The Significance of Small Sacrifices

Lent 1A: Matthew 4:1-11

A colleague of mine was telling me about how back when he was child, many, many years ago, his church, which wasn’t a very “liturgical church,” nevertheless practiced Lent. The church didn’t pay any attention to the other seasons of the church year, but they observed Lent. And the pastor would stress the importance of “Lenten self-denial.”

On the first Sunday of Lent, everyone was given small pieces of paper and pencils. And the congregation members would write down things they were giving up for Lent—chocolate, romance novels, ice cream after school, swearing, things like that. Then, as the organ played “Beneath the Cross of Jesus,” they all processed down to the altar, laid their folded pieces of paper on the railing, and knelt there a moment in prayer to ask Jesus to help them to keep their promise to give up something for Lent.

There were also programs through which church members promised to give up a dollar a day. And, at the end of Lent, on Easter, they’d present this special offering of 40 dollars to go to help in the church’s mission programs. In this way their “giving up” would result in giving something good to others, or at least that was how the pastor explained it.

To be sure, these little sacrifices, their giving up beer or ice cream or Saturday afternoon movies, didn’t amount to much. Their self-denial was little more than an inconvenience or a temporary delay in their enjoyment of treats. Whatever puny little self-denials they took on, it paled in comparison with the huge act of self-giving that Jesus made for us on the cross. Giving up a piece of chocolate each week is nothing compared with God giving us Christ.

This is all true, and yet I think there’s something important about those childhood acts of denial that we’ve lost in the years since. True, Lent means much more than our rather pitiful attempts at sacrifice, but it does not mean less than this. This is important to remember as we start our Lenten journey, that the sacrifices we make are made in the midst of a culture that doesn’t know anything about self-denial, even the pitifully insignificant kind that was practiced by my colleague’s childhood church.

Rather than self-denial and sacrifice, our society today celebrates self-satisfaction, self-indulgence and self-gratification. “Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow . . .” is a statement that has never been uttered in a TV advertisement. “Enjoy yourself,” that’s our most popular slogan, followed by “You owe it to yourself,” “You’ve earned it,” and “You deserve it.”

Some parts of the American church have given themselves over to this way of thinking, fallen into the grip of what is called the “prosperity gospel.” Got something wrong with your life? Want more out of life? Then come to Jesus and he’ll get it for you. Jesus is there to “fix what ails ya.” He’s there to get what we want but can’t get on our own. Few “prosperity gospel” advocates are so crass as to promise new cars, mink coats, and the like; some do, believe it or not. But the more sophisticated promise instead psychological or spiritual rewards. God wants you to be happy. God wants you to have success. But these spiritual rewards are still rewards. Christianity has become there just another self-help technique for getting what we want.

This is why Lent is the most countercultural of the church’s seasons. During these forty days we learn what it means to follow Jesus. We learn to let go of the things that distract us from God. We work on ridding ourselves of habits that hurt us or hurt other people. We commit to loving our neighbor as ourselves and forgiving those who’ve hurt us. But not so that we can get ahead, be happier, or have more peace in our lives. That may happen, but that’s not the point. Indeed, the point of Lent is to remind us that the work of God in our world is not to help us get what we want, but to enable us to get what God wants. And how do we get what God wants? Not through impressive displays of power, but rather through the difficult practice of rejection and renunciation.

That’s the message we get from Jesus’ temptations in today’s Gospel lesson. Before Jesus launches into his public ministry, he retreats to a deserted area where he spends forty days in prayer, neither eating or drinking. When Satan arrives, that twisted, tempting voice tries to divert Jesus away from his mission. And he does so not by trying to get Jesus to do the wrong thing, but by getting him to do the right thing for the wrong reason, encouraging him to accept an “ends justifies the means” approach to ministry.

The tempter’s first tactic involves meeting the material needs of life. “If you are the Son of God, turn these stones into bread.” The devil is appealing here not simply to Jesus’ hunger, famished as he was after forty days, but more broadly to the world’s hunger. You see this in the fact that the devil doesn’t suggest Jesus turn one stone into bread, but many stones, to make much bread, bread enough for the world. For, what is more basic to life than food? What leads desperate people to acts like war and revolution more than the need for bread? If someone wanted to do some real good for humanity, turning stones into bread and feeding the world’s hungry people is just the thing to do, right?

Jesus doesn’t think so. He insists that one does not live by bread alone, but by God’s Word. Whatever Jesus is about, we gather, he’s about more than meeting physical needs.

The second temptation takes Jesus to Jerusalem, to the Temple, the center of national pride and religious meaning for Jews. There Satan encourages him to perform a spectacular spiritual feat—“If you are the Son of God,” he says, “jump off this Temple, and when the angels catch you, everyone will know how special you are. Because God certainly is not going to let his ‘chosen one’ get hurt, to even stub his toe.”

But Jesus refuses again, to our surprise. I mean, what sort of God doesn’t want everyone to recognize his power and strength? And what better way to demonstrate that power than to perform a miracle right in front of everyone, at the Temple, for all to see? No one could deny his divinity then. I mean, wouldn’t it be wonderful, for poor struggling believers like us to have proof like that, undeniable evidence? It would certainly make believing in Jesus easier. But Jesus refuses. He won’t establish his kingdom on spectacles and manipulation.

That leaves Satan with one last angle of attack. Ok, so Jesus isn’t susceptible to the temptation of spiritual power. How about political power instead? ‘Cause there are few things people desire more than political power, the power to compel others to do what they want. People respect power; they don’t always like it, but they obey it. Wouldn’t it be great, Jesus, if you had that power in your hands, to use it to shape society, to force everyone to obey your will? Just think of the good you could do, the corruption you could root out, the injustice you could right. If you’re interested, I could give you that power. The kingdoms of the world serve me, but I can give them all to you…on one measly condition, you bow before me.”

But once again Jesus refuses. He will not be a political Messiah, at least not in the way that people expected, to be the “Emperor of the world,” bending people and nations to his will. Later this renunciation of power will cause Jesus all kinds of problems when he doesn’t act like the anointed deliverer that people were expecting (and so desperately wanted!). But Jesus is resolute. He will not take power that way, will not rule as worldly kings rule. He will not accept the devil’s terms, the devil’s bargain: gain the world, but lose your soul.

Jesus recognizes too the larger implications of using power that way. He knows how governments and rulers so easily become “gods” to people, how kings and nation cans become the source of meaning, protection, and ultimate security for people. That’s why Jesus responded to Satan’s temptation by referencing worship. He repeats the creed that Israel knew by heart: “You shall worship the Lord your God and him only.” That’s a tough word to hear in a world that encourages us to worship everything else but God. But what Jesus says to this temptation and to the others is, “No!”

A parent was saying to me the other day that the toughest job they had as a parent was having “the courage to look your children in the eye and say ‘no.’” That is a particular challenge when most of what we hear today tells us that our job as parents is to work hard to give our children everything their hearts desire. In a world where getting what we want is the most important thing, the only damage that we feel we can do to our psyche—or to that of our children—is to deny ourselves what we really, really want.

Self-care, self-aggrandizement, and self-satisfaction are what we deserve, what we expect, what “freedom” means to us. We want what we want and insist we should have it, and will not abide anyone telling us we can’t. We resent any limits placed on us, decrying them as tantamount to slavery, and all the while we’re oblivious to how we have become slaves to our appetites, to our ruin.

I once knew a guy, a professor, several years older than me, who grew up in a fundamentalist Christian church. When I was in college, he regaled us with tales of his rigid, fundamentalist childhood. Movies, even Walt Disney movies, were out for him — too worldly. Soft drinks? That’s a no-no. Alcohol? Forget it. Dating? Not until he was 18, and then he had to be in by 10 p.m. “Can you believe the pettiness, the narrowmindedness, the frightened, authoritarian nature of these Christian fundamentalists?” he’d ask us. And we in our sophisticated sophomoric minds would all nod our heads in agreement.

I saw that professor a few years ago. His young adult son is in an alcohol treatment program. His daughter is living through the hell of her second divorce. And he has had, by his own estimate, a sad disordered life. But he’d recently gone back to church, back attending the same backward, narrow, authoritarian fundamentalist church of his childhood! Why? “I realized too late that I had absolutely no means of saying ‘no’,” he explained to me. “I knew how to go out and get everything I ever wanted—career, prestige, material comforts—but I had no means of knowing what was worth wanting.”

Many people today pride themselves on heroically rebelling against religious authoritarianism, but they have no problem submitting to the authoritarianism of their desires, greed and reputation-chasing, which degrades them even more. They never think to ask, or are afraid to ask, any questions that might undercut their claim to independence, questions like: What thing in your life is in danger of taking over? What do you love too much in the wrong way? What do you need to let go of before it drags you under?

Whatever “it” is, God calls us to end it, to give it up. But that “giving up” need not be some great courageous act of renunciation, rejecting the world and becoming a monk, say. Likely more helpful is to start small, to take baby steps toward new life, beginning by denying ourselves some small things in order to be receptive to greater goods in our lives.

A few dollars a week given to relieve some of the suffering of others, a few hours taken from serving ourselves in order to serve our neighbors, twenty minutes of prayer in the morning. These are not huge acts of self-denial, but they are a start. There’s nothing wrong with starting small and then building up to larger acts of faith. That’s what I reckon my colleague’s old church was doing—training them to make small sacrifices so that they’d be able someday to make larger ones.

Fact is, our lives are formed not only by what we affirm, but also by what we reject. Following Jesus means accepting him, welcoming him, and embracing him, but also rejecting temptations, refusing those things—even ostensibly good things—that aren’t God’s will. Lent is given to us for this purpose, to remind us of the necessity of self-denial and of its promise, that in “letting go” we “let God” more into our lives, making room for God to act powerfully in our lives.

So then, What are you giving up for Lent?