First Sunday in Lent - Sunday, March 10, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
First Sunday in Lent - Sunday, March 10, 2019

Deuteronomy 26:1-11
Romans 10:8b-13
Luke 4:1-13

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

In the name of the one God, who is Lover, Beloved, and Love Overflowing. Amen.

The Letter to the Hebrews tells us that, though Jesus was God’s son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.

What is obedience? And what should it have to do with suffering?

Our Founder’s rule puts it this way: “the vow of obedience is the doorway to the monastic life, at the heart of which is the entire self-offering of the person—body, soul, spirit, material possessions—to God.” What is true of the monastic in a particular way, is true of every Christian, who, through baptism, has vowed obedience to God.

Obedience is a willingness to be used, not as I desire, but as God desires, and as the Church and the world need me to be used.

Many of my brothers will be quick to point out that the word “obedience” has its root in the Latin word for “listen.” Obedience requires a deep listening to the voice of God as it presents itself in scripture, reason, tradition, conscience, prayer, and the cries of pain and joy in the world around us.  But obedience that stops at listening is not truly obedience.

Speaking of the obedient disciple, the Rule of Benedict tells us, “no sooner does he hear than he obeys.” Such people, Benedict goes on, “immediately put aside their own concerns, abandon their own will, and lay down whatever they have in hand, leaving it unfinished.”

Real obedience, then, is listening paired with action, fused you might say, so that hearing the voice of God and responding to it become one single action. Like the unified heart for which loving and being loved are indistinguishable.

And why would a person lay aside her own will, her own desires, her own wants and perhaps even her own needs, in order to follow the voice of God?

Well, for love, of course. “It is love,” Benedict tells us, “that impels [the obedient disciple] to pursue everlasting life; therefore they are eager to take the narrow road.” And again, from our Founder, “Obedience is not simply outward conformity to external conditions and human requirements, but a real and positive response of love to God’s voice.”

This movement of love, listening, and response in the face of suffering and death is the movement Jesus demonstrates for us in today’s Gospel reading. He has just been baptized in the Jordan, just heard God’s voice of love proclaiming him the Beloved Son, God’s very own heart, given to the world. And with that foundation of love firmly in place, it is the Spirit herself that drives Jesus into the wilderness.

He faces into the temptations of the world only after God has claimed him as God’s very own. With the understanding of who he is in God, which is to say whose he is, Jesus is able to face into the temptations Satan presents to him.

And do you notice the words Satan uses? He says, “If you are the Son of God…” If you are the Son of God. Needling and questioning, introducing doubt, suggesting that maybe Jesus has gotten it all wrong. Maybe he imagined that other voice, the one that called him Beloved and name him for God’s very own.

How real these needling words are! They’re the words, perhaps in a different form, that get all of us, too. The seeds of doubt that we ever really belonged to God at all. And that’s where we stumble. And that’s where we fall.

Difficulty with obedience, which is to say difficultly hearing and responding to the voice of God, is really difficulty in loving. Or, more accurately, difficulty in being loved, in trusting that we are loved, that we are enough, and that God will take care of us, even and especially when we don’t get what we want or what we thought would make us safe, secure, and powerful.

To the extent that we have trouble with obedience—and we all do—we are really having trouble trusting, trusting that God loves us enough to provide us with what we need; trusting that the suffering and pain will not last forever; trusting that though our own will is insufficient to save us, God’s will is not.

What person, after forty days fasting in the desert, wouldn’t be desperate for food, water, affection, and power? And so those are exactly what the devil offers Jesus. Just so for us. Our own temptations and struggles always arise from those areas in which we doubt God has the power to save us. Which is to say from those places within us that are so hurt and so tender that we dare not risk surrendering them to God.

Our stumbling blocks are always a kind of idol, a manifestation of our own stubborn desire to save ourselves in isolation from God, to do it ourselves, because deep down we’re afraid that God can’t, or won’t heal us, save us, make us whole again.

The medicine for this difficulty in trusting, loving, and surrendering our entire selves to God is the Cross, the Tree of Life and the medicine for the hurting world. The Cross on which Jesus suffered and learned obedience; the Cross on which Jesus still stretches out his loving arms to us in surrender and embrace, beckoning each of us home to God, calling each of us to lay our ear against his chest, to listen to the sweet music of his heartbeat.

And yes, this obedience and the surrender that enables it will feel like dying, but dying is the only way to the life that really is life. “We are to die to our isolation and separateness as individuals,” our Founder tells us, “so that we might live together in the strength and power of a spiritual community in which there is fullness and integrity of life, namely the life of Jesus Christ our Lord.” You see, in the end, obedience never leads to isolation. Rather, it leads to integration into the mystical body of Christ, where we know ourselves to be one with all that is.

Temptation need not frighten us. Nor ought it lead us to despair or shame, even when we fall prey to it, as we mostly do. Temptation is really an opportunity to trust God enough to let go of our own will and our desires, to practice obedience and surrender.

We mostly fall. We mostly give way to our own stubborn willfulness. We mostly choose the pain of separation and isolation. But perhaps when we have suffered enough through our falling, we, too, might learn obedience. We might learn to say no to the Tempter so that we might say yes to the one who holds open his loving arms, welcoming us home again.