Just Who(se) Do You Think You Are

Lent 1C
Text: Deuteronomy 26:1-11; Luke 4:1-13
sermon by Rev. Robert Klonowski
Faith Lutheran Church, Homewood, IL
March 6, 2022

Just Who(se) Do You Think You Are?

Back in Luke chapter 3 Jesus is baptized and, like the rest of us who are baptized, it is in baptism that he is given his identity. “This is my beloved Son,” is how the Father identifies him.

The very next thing that happens, right after that baptism, is our gospel lesson for this morning, Luke chapter 4, and here there are more identity issues at stake. Jesus is led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where he and his old unwelcome friend the devil spend some time together … doing what? Well, I submit to you that they are exploring Jesus’ identity. Sure he’s been named Son of God, but what does that really mean? Just what kind of a God is this Jesus Christ character? Is he about bread for the world, or about the power of worldly kingdoms, or about fancy stunts with angels? Just who is this Son of God?

If you think about it, this question of God’s identity is the reason every one of us is in church this morning. You are here this morning because Someone – the Holy Spirit – has raised in you the notion that there is something, Someone, abroad in the world that is bigger than just yourself. There has been raised in you the notion that there does exist the power of God, a power that is there for you, a power for more than you could ever be on your own. You are here this morning because you want to tap into that. You want to know that power. You want to know the identity of God.

It is my privilege to be in conversation, often, with people who are new to our worship community. Do you know why new people come? They don’t come because they’re looking for friendliness, though friendliness is important. They don’t come because they want good church programs, though our programs are important. They don’t come because of our church marketing. They come, tentatively, gingerly into this sanctuary of a Sunday morning, because something has happened lately in their life that has them wondering about meaning, significance, beyond themselves. They have an idea that maybe God has something to do with the meaning they are looking for, and they have heard rumors that in the worshiping community of the church there is offered an encounter with the living God. They come because they want to know God, and they wonder if this community can help them to know God.

You come this morning because you want to know who God is. Because you want to tap into a power for more than you could ever be on your own. You have come here this morning, I say, to know the identity of God and to know your own identity as someone in relationship with God and connected to that power.

You do this more often than you think. You have had the experience of doing something extraordinary when you knew, it was not really you, it was God working through you. You have walked into situations where you didn’t have a word to bring, and yet in the end you did, because the right words have been there, provided for you by something, Someone, beyond yourself. You have seen people you know do things that nobody expected they could do; you have seen the power of God at work in them.

You know, my wife Deb and I have this funny little story, something that happened in the months before we were married, so this story is over 40 years old. We gave a lift to O’Hare Airport once to Bishop Desmond Tutu, the guy who died a couple of months ago. Only when we gave him that ride back then he kind of wasn’t Bishop Desmond Tutu yet; he was still pretty un-famous, just the Anglican bishop of Cape Town in South Africa, and he was here in Chicago on a fund-raising speaking tour, and the guy needed a ride. The chair of our sponsoring committee looked around and said, Can anybody take him?, and I allowed that I could probably borrow my girlfriend’s car.

So we took him to the airport. And from there he flew home to Cape Town, where over the next few years he became the most important leader of the church in the struggle against South African apartheid. He won the Nobel Peace Prize. He was the chair of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which did so much to bring peaceful resolution and democracy at last to a country that had been torn by the most violent kind of oppression.

But you know that day when we had him in our car, he was just a guy, crammed into the tiny back seat of Deb’s yellow Datsun 710. He was kind of hilarious, is our memory of him; we laughed together all the way up the Dan Ryan and the Kennedy.

What is it made a guy, who was just a guy, into one of the world’s greatest leaders for justice and Christian witness? He’d be the first to tell you it wasn’t him. It was a power beyond him.

Now you might say this story has not much to do with you. The issues with which you struggle are not as significant as that, and your response is nowhere near as heroic.

In other words, you’re just a guy, right? Or a gal? Well, that’s true. But whatever it is that you’re struggling with, whatever false empire of this world it is that Jesus is calling you to face down, the extraordinary power that made Tutu into so much more than he ever could be on his own, is offered to you too by God’s grace.

I stand before you this morning, just a guy, but fresh from a struggle in the wilderness that has been much longer than 40 days; fresh from a struggle with the devil, evil, and death. My dad died last night after a long struggle with debilitating illness, a struggle that in the last few months and weeks turned into an utter horror. And if the devil and death had their way, that would be the end of the story, and I would sit down right now, and this sermon would be over and we would all be left in the wilderness.

But funny thing about the devil and the power of death: they like to tempt you, trick you into thinking they have the power and they have the last word, but they do not. Because you see, with every gesture of the care for him that my mother and my brothers and sisters offered up in these months, we were facing down the devil and telling him, “You think you’ve got him, but you don’t. He doesn’t belong to you.” With every day of work we missed so we could sit vigil with him in these weeks, we said, “Nuh-uh. Satan, you think you’re all that, but he doesn’t belong to you.” With every loving caress in these last days of a body wracked with pain and disease, we said, “He doesn’t belong to you!”

Because his identity was given to him in his Baptism, where he was named child of God, sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross forever. He doesn’t belong to you, Satan. He belongs to us, and he belongs to God, forever and ever.

We didn’t ask for this calling, to face down the power of death and the devil; we didn’t want it. And there’s nothing extraordinary about us; we’re just ordinary guys, ordinary gals. But people who are claimed by God, who are identified as God’s own, are moved from the merely ordinary to tap into the extraordinary every day. Let the model of Christ facing down Satan in the wilderness then be the model for every one of us, who are children of God. Whatever it is that you’re struggling with, whatever false empire of this world it is that Jesus is calling you to face down, the extraordinary power that is yours through our Lord Jesus Christ, is offered to you by God’s grace, and through your eternal identity as child of God.