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Good
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 Sermon
02/21/2010
You Will Not Dash Your Foot Against a
Stone ~ by Reverend Thomas Cary Kinder
February 21, 2010 First Sunday in Lent
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 91, Luke 4:1-14
We
do not have to look far in this church to see that bad things happen
to good people. People may
love God and serve others as Jesus did and yet suffer from terrible
illnesses or wounds or losses.
It can make us wonder, what is the point of trusting in God if
that sort of thing can happen?
And
what sense can we make of promises like those in the 91st
Psalm? They are beautiful, and
we want with all our heart to believe them, but how can we? “No evil shall befall
you,” it says.
“For he will command his angels concerning you to guard
you in all your ways. On their
hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot
against a stone.”
The
devil threw that in Jesus’ face in the wilderness as the third
great temptation. The devil
said, ‘If you are the Son of God, then prove it by throwing
yourself off the temple, because God will command the angels to keep
you from dashing against the stone below.’ Did even Jesus suspect that God was
not trustworthy? Was that why
he came up with that quick and clever answer to reject the offer?
Can
we not trust in God in our times of trial and temptation? Can we not trust God to help us
change this violent and unjust world?
These
are wilderness questions, dark night of the soul questions, Lenten
questions that attack us and tempt us to despair when we are weak.
Let’s
see if we can come up with some answers to help us through the
wilderness.
“You
will not dash your foot against a stone.” There is something odd about the
Psalm’s choice of that image.
Every other image it uses exaggerates the threats God will
protect us from, like lions and serpents and whole armies. Granted, a stubbed toe is painful,
but even a broken toe seems insignificant compared to calamities it
could have used to emphasize how God’s angels will take care of
us. It could have said you
will not dash your head
against a stone. Why foot?
If
we think over the gospels, especially the gospel of Luke, we find a
clue. The clue is that Jesus
focused much of his ministry on the lame. The lame were invited in to take a
seat in his parable of the great feast. Once Jesus healed a lame man by
saying, “Your sins are forgiven,” and when religious
people objected to his right to say that, Jesus said, ‘OK, then
rise, take up your mat and walk,’ and the man walked.
As
disabling as lameness is today, it had a meaning in Jesus’ day
that it does not have for us.
To understand it, imagine that you are on a pilgrimage from
your home in Galilee
to Jerusalem. It is two thousand years ago, the
year 10. You are going to the
Passover festival. The road is
thronged with people like you making the journey on foot.
You
are walking along looking up at the great city rising ahead of you,
and singing one of the Psalms written for pilgrims on their journeys
to the festivals. You are just singing, “I will lift up mine
eyes to the hills from whence cometh my help,” when all of
sudden someone stumbles and knocks you off the side of the road and
you dash your foot against a stone.
The pain is intense because all you have on is a sandal. You look down to see that your big
toe is a bloody mess.
You
are far from home, you are not wealthy enough to hire a ride even if
you could find one, there are no cabs or buses, there are no clinics
or emergency rooms to go to, so you limp along toward the city. Most people are walking, but there
are soldiers on horses and merchants with donkeys pulling loaded
carts, and the road is filthy with manure. You find some water in a stream
beside the road to wash your wound, but the stream is polluted,
coming as it does down from the city.
You wash your toe and wrap a rag around it and keep
walking. In the temple you
pray for healing, but over the week of the festival, the toe becomes
badly infected. You cannot
make the trip back home.
It
gets worse, and though you do not die from the infection, you lose
the use of that leg. You have
no way of making a livelihood other than joining the other beggars on
the streets of Jerusalem, partly because you are unable to walk well,
but also because you have become ritually impure. You are considered cursed by God. By Jewish law, no one can have
anything to do with you without becoming impure themselves and having
to make a sacrifice at the temple to return to full social
standing. No one will hire an
impure person. So there you
are, one day a faithful pilgrim on the way to worship God in the
temple singing “The Lord shall preserve thee from all
evil,” and the next day an outcast, homeless and hungry on the
streets of Jerusalem,
accused of being cursed by God.
Jesus
made it part of his ministry to bring justice to those oppressed by a
prejudiced and corrupt social system that cared nothing for the
vulnerable. That is why he
scandalized religious authorities by saying to lame people,
“Your sin is forgiven.”
He was restoring them to justice and God’s community
over the objection of the priests and their law.
Jesus
saw that what matters in God’s judgment is not whether people
are lame or healthy, or poor or rich, what matters is that they keep
trusting in God through all their trials and temptations. But is it true that God will reward
that trust by protecting us from dashing our feet against stones?
In
today’s gospel passage, the trials that Jesus faces are all
temptations to trust in something other than God. The devil tries to get Jesus to
trust in his own powers by turning a stone into bread. But Jesus chooses humbly to trust
in God rather than in his own abundant power.
The
second temptation is to worship and trust the devil in order to rule
over all the nations of the earth.
But Jesus chooses to entrust himself to God’s higher
power and rejects the opportunity to gain worldly power through evil
means.
The
third temptation is about trust, too, but in a tricky way. The devil seems to be asking Jesus
to trust in God by jumping off the temple and letting God’s promised
angels bear him up so he doesn’t dash against the stones. But the real purpose of that
temptation is to prove that God is true, to prove that God will not
let bad things happen to good people.
Proof is not about trust—proof is about anxious doubt. Proof is not about
humility—proof is about insecure pride. Proof is about our demand to know
and understand, our desire to be in control.
The
stones that Jesus is in danger of dashing his foot against in the
third temptation are things that will make him turn away from
trusting in God, including trusting in our own powers, trusting in
evil means to attain good ends, or demanding proof of God’s
trustworthiness. These are the
stones to watch out for, these are the things that can trip us up on
the pilgrimage to Jerusalem,
that can knock us off the sacred way.
A
mind set on human things may think that being lame and an outcast and
poor are the kinds of things that get us off track in life, but a
mind set on divine things sees that we are still on track as long as
we do not let those things separate us from God by taking away our
trust in God. The bad things
that happen to good people do not have to be the end of the
story. Abiding in trust keeps
the story going.
Psalm
91 says, “You who live in the shelter of the Most
High…will say to the Lord, ‘My refuge and my fortress; my
God in whom I trust.’
Because you have made the Lord your refuge…no evil shall
befall you.”
Jesus
based his life on that trust.
He trusted when he was in the wilderness and he emerged full
of the Holy Spirit. He trusted
when he was in the Garden
of Gethsemane,
and he emerged on Easter morning full of the power of light. The message for us is that in our
times of trial or temptation, or when we are sickened by the violence
and injustice in the world, we should still trust in God, because
trusting opens us to the guidance and power we need in order to have
our suffering not be the end of our story.
Think
about the people you know who are models of this. Think of people who have been
stricken yet keep loving and giving to others the best they can. Doesn’t it seem that they
come through the wilderness of their suffering full of more power and
wisdom and light?
Of
course, stricken people lose their ability to trust sometimes, and no
one should dare blame them for that.
Some live in the bitterness of feeling abandoned by God. Some of us suffer illnesses that
snuff out all light, not because of anything we have done or not
done, but because our body or mind falls prey to forces beyond our
control.
The
heroes who move us most are those who have gone into those dark
nights of soul, those terrible wildernesses, and emerged with trust
restored. They have been
dashed on rock bottom and gotten back up and found paths where there
were no tracks to be seen.
How
can we be one of those? How
can we get past the doubt or despair caused by our own misfortune or
by the state of the world? And
why, with all the spiritual work we have done in our lives, all the
hours spent in church or prayer or reading inspired writings, why are
we not out of the wilderness yet?
Part
of the answer to that question is that the spiritual journey depends
on grace. Part of the answer
is up to God, and our only choice is whether to trust or not.
But
that choice makes all the difference.
The heroes who emerge from the wilderness full of the
Spirit’s power are people who have chosen the way of trust in
the face of all evidence and temptation not to trust. They are heroes because this is
extremely difficult to do. We
may want to trust in God, we may even believe that we can and should,
but when trouble or the cares and concerns of this life come along,
we tend to turn again to our own resources that we have practiced
trusting all our lives.
It
takes a different kind of practice to train ourselves to trust in
God. The three traditional spiritual disciplines of Lent are designed
to do this. Fasting or giving
up something for Lent humbles us and weakens us so that we have to
trust in God instead of ourselves.
Increasing our giving and acts of service puts our money and
time in God’s hands, in the trust that our needs will still be
met. Silent prayer lets go of
our control and turns from the powers of our rational mind in which
we usually place our trust, and practices looking more deeply for the
Spirit’s guidance and power.
We
can be sure that we will still dash our feet against worldly stones
as we stumble about in the wildernesses or dark nights of our
soul. But we also know that
the people who move us most are those who keep trusting and looking
to the light no matter what.
And if we want to be like them, we have to take the risk they
take. We have to practice
walking in trust.
Let
us do so now, turning away from the mind’s insistent voice, and
turning instead to the silence in our deepest spiritual center as an
act of trust in God. Let us
pray in silence…
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