Troy Bingham was my high school soccer coach. He came from South Africa, but played college soccer in the States. We were fortunate to have him as our coach, because this was long before kids were playing soccer all year. We were still really learning the game. We were scrappy and somewhat skilled, but we knew we needed something to give us an edge.
That edge came in conditioning. Soccer was a fall sport, which meant two weeks before school started, the team would gather at 6:00 a.m. for two hours of conditioning. We’d start with a two-mile run as a warmup. Upon returning to the football stadium, we’d spend the rest of the time doing ab work — crunches, leg throws, all sorts of pain-inducing activities — and alternating that with jumping up and down the football bleachers. Never once did we touch a ball. That was saved for the afternoon practice. I have never experienced more grueling workouts than those, including 10,000 yard practices for swimming. But, man, we were in shape. It was worth the work.
The last season I played for Coach Troy, we didn’t lose a single game that went to overtime. Why? Because the other teams were not in as good of shape as us. They were gassed before the end of regulation, and we never ran out of steam. The work paid off.
Our coach conditioned and prepared us for a long season, and we outperformed expectations because of those grueling mornings. You’re probably thinking, however, “That sounds miserable, Troy. Who would want to do that kind of work? Who wants to make such preparations for the season? The fun part of soccer is playing the game.”
And that’s true, but I want to lay this thought out to you: When you put in the preparation, the season becomes far more meaningful. It’s worth the work.
We are now in the season of Lent. With Easter being so late this year, it feels like it’s taken forever to get here. This past Tuesday, we held our annual Shrove Tuesday pancake dinner and game night. There was Mardi Gras music playing in the Lounge and festive decorations all around. Church members and staff did all sorts of preparations to be ready for the evening, which made it a really fun night. Except in all of our preparations, we skipped one very important step.
I’ve enjoyed celebrating Shrove Tuesday, going all the way back to the first time I heard of it as a student in London. The British students invited us to their homes for pancakes, which was symbolic of clearing out their pantries of lard and sugar to prepare for Lent. So, I thought “shrove” had something to do with clearing the pantry. I was wrong.
The word “shrove” comes from the word “shrive,” which means to be forgiven following confession of sin. I guess we could call the assurance of pardon in our service “the shriving.” So, Shrove Tuesday does involve pancakes, but it also involves Christians intentionally confessing their sins to be shriven before Lent begins. We skipped that step, and I regret it because it’s part of the preparation for the season. The pancake party may be the fun part of the preparation, but the confessing and shriving are like the early morning conditioning my soccer team did. It was hidden but essential to doing the season well.
So, if you’re with us today and you haven’t started your lenten preparations, this is the invitation for you to get started. If you missed confession on Shrove Tuesday, you’re still invited. If you missed worship on Ash Wednesday, you’re still welcome on the lenten journey. If you haven’t considered how God may be calling you in this season to prepare your life for Easter, now is the time.
The longer I’ve been a pastor, the more I’ve come to see that we comfortable Christians have work to do in exercising our spiritual muscles. Let’s be honest. Because most of us do not worry about what we will have to eat today or whether we will be warm tonight or whether our beliefs could get us into trouble, it doesn’t take much faith to live our days. But when things don’t go our way — the headlines make us want to pull out our hair, a sudden change in employment, a loved one who keeps making bad choices — we don’t have the firm foundation to weather those storms. Instead, we find ourselves doubting that God is our shelter and strength, a very present help in trouble. Instead, we find ourselves thinking that following Jesus should be a wide and easy road, filled with only blessing. Instead, we find ourselves thinking faith is transactional, that God owes us ease. We’re good people, after all.
The first Sunday of Lent brings us to the wilderness, following Jesus as he began his ministry. John baptizes Jesus, and God declares in a thundering voice that Jesus is his beloved Son. Then the Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness. This is no camping trip. It is no scouting excursion to learn survival skills. No, the wilderness is a harsh and lonely place. It’s a place where the frills of life are gone and one is forced to stare hard reality in the face. It’s a place where the devil shows up, offering Jesus shortcuts. These are the early mornings spent conditioning, testing one’s endurance and willpower on the way to something greater.
The wilderness is also “a place of meeting with God and of new beginnings.” There are clear connections between Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness and the Israelites’ forty years on their way from slavery to freedom. The wilderness is a place of waiting, of testing, and of temptation. On his way to going public, this is the preparation the Spirit drives Jesus into.
So, driven to the wilderness, Jesus’ limits are tested by hunger, loneliness, and even fear. Luke says that the devil tempted him for forty days. The gospels record three specific temptations, but as I read between the lines, I wouldn’t be surprised if the devil was constantly at it during that time. He was doing all he could to break Jesus down. The word used for “tempt” is peirasmos, and it can mean both “tempt” and “test.” Both of these meanings are at play here, because they are temptations to see if Jesus will take a shortcut and they are tests to see if his will is strong enough to choose the hard path he will walk.
Luke details three specific temptations the devil places before Jesus. After forty days of fasting, it’s easy to imagine how hungry Jesus must be. Remember that God had declared Jesus to be his Son at the baptism just a few weeks earlier, so the devil begins, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” This first temptation is intensely personal. He’s hungry. If he’s God’s Son, surely he can do this simple thing for himself. But it asks a greater question: Will Jesus’ ministry be one where he uses his abilities to turn stones to bread? That is, will he shortcut the deeper needs of people with bread and circuses like Rome did, diversions that do not get to the core of what is needed, or will he follow God’s plan?
The second temptation is political. The biblical understanding is that God has allowed the devil authority over the kingdoms of the world, and the devil offers them to Jesus for the price of his worship. Now, it’s easy to imagine that this shortcut would be good for the people. A world where Jesus is the authority and not the devil? Who wouldn’t want that? But it asks the question, Will Jesus submit to the ruler of this world in order to achieve good?
The third temptation is religious. The devil places Jesus on the pinnacle of the temple. Since that temple was destroyed a few decades after this time, we don’t have an exact image of what this looked like, but since the temple sat where Jerusalem meets the Kidron Valley, this was a 150 foot drop. A man named James the Just was thrown to his death from that very spot just a couple decades later. The devil reasons that God will do something to rescue Jesus, not letting him plunge to his death. So, the question is this, will Jesus win Jerusalem by coercing faith, avoiding death by the display of supernatural power?
That is, will Jesus take the shortcuts on offer to achieve his mission, or will he faithfully walk through all the trials and struggles of life to do fully what God sent him to do?
Oddly, this question reminded me of the movie Yesterday that came out around five years ago. In it a struggling musician named Jack wakes up one day in a world that has no recollection of The Beatles or their songs. He begins to experiment with playing their songs, and the people go wild for the music. The more Beatles’ songs he plays, the more famous he becomes. I mean, I know I wouldn’t want to live in a world that didn’t have The Beatles and their music.
Jack is doing the wrong thing for the right reason as a shortcut. He was frustrated that his music hadn’t made him famous, and now he lives in a world where The Beatles’ songs do just that. Only, they aren’t his songs. He is taking a shortcut to fame. Jack is lying about the origin of the songs, but he is introducing this great music to a world that is so eager to hear it. It brings Jack huge fame, but he also is moving further from the life he’d really like to have — a life with Ellie, his soulmate who is not interested in Jack’s fame.
His shortcut got him some of what he wanted, but it took him off track of his real purpose in life. He does eventually realize this, and the movie ends happily, but it takes a lot for him to find his center.
Do you know how Jesus stays faithful? He relies on God’s word to guide him in this trial. To each temptation, Jesus responds with scripture. His responses are another connection to the Israelites’ time in the wilderness, because each passage Jesus quotes comes from Deuteronomy, a book that was all about preparing the people to live well when they came into the Promised Land. This time of testing for Jesus was similar. Was he ready to go public with his ministry? Would he give in and take the easier road offered by the devil? Because Jesus was Spirit-led and deeply guided by God’s Word, he was able to resist the temptation.
What does all of this mean for us? Well, sadly I think it’s so easy to believe the lie that following Jesus should make our lives easier and even make us happier and healthier. That’s something at the core of what this country has aimed for since it declared it’s independence from England — that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights — including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And these are good pursuits, but the God we know in Scripture hasn’t promised that this is how life will go. In fact, it seems often to be the opposite.
Fred Craddock puts this so well, “Being committed to the way of God in the world does not exempt one from the struggle.” Psalm 91 is a great example of that. It’s a psalm that seems to be written for those facing battle. It’s one that soldiers down the centuries have carried with them as they have struggled against an enemy. Notice that the psalm never promises to remove the struggle. “Rather than offering naïve promises that force a person to deny life’s threats, they are expressions of trust as the psalmists face life’s dangers crucially and at the same time rely on the presence of the divine.” God doesn’t promise us the absence of struggle. God promises to be with us in it.
This Lent I invite you to choose the struggle. It’s a time of preparation. It’s a time of choosing the wilderness, a choosing to undergo trial and testing. Like the conditioning we did for soccer season was hard and even painful but worth the work, so the preparation we do in this season steels us to live as Christ’s agents in the world. It gives us resiliency. It gives us a core of hope and faith that will carry us at all times.
When you put in the preparation, the season becomes far more meaningful. And I believe it will strengthen us to live these days faithfully.
