Sermon for Sunday, March 6th 2022 – First Sunday in Lent – The Pinnacle of the Temple

                                                                          First Sunday in Lent, rcl yr c, 2022
ROMANS 10:8B-13; PSALM 91:1-2, 9-16; LUKE 4:1-13

the pinnacle of the temple

In his telling of the story of Jesus in the wilderness, Matthew’s ordering of Jesus’s temptations differs from the one we’ve just heard. In Matthew, the famished Jesus is tempted by the devil with bread; then Jesus is taken to Jerusalem, where the devil tempts Jesus with testing God; and then, after the temple test, Jesus is taken to a high mountain, where he is tempted with “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour.”

For a good many commentaries, this makes a lot of sense, because you can imagine these three successive temptations as increasingly large in scope and significance. First you have Jesus tempted in a personal way, with the end of his hunger; then you have Jesus tempted in a larger sphere, that of the religious; and only then after that, you have Jesus tempted in the largest earthly sphere we could imagine, that of all the kingdoms of the world.

And this makes sense, this enlarging sphere of temptation, from the personal, to the religious, to the political, because many of us imagine the world this way: with the religious sphere embedded as a small part of larger political concerns.

Luke, however, in our reading today, has a different ordering of things. Luke, like Matthew, starts with a famished Jesus, tempted by the devil with bread. But instead of taking Jesus to the temple next, Luke first has the devil tempt Jesus with all the kingdoms of the world. And then, finally, Jesus is taken by the devil to the pinnacle of the temple, tempting Jesus to test God.

And if we were to read these successive temptations as increasing in scope and magnitude, Luke’s worldview is quite different than Matthew’s; in Luke, it is the religious sphere that is the most comprehensive, with the political, and then the personal, each subsidiary to the most reaching and largest horizon, the horizon of the religious world, and the religious imagination.

One of the mistakes we seem so intent on making in secularized societies such as ours, is to assume that the rest of the world thinks like us. And in our largely secularized imagination, where religious practice and conviction, (if we even have such a thing) is small and personal, and largely absent from political discourse. It makes us blind to just how important religious concerns are for a very good portion of the rest of the world.

The importance of the religious imagination is something that someone like Vladimir Putin, though, most certainly does understand. While religious concerns have largely been absent from the media reporting that most of us consume, historians like Diana Butler Bass have pointed out the ways in which the religious imagination is critical to understanding what is happening in Ukraine.

Kiev is the birthplace of Russian Christianity. In the year 980, it was Vladimir of Kiev that consolidated the countries we know today as Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine; and Vladimir converted to Byzantine Christianity after hearing of the wonders of Constantinople. He married a Christian imperial princess, and led a mass baptism in the Dnipro River. And under Vladimir the Great, Kyiv became the heart of a new Christian empire.

Vladimir the Great eventually became St. Vladimir; and the centre of Russian imperial power eventually moved to Moscow. But the birthplace of Russian Christianity could not move along with the shift in political power; Kyiv, and Vladimir, would keep their religious significance for Russian Orthodox Christianity.

And so there’s good reason why Vladimir Putin has made such close an ally as Kirill, the highest ranking bishop in Russian Orthodox Christianity, giving money and support to building new Orthodox Churches; and there’s a good reason Vladimir Putin unveiled a 17 metre high statue of St. Vladimir in 2016 right outside the Kremlin; it’s the same reason that Patriarch Kirill has taken sides with Vladimir Putin in the invasion of Ukraine: Russian Orthodoxy, along with Vladimir Putin, wants to recapture the historic seat of Russian Christianity as an integral part of a new Russian Empire, one that will form a bulwark, along with right-wing Evangelicals and Catholics in the United States in a quest for a new Christendom.

Vladimr Putin does get how important the religious imagination is. It is hardly subordinate to the political, at least not in Vladimir Putin’s, and Patriarch Kirill’s world; it is perhaps the other way around. If you can capture the religious imagination, then the political is not far behind at all.

Putin is right, of course, about the importance of the religious imagination in his political power play, though I would wager he is a bit more cynical than most religiously committed people are. Putin knows that religious concerns motivate a good many people, and he is using those to extend his own version of empire. Less cynically though, we would say something similar. God’s horizon is as total as one could ever imagine; God, is creator of the universe, and God upholds, in each moment, all that has been in his own being. The horizon of the theological, or of our own religious commitments, or of God’s love and care of the world can never be enclosed in something smaller, because God’s care and love are just that comprehensive.

And as we travail through Lent, we endeavour to speak truthfully not just of our own personal brokenness; or of the brokenness of the church; but also of the brokenness of the sorts of politics that lead to war in Ukraine, to things like wealth inequality and the continuing difficulty of indigenous-settler reconciliation in our country; and the sort of politics that lead to a continuing overdose epidemic in our city; and we travail too, under the weight of a broken natural world, struggling under the effects of a novel coronavirus, and climate change.

So yes indeed, God’s horizon, the sphere of God’s saving work in Christ, is as comprehensive as we could imagine, and so for Christians, this would mean that our political commitments really should find themselves enclosed in this greater commitment to God. The political is enclosed in the religious, much like the human world of social relations is enclosed within a larger universe, and God’s care for us within our cities and provinces and countries is enclosed in God’s care and love for the totality of his creation.

I would hope, though, for many of us, to say that political convictions are enclosed within larger religious convictions, does not at all mean that we would sign off on Vladimir Putin’s imperial quest for a new Christendom.

There is something significant question to be asked here. Is the God we worship the God of empire, or the God of peace? If we were to say the God of peace, then we would have to ask ourselves some difficult questions, not just about the invasion of Ukraine, about also about the lasting effects of colonialism here in Canada.

We can take heart though, I think, even in this time. Ukrainian evangelicals have implored their Russian colleagues, asking the question, “Where are your Bonhoeffers, where are your Barths?” invoking two of the most well-known critics of another imperial ideology that unduly influenced German Christianity in the 1930s and 1940s, turning Christians then into allies of another bloody attempt at empire-building. And in response, a good number of Russian clerics are bravely speaking out against their own leaders, saying no, not this war, not in our name, not in the name of God.

And we can say, heartily I hope, that our God is not a God who would underwrite imperial aspirations in Ukraine, or colonial exploitation here at home in Canada.

No, our God is one of peace, or reconciliation, above all. And so we labour under the truth of our condition; and we set our hearts on God’s world of peace and reconciliation through our own repentance.

And as we trust, in setting our hearts through repentance on God’s world of peace and reconciliation—as we trust, in our endeavour to speak truthfully about the fallenness of ourselves, our politics, and the world—we would be trusting that in the Jesus who bears all this on the cross, we would be made new, we would be citizens of the New Jerusalem where tears will be wiped from our eyes, and even creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay.

That is, we would set ourselves on a path to the world as it is: redeemed in Christ.

The Reverend Dr. Preston Parsons