Deuteronomy 26:1-11
When you have come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance to
possess, and you possess it, and settle in it, you shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the
ground, which you harvest from the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and you shall put
it in a basket and go to the place that the Lord your God will choose as a dwelling for his name.
You shall go to the priest who is in office at that time, and say to him, ‘Today I declare to the
Lord your God that I have come into the land that the Lord swore to our ancestors to give us.’
When the priest takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before the altar of the Lord
your God, you shall make this response before the Lord your God: ‘A wandering Aramean was
my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he
became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and
afflicted us, by imposing hard labour on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the
Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The Lord brought us
out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and
with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing
with milk and honey. So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O Lord, have
given me.’ You shall set it down before the Lord your God and bow down before the Lord your
God. Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate
with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you and to your house.
Luke 4:1-13
The Temptation of Jesus
Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the
wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those
days, and when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, ‘If you are the Son of
God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.’ Jesus answered him, ‘It is written, “One
does not live by bread alone.”’
Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the
devil said to him, ‘To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over
to me, and I give it to anyone I please. 7If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.’ Jesus
answered him, ‘It is written,
“Worship the Lord your God,
and serve only him.” ’
Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to
him, ‘If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written,
“He will command his angels concerning you,
to protect you,”
and
“On their hands they will bear you up,
so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.”’
Jesus answered him, ‘It is said, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”’
When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.
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Stones Into Bread
A sermon by Rev. Leah Grace Goodwin
January 18, 2015
Harrisena Community Church
Texts: Psalm 91; Deuteronomy 26:1-11; Luke 4:1-13
Would you pray with me?
May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of my heart, be acceptable in Your sight, our
Rock and our Redeemer.
*****
“Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the
wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil.”
It seems an unlikely way to celebrate.
Jesus, you see, has just been baptized when this story begins. He has been claimed by
God as his own son. He has been made legitimate in the eyes of his community and given the
best professional recommendation anyone can really get – a distinctly audible seal of divine
approval. “You are my beloved Son,” God has just said; “in you I am well pleased.”
In the next chapter, however, we do not find Jesus celebrating with his friends, or even
moving on to the immediate business of his own ministry. Instead, he goes—abruptly, the way
Luke describes it—into the wilderness. Actually, he does not precisely “go” into the wilderness
so much as he is led. The Holy Spirit, at least the way the author of Luke tells it, leads him
there. Something, some metaphysical trail of breadcrumbs, drew Jesus into the wilderness. That
Hansel and Gretel trail, we are made to understand, was created by God.
The Judean wilderness is not a kind place. It is very hot during the day and extremely
cold at night, and if you are human, you are not at the top of the food chain. Water is
notoriously hard to find, while in those days robbers, bandits, and demoniacs were a whole lot
easier to bump into. Not an easy place in which to survive overnight, let alone forty days.
Why, then, is Jesus led into the wilderness? Why now? Why such a trial so soon after
such triumph? It seems a cranky, capricious, and frankly mean and self-destructive thing for the
Holy Spirit, for God, to do, leading his son, his own self, his best beloved, into the wilderness
and seeming to abandon him there.
But it’s not. That whole mean-God-abusing-divine-Son thing is not the gospel truth being
revealed here. I think what the writer of Luke is trying to express is that important moments in
our lives usually involve some degree of things falling apart.
Very often, figuring out who we are, or what matters to us, involves a significant amount
of uproar along with it.
Maybe you find out you’ve gotten a dream job or an amazing promotion—a real careerbuilder—but it means moving to another town or state or country, and coping with all the stress
that comes with that kind of a change.
Maybe you discover that your child is a genius—and he or she also has a learning
disability, which will change your whole family’s lives.
Maybe you discover that you have a passion for something—teaching skiing, working
toward social justice, feeding the hungry, teaching kids in Peru, being a reporter—and then you
realize that following your dream is going to dismantle everything you’ve worked hard to create
in your life, or upset your family, or cut your pay by half.
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Maybe you discover that your partner or spouse has an illness that cannot be cured, and
you know that your love for this person means you will empty yourself out to see them through
their journey out of this world and into the next.
It’s a hard but beautiful truth: learning who you are means handing yourself over, and
sometimes feeling all by yourself, even though you’re not. Becoming who God wants us to be
very often means feeling hollowed out and lost, at least at the start. What we, in the 21st century,
often call “fulfillment” very often comes hand in hand with a deep sense of loss and emptiness.
And sometimes we don’t feel God working in these days of darkness, these hours of longing or
confusion or head-against-desk frustration.
But this is the challenge of freedom, the freedom each of us was given as a child of God.
And this is the hardest thing a parent has to do: watch a child struggle and know that he or she
can only learn, sometimes, from what is difficult. I want to tell you, before we go any further,
that God IS there with you, when those dark moments come. As one theologian put it, “God is
most intimately accomplishing everything that is good and true [in you]. This is what everyone
has to go through to become spiritual and not merely physical.” God is just giving you some
breathing room to figure stuff out. I just wish it didn’t have to hurt so much.
And I also will note that God expects his children to help one another. He expects us not
to leave each other alone in our hurt. Our work to live into our innate beauty, to become all that
we are born to be, is not work we can do in isolation. It is not work best done when we are
hated, or hungry, or told we are worthless. That is why we must be true and good to one another.
John Donne wasn’t kidding when he said that no man is an island.
But one way we can understand Jesus of Nazareth, the Jesus that many of us understand
as the Son of God, as God himself, come to walk with us—one way we can understand him is as
an archetype of our own experience. Which means that, in the stories we read and hear about
him, in the history we are given of him, we see the pattern of our lives in him, woven into a
wilder and starker fabric.
So, Jesus, after his glorious baptism, is led into the wilderness to accomplish just what I
have gone on about – to learn in the most visceral of ways what it is to be empty; to discover
what is left when he is utterly unable to pretend that anything remains of his own capacity to
survive; to learn what it is to be desperate enough to let God speak through him and
acknowledge that it is actually God and not his human self; to “become spiritual instead of
merely physical.”
Basically, he was led into the wilderness so that he might, more clearly and more starkly
than any normal human is ever called to do, answer two questions: Who are you? And, whose
are you? Jesus has already begun to understand the significance of his call and the scope of his
mission, but now he must encounter the enormity of his life dream—and he has to do it in the
most physical of ways. He has to find out what, exactly, it means to carry the divine essence
within a very human soul and spirit. And to do that, he has to undergo temptation, or trial; he
has to learn about the power of his divinity; he has to understand the depth of the upcoming
struggle for human redemption, in the most physical AND spiritual of ways. Plus, he has to
walk this lonesome valley all by himself.
God had been quite satisfactorily present in the previous chapter of Luke’s account,
which tells of Jesus’ baptism. His voice is appropriately audible and his statement thoroughly
affirmative. “You are my Son, the Beloved,” he says, “and with you I am well pleased.” God
makes a dramatic entrance, as well, dive-bombing the scene when the Holy Spirit descends in
the form of a dove. But now, just after this ringing endorsement of Jesus’ mission, God’s voice
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is conspicuously silent. Jesus entered the wilderness “full of the Holy Spirit,” and it is true that
the Spirit guides him not only into, but within, the wilderness – but despite the fact that Jesus is
clearly bursting at the spiritual seams with divinity, he does not appear to have gained much
comfort, creaturely or spiritual, from such status.
Enter the devil.
We tend to read the wilderness encounter as a sort of semi-civilized rhetorical debate
between Jesus and a demon, an argument in which Jesus confidently declaims the various
religious doctrines that eventually send the devil slinking away with his tail between his legs.
But when we read the story that way, we rob the incident of much of its power.
Here, once again, is the thing: people only struggle with temptation to the degree that
they care about the thing tempting them. For example: if I hate cake, cake has no power over
me. (I’m a frosting girl, myself. I’ll lick the buttercream off six pieces of cake before I bother
with the cake itself, or even the ice cream. I really love frosting.) If cigarettes or heroin or
alcohol or power or networking potential don’t call my name or your name, their presence in a
room is absolutely irrelevant to our existence. Bronx cheer. Whatever.
But if I or you were to be jonesing for one of those things and they happened to be in
front of us, well, then, all bets would be off. Again, the level of the love we have for something
dictates the hardship of the temptation, the trial, we endure. No love, no trial.
This was Jesus’ worst problem. He had it bad for the human race—for all creation, in
fact. He loved it so much that he practically smoked at the ears. You can figure out for
yourselves how badly he must have struggled and thrashed in the wilderness, bound by the wild
desire he felt for God’s creation to be made whole.
The short explanation of this passage: the forces of hell represented by Luke’s devil
packed a wallop.
The word “devil”—in Greek, “diabolos”—literally means “one who throws things
around” or “stirs things up,” “one who confuses things.” My daddy once pointed out that “the
work of the devil is to get us muddled.” He also reminds us that “the best example of the work
of diabolos, the muddler, is our first meeting of it, in the Garden of Eden, in the form of a
serpent. He doesn’t ask Eve “why don’t you eat from that tree?’ No, he just kind of sidles up
and says, ‘Say, did God say you shouldn’t eat from that tree?’ He just raised the question.
Oldest trick in the debater’s book. Confuse them.”1
And that is precisely what the devil tries to do to Jesus. He confuses him, by poking him
where it hurts. “If you are the Son of God,” he says, “command this stone to become a loaf of
bread.” Prove who you are, the devil says. Show me your power. And the vicious twist he puts
on the whole trial is the fact that Jesus has not eaten for forty days.
It was Robert Heinlein who said that one ought to “avoid making irrevocable decisions
on an empty stomach.” Jesus, alas, does not have that choice. And Heinlein is right, because
hunger changes a person. Even mild hunger can distract, as anyone who has ever skipped or
delayed a meal knows. But hunger, real hunger, the kind that comes from not eating for days on
end, possesses you. It strips the mind down to the simplest of all mental calculations: “I need to
eat. I must survive.” It links eating to every level of existence in the most immediate possible
way.
All this adds up to the fact that when the devil dares Jesus to turn a stone into bread, he is
also daring him to prove his power – to prove who he is. And to a starving man, finding food
1
Everett Goodwin, “The Experience of Temptation,” sermon delivered February 28, 1993 at the First Baptist Church of the
City of Washington, D.C.
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means staying alive – staying who you are. For Jesus, the devil’s question would have been a
nearly impossible conundrum. Jesus knows, somewhere deep inside, that the question of who he
is, as the Son of God (as God himself, in fact) – is fundamentally the same as whose he is. He
knows that the stakes are high, and he knows that the devil is playing a dirty game. He knows
that the very foundation of his identity – his love for humanity – is precisely the reason that this
demon has such power over him.
Every one of us has had our own wilderness experience. We have all felt left alone,
trapped in a situation which tears at us precisely because it is so important, because the stakes
are so high. These, bitterly enough, are generally the times when nothing we bring to the
situation seems relevant or helpful. All our histories and beliefs seem to fade into platitudes
and dogmas. They seem useless or lifeless.
Barbara Brown Taylor describes these wilderness experiences as “an Outward Bound for
the soul.”2 “The real test,” she says, “comes when you go solo… that is when you find out who
you really are. That is when you find out what you really miss and what you are really afraid of.
Some people dream about their favorite food. Some long for a safe room with a door to lock
and others wish they just had a pillow, but they all find out what their pacifiers are – the habits,
substances, or surroundings they use to comfort themselves, to block out pain and fear… It is
hard. It is awful. It is necessary to encounter the world without anesthesia, to find out what life
is like with no comfort but God.”
Jesus, in the Judean wilderness, is definitely encountering the world without anesthesia.
All Jesus has are stones – the stones that litter the rocky Judean wilderness, the stones that he
could, if he gave in to his hunger, quite easily turn into bread. And, the stones of his religious
truths—the laws and religious precepts under which he has been brought up. He is hungry—no,
he is famished—for food, both physical and spiritual, for bread and for God’s living presence.
And he is in a bind. Social conditioning and religious commitments are powerful things
– but are they powerful enough to conquer what Jesus faced? Are they powerful enough to face
down the whole of hell? Are these spiritual stones of religious truth enough to remind Jesus of
who he is, of his divinity, his love, his goodness, his truth?
What those spiritual stones, those religious truths Jesus has inherited—what they do give
him is a verbal pantry. It gives him the words of Hebrew scripture, the laws and stories and
creeds he has heard, read, talked about, lived by all his life. The spiritual stones, the religious
truths and laws that roll around in his head, give Jesus the words to answer the devil. He falls
back on words from Deuteronomy. “Man does not live by bread alone,” he chokes out—even
though, in Luke’s version, at least, he forgets the rest of the quote—“but by every word which
comes from the mouth of God.” No matter. He gasps out enough of the oft-repeated text to
force the devil to try another tactic. The sparring goes on for at least three rounds.
And then, in the devil’s last recorded attempt, he strikes a low blow. Twice Jesus has
deflected the devil’s suggestions by quoting from Deuteronomy, calling back to his own mind
the commandments that Moses gave to the Israelites direct from the mouth of God. “It is
written,” he says, “that man shall not live by bread alone.” And it is that first statement—that “it
is written” part—that has almost more power than the oft-repeated maxim which follows,
because in those three words are bound up the complicated fibers of Jesus’ childhood and
heritage, as well as his divinity. When he recites the words of scripture, they are not only laws
he as a human has been given to live by. Because he is divine, they are also his own words.
2
Barbara Brown Taylor, “Settling for Less,” in “The Living Word,” The Christian Century, Feb. 18, 1998.
5
Jesus responds to his struggles in the wilderness with laws that are his spiritual inheritance in
every sense.
But the devil mocks him. He takes him to Jerusalem, to the place in which he will be
both honored as a Messiah and reviled as a common rabblerouser, and he places him at the
pinnacle of the temple. The setting and the symbolism are rich, bitter with irony. He parks him
at the peak of the temple, and he proceeds to use Jesus’ own spiritual inheritance against him.
“If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from this precipice, for it is written,” he says
more than snidely, and then quotes the very Psalm we read this morning: “‘He will command
his angels concerning you, to protect you.’” And then, just for good measure, he cites a second
passage.
What are you gonna do now, Jesus? he seems to be asking. How are you going to resist
this time?
One writer3 points out that our sense of emptiness is not always a sign of impending
spiritual destruction. “The hollowness we sometimes feel,” she says, “is not a sign of
something gone wrong. It is the holy of holies inside of us, the uncluttered throne room of the
Lord our God.” Jesus, in his struggles with the devil, encounters that sheer magnitude of that
hollowness. In that encounter with emptiness, he finds room to bring the Word to life within
himself.
Jesus responds to the devil’s ultimate test. Perhaps calmly, or perhaps stretched to his
final limit and desperate for something to say in retort, he spits out, “It is SAID, ‘Do not put
your Lord God to the test.”
And in that moment, what is written, what is platitude, what is recitation of distant and
bone-dry history, explodes into life. Not only is it written – it is also said. Not only is God’s
word true, it is good – and it is living, fresh every day. The laws that God gave to his people
through Moses so many years ago are the laws by which his people live still. With the words of
Jesus’ scriptures, the same ones that he has recited since childhood, the same creeds and
commandments he very likely mumbled through as a child and occasionally rolled his eyes
about as a teen – with these same ancient and oft-repeated words, the Lord still “[brings] him out
of Egypt, [out of the wilderness,] with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.”
Jesus, without the signs and wonders, and in a way that the devil could not have ever
imagined, has just turned stone into bread. He has taken the stories of his childhood and the
scriptures of his inheritance, the truths that he believes and the laws that he obeys, and he has
seen that the ancient words are still leavened with life—they are fragrant with goodness. In this
moment, in that tiny phrase, “It is said,” Jesus defeats the devil. Not for good, mind you – he
will be back, at a more “opportune time,” to try Jesus’ mettle again, but Jesus has taken a good
chunk out of the arguments of darkness.
Stones into bread. This is what Thomas A. Dorsey, the writer and composer of the
anthem the choir just sang, did. He turned stones into bread, dead platitudes into living comfort,
when in 1932 his wife Nettie died in childbirth, and their firstborn son two days later. Out of
that darkness, mired in his grief, he wrote “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.” He has brought
comfort to millions of people over many, many years with that song. Stones into bread.
The war correspondent Anna Badken writes in her book Peace Meals of women and
families who turn stones into bread. She writes about those who shared meals with her—making
dolmas, the rice-and-lamb-stuffed grape leaves, while bombs rattled the house and destroyed the
next town over. She remembers the driver who terrified her by stopping their vehicle in the
3
Taylor, “Settling for Less.”
6
middle of the Afghanistan night and strode off, gun in hand, firing a volley of shots at what she
assumed to be snipers, only to return with a dead fox in his hands. “For your supper, tomorrow,”
he growled at her. Brutal? Yes. Sad? Stones into bread? Yes.
And there is Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose national day we celebrate
tomorrow. The stones—the flinty, sharp-edged, granite-heavy misery of bigotry, of beatings, of
savage attacks and fear and even eventually his own assassination—he turned those stones into
bread, into the living word that righteousness and love and beauty and freedom would prevail.
“The moral arc of the universe is long,” he famously said, “but it bends toward justice.” And in
the Birmingham jail, as he listened to guards cursing at women and children and beating the
men (including himself), as he wrote on scraps of paper hoarded, he wrote the long letter which
is really a magnificent sermon, and came to its end with this quote, which breaks my heart:
“Never before have I written so long a letter. I'm afraid it is much too long to take your
precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a
comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than
write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?
“If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an
unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the
truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than
brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.”
That, my beloved, is turning stones into bread.
The poet John Canaday referred to the transformative power of the wilderness thus
bluntly:
Praise God for the deserts, famines, droughts
with which he seasons us when we wax fat.
And bless these vacant words as well, [Lord]. Inhabit them.4
Praise God, indeed, for the trials that come into our own lives, that show us who we are and to
whom we belong. For we are God’s. He has indeed inscribed his name on each of our hearts, as
the prophet Jeremiah promised. At the oddest times and in the most surprising ways, he gives us
vision, he inhabits our words and lives, he turns our stones into bread. Amen.
4
Adapted from “A Fast of God’s Choosing,” by John Canaday, from The Invisible World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University, 2002), 59.
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