and focused on how we need to be repentant. And here’s why.
Salvation doesn’t begin with pretending nothing is wrong. Instead, it begins with trusting that God loves us. So much so that God is willing to see the truth about each of us and still love us. And God is willing to know who we are and still heal us.
Repentance, naming our sins and turning away from all of them. It’s not about punishment. Instead, it’s about freedom. Freedom to turn away from our sins and toward God. Freedom to refocus our lives on God in a way that still names who we are and yet also allows us to know who we are. Sinful, yes, and loved, worthy of grace and worthy of salvation.
Salvation doesn’t begin with pretending nothing is wrong. It begins with letting go of what binds us, what holds us back, what limits us, so we can receive the grace God longs to give to each of us.
Yes, we can list our own sins and temptations. And we can choose to give something up for Lent as an attempt to refocus to God. And we can repent to seek freedom. And God wants us to have salvation because God made us to be saved.
Amen. Amen.