Remembering Jesus

 

Luke 4: 1-13
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
March 9, 2025

Photo of red, purple, and white crocheted flowers surrounding an embroidered message in white that reads "Lest we forget".

Getting into Lent is like an encounter with every hard thing about being human. No wonder we don’t like it or look forward to it. God desires that we would face ourselves, all of who we are, our worst and our best, so that we would be in community with people who are just as human as we are. God wants us to acknowledge what it is we use to feel safe, so that we would face our lives without illusion. God invites us to look our inevitable death in the eye, so that we would realize that our lives are intertwined with those whose lives are more fragile than ours. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Repent, turn away from sin, and believe the good news”, which is, that God intends us for wholeness.



Wholeness means accepting the light and dark, joy and sorrow, the capacity to do good and the capacity to do evil and everything in between; to allow God and ourselves to see us as we are, all of it, the whole truth, and know deep down in our bones that God calls us ‘beloved’. Wholeness, remembering our belovedness, is our vocation, our calling, who we’re meant to be.



And who does the Spirit call to get at the truth but the devil. What we call the devil, the Jewish tradition calls the ‘accuser’ or the ‘adversary’. I used to imagine this devil character was really a wizened old rabbi who lived in a cave out in the desert, one of Jesus’ oldest mentors, a combination of Dumbledore and Professor Moody—a crabby, cantankerous, wise-as-a-serpent kind of guy who knew what Jesus’ fatal flaws could be, along with the trouble he was heading for.



“My poor dear boy, you’ve been fasting for a long time. Think you’re hungry now? Who do you think will feed a penniless peasant like you? Come on, how about a little magic? Why don’t you just turn these stones into bread? It’s a long way between here and Jerusalem.”



“It takes more than bread (or eggs or gas or money) to really live.”



“No one is going to give three figs about this kingdom of God you’ll be preaching about. They want to know who’s in charge, who’s going to throw the Romans out on their ear, who’s going to do away with the wicked and reward the good. Nobody cares about their souls! I’ll give you power over human lives, and they’ll worship you for it!”



“Worship the Lord your God and only the Lord your God. Serve God with absolute wholeheartedness.”



“You’re not going to have a single place to lay your head. No one will take care of you. You’ll be sleeping on the ground, in the rain, walking in the stinking heat. And you know how this is going to end, don’t you? That’s some God you’ve got there. I thought God would send an angel army to defend you, lift you out of trouble, even keep those precious feet of yours from stumbling. Where’s God’s power in that?”



“Do not answer temptation by tempting the Lord your God.”



Jesus is offered security. Jesus chooses uncertainty. Instead of safety, Jesus decides to live with risk. When given the opportunity to seize power, Jesus opts for weakness. These are the foundation of Jesus’ ministry. At his most vulnerable, famished, and exhausted, Jesus finds his bedrock and it is unshakable. Jesus remembers who and whose he is.



This devil, this adversary, this accuser isn’t just tempting Jesus, but anticipating that this famished, weakened Jesus will confuse evil for good, that he will forget who he is and why he is here.



When Jesus says to his disciples and to us, “Remember me”, the Greek word used for “remember” is anamnesis, which means against amnesia. Jesus doesn’t just want us to remember him, he wants us to refuse to forget him, to resist, to oppose everything that would tear us away from him and what he did to resist the evil of his day, which isn’t all that different from the evil of our day.



From my church history professor Mary Luti, who wrote: “There are forces around us and within us that want us to forget what they’ve been up to for eons, wreaking havoc, taking up all the breathing room, squeezing the life out of everything for ego, profit, supremacy, and power. Killing for sport.



“They’re still at it, night and day, try to fog over all traces of Jesus’ love revolution in the world and in our hearts. They hope we’ll lose his trail, his story’s thread. They hope we’ll forget we ever knew him.



“For if we forget, we’ll be putty in their hands. If we forget, they can tell us anything they want, and we won’t know they’re lying. In the vacuum of forgetting, injustice has it easy, violence rules the day.”



Forget that Jesus was an oppressed, brown-skinned Palestinian Jew living under occupation who was executed by the state. Forget that Jesus talked more about the vices of wealth than anything else. Forget that Jesus sided with the poor, healed the sick, ate with outcasts, praised the gentle and refused to pick up a weapon, welcomed and forgave sinners.



And not only forget Jesus, but forget what evil has done before and is attempting to do again. Ninety years ago another administration sought to consolidate power, instigated the mass deportation of immigrants, demonized and marginalized queer and transgender citizens as well as other groups of people, used divisive and inflammatory rhetoric, manipulated and exploited societal fears, and began their term with the words “Now we can really get started, I am never leaving here.” And we said this could never happen again. We said we would never forget, and yet here we are.



Fr. Richard Rohr writes that “we can only be tempted to something that is good on some level…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.”



Security, safety, and power are good in many ways. But they’re also seductive, sounding like so many political campaign promises. Our all-too-human egos can be tempted to rely upon our own limited wisdom and think ourselves sufficient. It can be all too easy to be lulled into a false sense of security, safety, and power. And so Jesus, having been led by the Holy Spirit, does not rely on his own wisdom in his responses but draws on the wisdom tradition of his faith.



Our theme this Lent is “do this in remembrance of me”, a pledge to not only remember but more importantly to not forget who Jesus is. So, during the next few weeks and beyond I invite us to do those things that Jesus would do. Love your neighbor, especially the one who doesn’t deserve it. Side with the poor and with workers. Visit someone who is feeling less than. Eat with people who are considered outcasts. Forgive freely, which really means to not let hate and resentment make a home within you. Give away what power you have, whether it be privilege or money or both. Because if we can’t love all, do we really understand what love truly is?



Lent has become this thing where we give up something for six weeks and then pick it back up again. We’ve forgotten what it really means because the powers that be prefer it that way. And in our amnesia we have become comfortable with our split lives of Christian on Sunday and ordinary citizen the other six days of the week. Jesus wants us to remember that Lent is about resistance to evil dressed up as good, a transformation of the heart and our lives. Which is why we pray “thy kingdom, thy kin-dom come, thy will be done.” Because we are dust and to dust we shall return. Amen.

Benediction – based on a meditation by the Rev. Dr. Mary Luti


Margaret Bendroth in her book The Spiritual Practice of Remembering writes:

“The world’s unwillingness to remember one genocide will always enable the next.” Remembering is an ethical act, a justice imperative.

Let us live into remembering
The whole truth about Jesus
That what was done to him is never done again
To anyone else.
Amen.