Sermon: The Worst Temptation

First Presbyterian Church

February 22, 2026, Lent 1A

Matthew 4:1-11

 

The Worst Temptation

 

 

When was the last time anyone dared you to go up on top of the tallest building in town and throw yourself off to prove that God loves you so much – that you are #blessed, so to speak – that God wouldn’t possibly let you get hurt?

Has anyone ever challenged you to turn a bunch of decorative garden stones at Home Depot or Lowe’s into bread to feed all the people at a local homeless shelter or soup kitchen?  

Or have you ever been tempted to sell your soul to some billionaire in order to get bankrolled for a run at public office – maybe even the highest office in the land?

As familiar as this story is – we do read it once a year from either Matthew, Mark, or Luke – one of the things we often don’t think about is that the particular temptations Jesus faces here are not really that relatable for most of us, even in more modern equivalents. And truth be told, it’s just as well. We struggle enough with the far more mundane temptations with which we are confronted on a regular basis. 

I could go through a whole laundry list of temptations any one of us might face on a regular basis. A typical preacher might toss out some manner of temptation to some financial misdeed, possibly, or a more sexual temptation, perhaps, or the temptation to make like the Houston Astros and cheat our way to whatever success or “win” we desire. 

I wonder, though, if the most insidious temptation we face on a regular basis – so common, in fact, that we probably don’t even recognize it as a temptation – is what might be called the temptation to ‘let it slide.’ It’s the temptation that comes of seeing a thing that is wrong, and knowing that it is wrong, but choosing to ‘let it slide.’

This temptation works a lot of ways. Let’s take what we might call a global example. The world’s economic food system is in many ways riddled with all manner of corruption, abusive or exploitative practices towards workers in the supply down to and including slavery, widely unethical pay practices, environmentally degrading agricultural practices, and a whole load of other such wrongdoing. The practices in question implicate an awful lot of the favorite food brands people, particularly in the USA, buy most often. Now there are in some cases particular brands or companies that take into account and seek to avoid or eliminate such practices; you might see labels such as “fair trade certified” or “rainforest-safe” or something like that on the packaging of such foods or goods. Still, you know, those brands tend to be a bit more expensive and harder to find. And, you know, you really like that particular chocolate bar or can’t function at all without that particular cup of coffee in the morning (just to name two of the worst examples). And then comes the defeatist argument: what difference can one person make, anyway?

And so, we … let it slide.

But let’s get more immediate, or more personal. You know something is wrong with the couple next door. You don’t see him, unless he comes tearing in late at night, often with a lot of noisy shouting or arguing. She’s turning much more withdrawn, less approachable, and when you see her she’s clearly trying to hide something and is clearly more fearful and on edge. You have suspicions. But you don’t know anything. And you can already hear the voices telling you to ‘mind your own business.’ And after all, if he’s willing to be that violent to her, who’s to say he won’t be that violent towards you?

And so, we…let it slide.

All creation suffers, peoples around the world are ground into dust by unrelenting poverty, women are abused constantly and even killed, and we…let it slide.

Perhaps this is where Jesus’s temptation meets ours after all. The Tempter’s challenges to Jesus are a direct attack on Jesus’s relationship to God the Father. Who does Jesus serve with his power for miracles? Does Jesus glorify God, or himself? Who is worthy of worship? Jesus lets none of these challenges slide, to say the least. And yes, that temptation to "let it slide" resonates with those questions as well. Do we serve God instead of a flashy doer of tricks? Do we glorify God instead of putting God to the test? Do we worship God instead of a power-mad tyrant?

And also, Jesus doesn’t get into great theological arguments with the Tempter either. Each temptation is swatted aside, you’ll note, with a statement that either begins with or includes the phrase “It is written…” In this case, all three of these answers are written in the book of Deuteronomy, that great recapitulation of the Law that finishes the Torah. 

We do have that resource at hand, you know. We also have a lot more “it is written” resources as well, law and prophets and writings and psalms and poetry and letters and apocalyptic visions and most of all the very acts and deeds of Jesus himself, written that we might have Jesus’s witness in our minds, our hearts, and our lives, that we might know temptation when we see it and might be prepared to rebuff it at every turn. As it is written in John 20:31, “these are written so that you might come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”

See, not giving into temptation isn’t about the do’s and don’ts, the “gotcha"s and the finger-pointers. It’s about life; life in Jesus’s name, life in God’s good-created world, life in the Holy Spirit’s guidance. It’s about the choice, again and again, to live into our baptisms and our confirmation promises and the commitment we express every time we come to this table. It’s about life in the Jesus who chooses again and again to live for God and for us. 

For all this, we have to say Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal unless otherwise indicated): #165, The Glory of These Forty Days; #---, A serpent so wily; #819, Be Still, My Soul

 

 

  

Sermon: The Fast God Chooses

 

First Presbyterian Church

February 18, 2026, Ash Wednesday

Isaiah 58:1-12; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

 

The Fast God Chooses

 

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…”

It’s one of those phrases that is so familiar, we assume by default it must be in the Bible, but it’s not; it’s from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, dating at least back to 1662.  It is part of the burial service, reminding those in attendance that all of us are subject to the same finality as the deceased.  Not surprisingly, a phrase about ashes pops into the mind of many when the subject of Ash Wednesday comes up.  

Ash Wednesday is not an inappropriate time to consider our own mortality.  It marks the beginning of the season of Lent, the culmination of which finds us at a crucifixion site outside Jerusalem, where even our Savior tasted of the pain and indignity of human death.  It is not inappropriate for us to keep in mind our own finiteness, the knowledge that our days are numbered, and that we don’t know exactly what that number is going to be.  At the end of this service, you will be invited to take up a Lenten discipline and to come forward and receive a mark on your forehead or hand, a cross of ashes, and you will hear the words “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

It is not at all inappropriate to remember and reflect upon our finiteness on this day.  The challenge is: what will we do with that knowledge?  How will that reflection affect us?

There are good ways to be affected, and there are bad ways.  There are positive ways to carry forward that realization, and there are negative, even damaging ways.  

Matthew cautions us against some of those negative ways.  In these verses Jesus warns his followers against the kind of piety and fasting that damages.  Matthew records Jesus’s warnings in the context of three different kinds of pieties; giving alms, praying, and fasting.  In each case Jesus weighs in against the kind of giving, praying, or fasting that exists mainly to be noticed by others.  As crazy as it sounds, an influential person might well have had a trumpeter at hand to “announce” his gift before the public.  (Today that person would just hire publicists or spin doctors for the same effect.)  Likewise, it wouldn’t have been unusual to see such a person out on the street praying in a particularly ostentatious manner.  (We have “prayer breakfasts” for that now, I guess.)  And a person on a fast might well go about with a face pulled down into a frown, all the better to provoke others to ask “oh, dear, what’s wrong?”

Note that Jesus is not warning against giving alms or praying or fasting; in fact Jesus presumes his followers will give alms and pray and fast – “whenever you give alms,” “whenever you pray,” “whenever you fast.”  But the heart of the matter is why his followers pray or give or fast; is it to receive the praise of others?  To check off a couple of boxes on the Official Good Person Scorecard?  Or is it to give honor to God?  

Isaiah adds a slightly different dimension to the question of practicing pieties like prayer and fasting.  For Isaiah, it’s not just a matter of the public nature of the piety; it’s also about whether the whole life matches up to that public piety.  For example:

If you sit down to your meal, but those who labored to make that meal possible are living in poverty or abuse despite their labor, is that the fast God chooses?

If you pray and sing and make all sorts of joyful noise in worship, but turn a blind eye when others of whatever faith cannot worship in peace without being harassed or even killed, is that the fast God chooses?

Short answer: no.

To the degree that we do not pursue justice in all its forms, to the degree that we tolerate or even profit from oppression or exploitation, to the degree that we assume hunger or homelessness or poverty or lack of educational opportunity or any of the conditions that plague women and men and children around us is "their fault," our fast is pointless or worthless.  It is no service to God whatsoever.  

This is how our mortality, our knowledge of our finitude and limited time, is to move us; to refuse to live with the way things are, to refuse to live in ease because of the oppression and exploitation of others, to loose the bonds of injustice, to set free the oppressed, to share our bread with those in need of bread and on down the list that Isaiah gives us, that is the fast God chooses.  This is our rightful service.  This is what goes hand in hand with the right-minded piety Jesus teaches in Matthew 6.  The piety that comes from our deepest longing, the piety that cares only to be seen before God, the piety that changes the world: this is the fast God chooses.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal unless otherwise noted): #166, The Glory of These Forty Days; #---, You teach us 

Sermon: What Is Revealed, What Is Concealed

First Presbyterian Church

February 15, 2026, Transfiguration A

Exodus 24:12-18: 2 Peter 1:16-21; Matthew 17:1-9

 

What Is Revealed, What Is Concealed

 

 

Have you ever noticed how much easier it is to drive around town or perhaps across the state on a cloudy day? Not a rainy day, but a cloudy one, when the sun isn't constantly beating down and creating a glare that obscures everything? I know this is a little bit heretical to say, but sometimes cloudiness can be a good thing. 

In the Old Testament a cloud can in fact be a very good thing: it can, on occasion, be a manifestation of the presence of God. 

It happens in today’s reading from Exodus, Moses is making ready to go up the mountain called Sinai to receive instruction from God. Even from the moment the Israelites had first come to that mountain after their deliverance from Egypt (back in 19:9), God had made his presence to Moses there known by the appearance of a thick and dense cloud, from which God’s voice might be heard by the people. Even before that, during the Exodus from Egypt, a pillar of cloud had been the manifestation of God’s protection of the people as they traveled by day, with a pillar of fire taking its place by night. That cloud, in a sense, revealed God.

There are other accounts in Hebrew Scripture of cloud as manifestation of God, but my personal favorite is a little-known account from the little-read book of 2 Chronicles. In this account in chapter 5 the great Temple was being dedicated under King Solomon. At the climax of the dedication, as the priests sang a song of praise, the Temple was filled with a cloud, “so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud; for the glory of the Lord filled the house of God.” I mean, let’s face it, that’s pretty cool. And again, the cloud reveals the presence of God. (There is a parallel account in 1 Kings 8, but I prefer the Chronicles version because in that story, the cloud fills up the Temple only after the trumpeters have started playing and the choir singing. Music, after all.)

So when we get to the account from Matthew’s gospel today, along with the account of going up a mountain, and the actual glowing transfiguration of Jesus, the bright, welling cloud as a manifestation of the glory of God would not have been unfamiliar to those to whom Matthew was writing. It is a scene in a gospel, but like so much of Matthew’s gospel it contains a host of echoes and resonances with Hebrew Scripture.

Still, though, there is something interesting about a cloud as a manifestation of the presence and glory of God. Clouds, after all, aren’t exactly known for their revealingproperties most of the time. Clouds aren’t translucent; they obscure. The whole reason that the cloudiness makes that drive so bearable is that it obscures the sometimes-oppressive summer sun (or even the sometimes-oppressive wintertime sun). 

And in the account from Exodus, that’s exactly what happens. The voice of God could be heard by the people, but God could not be seen, and when Moses went up the mountain to receive the commandments of God he also disappeared. Not that the people minded; already they were quite content to keep their distance; as early as Exodus 20 they were afraid that if God spoke to them directly – face to face, so to speak – they would die. In their minds, the cloud was protection.

(As for that lovely story from 2 Chronicles 5, the glory of the Lord filling the Temple with a cloud was indeed enough to bring the dedication of the Temple to a halt; “the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud” as verse 14 describes. Not sure if it means the priests were physically unable to stand or simply couldn’t stand it.)

In Matthew, the cloud seems a little different. This event is taking place six days after Simon had made the great breakthrough confession of faith recorded in 16:16: “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God.” Jesus had followed up this confession by giving him a new name – Peter – and by launching into an extended piece of instruction on his forthcoming death. The newly-christened Peter had taken Jesus aside to rebuke him for such talk, only to get it back ten times over – “Get behind me, Satan!” 

Despite that incident, Jesus took Peter up the mountain, along with James and John, where this Transfiguration took place. Jesus himself is transfigured and glowing and shining and dazzling, and then as Moses and Elijah – the law and the prophets, so to speak – appear with him. You get a brief reminiscence of this in the reading from 2 Peter, likely written by a follower of that apostle recording his teacher's recollection. 

After this transfiguration, Peter steps into a role many of us might recognize, maybe, from times of great excitement or stress or fear in our own lives: the person whose mouth immediately starts running despite the fact that his brain is supplying absolutely nothing useful for his mouth to say. (Somehow, 2 Peter doesn't include this part.) And then, when Peter is fumbling around about building booths for Moses and Elijah and Jesus as if this were the ancient Hebrew festival known as the Feast of Booths? That’s when the cloud takes over.

The cloud “overshadowed” them. And, as it was back in the days of Exodus, a voice (the voice of God?) spoke from the cloud, to the effect that the disciples fell to their knees in fear (not unlike their Hebrew ancestors at the prospect of the voice of God). What the voice said sounds familiar – “this is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased” is an exact echo of what the voice from Heaven says at Jesus’s baptism, back in chapter 3. But there is added a command: “Listen to him!” (And don’t miss that exclamation point.) Only at the touch of Jesus (“Get up and do not be afraid”) do they look up to see the cloud gone, Moses and Elijah gone, and Jesus – “Jesus himself alone” in Matthews’ emphatic Greek construction – is there. The cloud, the glory of God, has removed the distractions of Moses and Elijah, the safe and comfortable heroes of the faith Peter and James and John knew, and left them with “Jesus himself alone,” whom they have just seen as they had never seen or heard or understood him before. 

In concealing Moses and Elijah from the overly enthusiastic disciples, the cloud also reveals; Jesus is revealed not merely as an equal to those two, but something completely other, something so far beyond what either of those figures could represent or offer. The Son of God, the Eternal, is revealed by what the clouds conceal. 

As the eminent twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth describes in his The Faith of the Church:

Eternal does not mean "that which has no end" but "that which belongs to the world to come". Eternity is not defined by its unlimited characteristic but by its relation to the world to come, to the glorious kingdom of God.

 

“That which belongs to the world to come” – a world without end. 

At a challenging time for the disciples, when Jesus insisted on his own death and severely rebuked those who could not accept it, these disciples are given a glimpse, however fleeting, of Jesus the Eternal, Jesus of The World to Come. At a time and season nearly impossible for us to bear, we receive this glimpse of Jesus the Eternal, Jesus of The World to Come. Death does not, cannot, have the last word, no matter how dark our despair might seem, how much madness might seem to hold sway in the entire world, no matter how bleak the night. The clouds pull back and conceal what is not eternal, revealing the One who is eternal. And that, strange and puzzling as the story might be, is why Transfiguration Sunday is a day of great hope. 

This is God’s Son, the Beloved, in whom God is well pleased. Listen to him!

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #189, O Wonderous Sight, O Vision Fair; #---, Upon a holy mountain; #11, Source and Sovereign, Rock and Cloud

 

 

Sermon: Blessed Are...

Grace Presbyterian Church

February 2, 2020, Epiphany 4A

Micah 6:1-8; Matthew 5:1-12

 

Blessed Are...

 

 

I think most folks in this church is at least vaguely aware that I was a professor, specifically a music history professor, before changing vocations and heading off to seminary. That is in some ways a challenging subject for teaching on the college or university level. Early in your career, as I was, the core class you’ll end up teaching the most is some part of the music history sequence for majors, the one that over two or four terms covers the full sweep of the development of music in the European classical tradition from the Middle Ages up to the current day. 

The reason that the courses in this sequence can be the most challenging of all to teach is that inevitably, you’re going to have some substantial chunk of the population of that class coming to it pre-prejudiced with a particular bias, one that is summarized “why do I have to take this?” A great many music students come to higher education believing that the only thing that matters is their applied study – the lessons they take on their instrument – and any other ensemble playing or singing that they do. As a result, they have a habit of viewing anything that “distracts” them from those studies as a “waste of time.” Whatever core classes the school requires fall into that category without fail. 

You can spot these performers out in their careers. They are often technically brilliant performers, befitting the time and energy they have spent in that practice room. They are also, very often, bereft of anything beyond that technical brilliance. It might be described as having “no feel” for the music, or being aesthetically dull or lacking in interpretive nuance or skill, the kind of ability that is formed not only by knowing the notes but knowing the music, the in and out and how and why of how Bach or Beethoven or Brahms came to write the way they wrote, the kind of learning formed by classes such as music theory and, yes, music history.

I am convinced that something like this applies in the life of the Christian faith as well. For an awful lot of Christians, what matters is the death and resurrection of Jesus. There might also be space for the Incarnation – the birth of Jesus, the Son of God, God-with-us, God in the flesh. But beyond that, these Christians (some so-called Christian “leaders” even) seem strangely disinterested in all the things that come in between those two events in the life of Jesus. 

Matthew would be horrified at that. 

After the baptism of Jesus, the temptation in the wilderness, and the initiation of his public ministry and calling of his first disciples, we read in 4:23-25 that Jesus began to minister to great crowds of people, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of heaven come near and healing all manner of diseases. His fame spread quickly as a result, to the point that people were coming from far and wide to hear him and be healed.

And we then read in 5:1 that “when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them…” Specifically he began by teaching them these thoroughly upside-down lessons known as the Beatitudes, continuing with what we call the Sermon on the Mount.

Notice about these Beatitudes: on some level all of them are formatted “Blessed are… for they will …”.  Good thing, because we can easily look at all of these and, without that “will” qualification, think the poor in spirit, blessed? the ones who mourn, blessed? the meek, blessed? None of those things look at all “blessed” to us, and being persecuted or treated ill for Jesus's sake certainly doesn't look "blessed." Yet in sitting down to hear what Jesus teaches we learn what it is to repent – to “turn around” and see not from the world’s perspective, but from Christ’s own view. 

As is so often the case with Matthew's record of Jesus's teachings, these words have many roots in Hebrew scripture. Perhaps most worth noting today is their connection to today's reading from the prophet Micah, which might not be apparent on the surface. Following the rhetoric of the courtroom that opens this oracle, we come to its core in verse 6, as the prophet ponders what kind of offering would be needed before the Lord; burnt offerings, even the offering of the firstborn are rejected. Instead the prophet reminds the people, 

 

He has shown you, O mortal, what is good;

and what does the Lord require of you

but to do justice, and to love kindness,

and to walk humbly with your God?

 

 

It isn't hard to draw the line from these three "requirements" to the characteristics of the "blessed" as described in the Beatitudes. And yet so many self-proclaimed Christians proceed as if Jesus never said such things, living according to the world’s idea of what “blessed” means, what the world says is important – gaining and wielding power, getting ahead no matter who gets hurt, punishing or killing anyone who gets in the way. Self-proclaimed Christians – even or maybe especially pastors with all the fancy titles and great big pulpits in great big churches – treating with utter contempt those with whom they come into conflict, as if Jesus never said a word about hungering for righteousness or being peacemakers.

Or there is the tendency observed by the late Rachel Held Evans in many Christians, described as follows:

 

“Jesus came to die,” they often say, referring to a view of Christianity that reduces the gospel to a transaction, whereby God needed a sinless sacrifice to atone for the world’s sins and thus sacrificed Jesus on the cross so believers could go to heaven. In this view, Jesus basically shows up to post our bail. His life and teachings make for an interesting backstory but prove largely irrelevant to the work of salvation.

 

 

Like that student wondering why they have to take music history, too many Christians get hung up on the death (and maybe resurrection) of Jesus to the neglect of, well, pretty much everything else about Jesus's life. That is, suffice to say, a woefully incomplete theology. What Jesus said and taught matters. No less a figure than Pope Benedict XVI, of all people, summed up the alternative thus: “Jesus himself, the entirety of his acting, teaching, living, raising and remaining with us is the ‘gospel’.” All of it, beginning right here with these backwards “blessed”s, is our good news. The Christian faith is not a get-out-of-Hell-free card; it is no less than a call to repent - not just to confess, but to repent, to turn away from sin altogether, and see the world from a turned-around perspective. These Beatitudes are a beginning – but only a beginning – to understanding what that means. 

And we must, no matter how awkward or difficult it may be, be very clear that attitudes and behaviors and wielding of powers that is not guided by these teachings of Jesus cannot be reconciled with the gospel of Jesus. Not now, not ever.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #386, Come, Worship God; #731, Give Thanks for Those Whose Faith Is Firm; #525, Let Us Break Bread Together; #700, I’m Gonna Live So God Can Use Me