Connect: Together to Overcome—Gen.2: 15-17, 3:1-7; Matt. 4: 1-11
The other day, while working in Atlanta, I met some friends for dinner after work at Atlantic Station. Now, if you’re not familiar, Atlantic Station is a large outdoor mall, cinema, plaza, and row of restaurants right in the heart of midtown off of 17th Street. It may sound daunting, given the location, but there is a very nice system of color-coded and numbered parking in the parking deck. I assumed nothing could go wrong with this, right? Oh, how wrong I was. I parked and remembered my area carefully—P2—near the green/purple area. I had dinner and came back down to the parking deck.
It was then that I learned that there 3 different green and purple sections, and that P2 was the floor—Parking Level 2—and not the area of the parking deck I was in. For 25 minutes I searched for my car clicking the panic button and hearing no car alarm sounds. I was beginning to get nervous as it was nighttime, downtown in a parking deck, and smelled suspiciously like a strong semi-illegal “herbal” cigarette, if you know what I mean. So, I did what I had to do. I called security and spent the next 25 minutes riding around on their golf cart up and down the parking deck looking for my car. We found it. 20 feet away from where I was looking.
Sometimes, we cannot face situation, trials, and struggles alone. It leads us to unhealthy, unsafe, and bad places in life when we turn away from our support and strength. Over this Lenten season, we will walk through our tagline, found on the letterhead and website—Connect, Belong, Believe. I had a couple of people didn’t even know it existed. Well, by the end of Lent, you’ll be very familiar, I promise! In our lessons for today we read about two instances where temptation was faced, trials were endured, and two different endings came from the struggle.
For Adam and Eve, the manipulation and temptation of the serpent did not lead to a strong or happy ending. It appears to have taken very little convincing for Adam and Eve to both ignore God’s commandments and eat of the tree they were supposed to stay away from. Eve looked to Adam, her help, her partner, her support system, but neither of them looked to God. They both listened to false and enticing manipulation and gave in to what was wrong. The consequences were dire and permanent. When we listen to the snakes in our lives, we will suffer. Adam and Eve looked at everything around them, but they forgot to look to God.
In the Gospel lesson, Jesus is out in the wilderness facing hunger, temptation, struggles, and trials. The devil comes to him, just like he came to Adam and Eve with sweet and convincing words, seasoned tricks and manipulations, and suggestions that might have fixed the suffering in the short-term, but still led deeper into sin and evil in the long run. Yet Jesus looked to God’s wisdom. When tempted by food, Jesus quotes the Word of God. When Satan tempted Jesus to make a foolish and pointless statement of power, Jesus hurled back God’s commandments.
When Satan finally tempts Jesus with power, prestige, and royalty, Jesus bluntly refutes him. All of these trials tempt Jesus in his vulnerability: his hunger, his work to proclaim his authority and position; and his struggle and living in a limited, human way. The trials of life will always hit us where we are most vulnerable and most susceptible to the spiritual assault. Jesus had no one to help him—no circle of friends in the wilderness or partner in the garden like Adam and Eve. Yet he had God, and as the Son of God, that was enough.
When we encounter our struggles, trials, temptations, and painful edges of life, we need to connect—both to God’s power and our community of support. We’re not Jesus in the desert. We need a little extra help to overcome. We have to connect together with God and as a church of support in one another’s tough times.
I told you the story of my foolish car hunt as an example of this. There was no way I was going to find my car on my own. I needed the wisdom of my friends in knowing what to do, and I needed the support of the moderately irritated security guard who came out to help me locate the car. My education, intellect, wisdom, whatever talent and ability I have were no longer able to help me as tiredness and panic began to set in. I needed help, or I was going to be wandering that parking lot for heaven knows how long.
There is no shame in saying we need help when we face the struggles that come to us in life. There is no shame in needing a medical doctor, a support community, a loving and listening ear, or a combination of prayer, medication, and therapy. God wants us to be made whole, to find redemption, and to be able to follow Jesus with our complete mind, soul, and spirit. That is why we are told to both trust in God and to live in a community of faith together.
We often talk about the work of the church and being a community of faith that works for God’s will in the world, and community outreach is a good and wonderful thing. Being a church community together, however, is about far more than just the outreach we do. We need folks who will make food for us when a loved one has died and check on us. We need folks who will pray with and for us. We need a place where we can come in and know that there’s a group of people there who love us and will be there to support us in every way.
Being connected means having a place and a people who will care for us in our time of need. I’m reminded of a story a friend shared with me. The author, Naomi Shihab Nye wrote of the time she was walking through the airport and heard an announcement asking if anyone could speak Arabic. The call was coming from her own gate at the airport. She found there an older Palestinian woman sitting on the floor sobbing uncontrollably.
In broken half English half Arabic, she discovered that when they said the flight was delayed, the woman had believed it to be cancelled. The woman was flying to another state for life-saving medica treatment and was terrified she wouldn’t arrive for it. Her son was waiting at her destination. After being reassured, Naomi helped the woman call her family, then they called Naomi’s own dad to speak more fluently in Arabic to the woman.
It took little time for the woman to be smiling, laughing, and offering homemade cookies to those who were there. Everybody took some of the small cookies covered in powdered sugar and shared them around. They all shared stories as well. Naomi writes it was like sharing a sacrament together. She went on to say, “This is the world I want to live in.”
When we are faced with life’s struggles we need both God’s power in our lives and the folks who are there to support us. We have to connect together to overcome life’s trials. There’s a contemporary Christian song that speaks directly to this. It says, “I need you; you need me. We’re all part of God’s body. Stand with me, agree with me, we’re all a part of God’s body. It is God’s will that every need be supplied. You are important to me; I need you to survive.” Faith and life are too hard to be lived alone. So may we connect together both in God’s power and in support of one another to overcome all the trials of life.
Worship Video: https://www.facebook.com/fccmacon/videos/167136442341616