FIRST SUNDAY IN LENT, YEAR C

March 9, 2025

Saints Matthew and Mark, Barrington, R. I.

 

Deuteronomy 26:1-11

Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16

Romans 10:8b-13

Luke 4:1-13

 

This morning’s reading from the Book of Deuteronomy takes me back to my first year in seminary. Our Old Testament Professor had an old-fashioned teaching method; he required us to commit to memory those passages of scripture that he considered it necessary for us to know by heart.

 

Some shorter passages, like the Song of Miriam – “Sing to the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously, the horse and his rider hath he cast into the sea” – he had us memorize and recite in the original Hebrew. Longer passages he was content to have us recite in English translation. And one passage he considered most important was that in today’s Old Testament reading, “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down to Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number; and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous.”

 

Every year, faithful Israelites would recite these words when they came up to the Jerusalem Temple to offer to God the first fruits of the harvest. These words constituted a solemn remembrance of their sojourn in Egypt, their toil and affliction, and their deliverance from bondage by the Lord’s mighty hand and outstretched arm. Most of all, these words gratefully acknowledged that the present harvest was the gift of the same Lord who’d brought them into this place and given them this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.

 

Imagine the cumulative effect of re-enacting this solemn ritual year after year. By reciting the story of God’s mighty deeds in the past, the Israelites reaffirmed their allegiance to God, and reconstituted themselves as God’s People Israel. So, over many centuries, this annual confession of faith powerfully formed and shaped their identity as the People of God.

 

The memorization of scripture passages is an invaluable exercise. While my seminary classmates and I initially chafed at our professor’s requirement, by the end of the semester we were immensely grateful to him. Learning these verses by heart deepened and enriched our priestly formation. But we don’t need to be in training for holy orders to benefit spiritually from committing key biblical texts to memory. So, there’s a challenge for each of us: Do we have an arsenal of scripture verses, passages, and stories that we can call to mind and recite at key moments in our lives—moments of decision and maybe even temptation?

 

The more we immerse ourselves in the scriptures, the closer we come to realizing the goal that St. Paul sets before us in today’s Epistle: “The Word is near you, on your lips and in your heart . . . because, if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved; for one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved.”

 

At the offering of the first fruits, the Israelites confessed with their lips what they believed in their hearts. The temptation narrative in today’s Gospel exemplifies the same principle. Jesus overcomes each of the devil’s three temptations by means of a confession of faith that involves quoting Scripture.

 

To the temptation to misuse his divine power by turning stones into bread, Jesus responds: “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’” To the temptation to fall down and worship the devil in return for all the world’s kingdoms, Jesus responds, “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’” And to the temptation to throw himself down from the Temple pinnacle to have the angels catch him and so demonstrate his divine Sonship, Jesus responds, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”

 

This third temptation shows us that the devil himself can misuse Scripture for his own ends, as he cites today’s Psalm, “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.” So, we need to be careful. Not all quoting of Scripture serve God’s purposes. Even so, in his three responses, Jesus demonstrates how the right use of Scripture can be a decisive shield against temptations to sin.

 

This wilderness episode reveals a lot about Jesus. No doubt, as he grew up, he learned large portions of the Hebrew Bible by heart, both at home with Mary and Joseph, and every sabbath in the synagogue in Nazareth. Luke’s Gospel tells us that when Jesus was twelve years old, his parents took him up to Jerusalem, where he amazed the teachers in the Temple by his understanding and his answers. Having grown up immersed in the scriptural heritage of his people, Jesus was equipped to stand firm in the time of testing. The Word of God was truly in his heart and upon his lips.

 

So much of what we do in worship today is designed to have precisely that effect: to bring the Word of God near us and put it in our hearts and upon our lips. In our Sunday Eucharist, we follow a three-year lectionary that systematically takes us through large parts of the Bible, keying a wide variety of readings to the changing seasons, feasts, and fasts of the Church Year.

 

Those who read daily Morning and Evening Prayer from the Prayer Book recite the entire Psalter once a month, and read through much of the Bible every two years. This regular repetition of set prayers, psalm verses, and scripture lessons, is a great gift of our Anglican spiritual tradition. The more we repeat them, the more they sink into the depths of our subconscious awareness, the more they become part of who we are—and the more likely they are to spring to mind when we truly need them: in moments of tragedy, crisis, decision, or temptation.

 

This Season of Lent is a time of year when by God’s grace we recommit ourselves to resisting temptation and repenting of our sins. It’s a time when we recommit ourselves to faithful participation in the worship that helps put the words of Scripture in our hearts and on our lips. And it’s a time when we recommit ourselves to the lifelong process of allowing God’s Word and God’s Spirit to form us ever more deeply in our identity as God’s People. So we do well to make the commitment, at the very minimum, to be here in church every Sunday, not only throughout this Lenten season, but into Eastertide, and throughout the coming year, and beyond.