HELLO!

I hope to see you on Sunday at 10 am. I have received 12 emails from those who will be watching the Men’s Ice Hockey Gold Medal game, starting at 910 am. Kaitlin is offering the AV at our service, she may slip in the scores from time to time. When you arrive on Sunday you will find the sanctuary configured as a campfire. Please dress as you would for a campfire. My brother Scott was a Queen’s Scout, he made racing cars, etc…and we will have displays downstairs so you can share your Scouting items.

Our reading for Sunday is Matthew 4:1-11, an invitation to accompany Jesus into the wilderness. In every aspect we are being challenged to let go, to repent, to be stripped bare and to go to the next level. Jesus was approximately thirty years of age at this point. He was already a fully formed adult human and given we think of him as one without sin we will assume that he was already making truly good moral and ethical decisions about his own life. But even Jesus had to be initiated into a deeper more demanding level of discerning the will of God, the way of choosing life - and it was a struggle. Priest and contemplative theologian Richard Rohr says Jesus struggled with the same temptations that everyone going into public ministry must struggle with. He describes temptations to the misuse of power – everyday power, religious power and political power.

Let me point out something we almost always fail to notice. We can only be tempted to something that is good on some level, or good for some, or just good for us and not for others. Temptations are always about “good” things, or we could not be tempted. Most people’s daily ethical choices are not between total good and total evil, but between various shades of good, a partial good that is wrongly perceived as an absolute good (because of the self as the central reference point), or even evil that disguises itself as good. These are what get us into trouble.

People had been telling Jesus his whole life he was something special, descended from the house of David, “Emmanuel” “God with us”. Those magi from far and away, showed up with gifts for him when he was just a boy. He probably heard stories about how King Herod had tried to kill him because of it. John the Baptist had been telling everyone Jesus was “the One – who would take away the sin of the world.”

It’s why what Jesus is up to this morning can be a powerful encouragement for each of us. He follows the Spirit of God into the wilderness for a season of time long enough to get away from all the voices and all the people, all the opinions and all the ideas of the world around him, and he considers it from the holy perspective he knows God would have for him. I wonder if that’s our invitation and challenge, with all of this, this time around. “One doesn’t live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” We are invited not to live by or for the “bread” of this world – the things, the money, the stuff and the possessions that never last. But we are invited to be fed, nourished and sustained by the better things of love and grace and mercy and hope that come from the mouth of our creator. Peace, Kevin