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A Sermon on Matthew 4:1-11
by Rev. Chris Bohnhoff

I wasn’t going to preach on this text. Even though it contains the snippet of Biblical story that is the basis for the whole church season of Lent, my initial thought was to get back into the lectionary flow after a couple of weeks out of whack and preach on “this week’s” text.

There is something to be said for sticking to a calendar. I do it often. But then, sometimes, life happens. For example, your brilliant, well-read wife expresses her outrage to you over a current event on a Thursday morning, and you realize that that story you thought you were going to skip over actually needs to be lifted up. Thank you, Johanna.

Will you pray with me? Creator God, we give you thanks for the intellects with which we were gifted. We thank you for the space you leave us to use those gifts and make our own decisions. But wow, is it hard to choose the path that leads to life. Especially when there is comfort, and safety, and power on offer, be with us and remind us that the choice before us is never as easy or cost-free as the tempter would have us believe. Amen.

Last Sunday, before I preached to you about the Super Bowl halftime show, my family and I watched the men’s hockey gold medal game between the US and Canada. (Side note, no, my sermons will not always be sports themed.) It was an incredibly dramatic game, with gritty defense, resilience, and a beautiful, walk off, game-winning goal. What a way to cap off the Olympics, right?

It wasn’t until the next day that I saw the rest of the story: FBI Director Kash Patel partying in the locker room with the team after the game, our President on the phone, his misogyny on full display as he slipped a disparaging comment about the women’s hockey team into his invitation to the men’s team to be his guests not only at the White House, but also at the State of the Union address.

So much for that feel good story.

Just days earlier, the women’s team that the President had joked that he had to invite to the White House, won their gold medal game against Canada in equally dramatic and impressive fashion. For context, the women’s team has never failed to medal since women’s hockey became an Olympic sport in 1998. The men medaled for the first time in 46 years.

The locker room celebration prompted writer Jermaine Fowler to post an article entitled The Room.[1] It incisively and movingly describes the unspoken rules held and the bargains struck to stay in The Room: the place of safety and power created by the various forms of domination we humans employ.

Hold the picture of the scene after that gold medal game in mind—a senior government intelligence official yukking it up with “The Boys,” chugging a beer and holding up a phone with the President on the line—and hear Fowler’s description of that room:

“The room changes addresses. The door stays the same.

“The room does not ask you to hate anyone. It asks for something cheaper and more available. It asks you to not make it weird. To stay in the energy. To laugh when the room laughs. That is the rule you learn without ever hearing it said.

“The laugh is not innocent. It is a vote. It is how the room takes attendance and counts its members. And the room keeps records. . . . The bystander who laughs is not outside the system. He is the system. . . . The room did not ask them to believe the joke. It only asked them to perform it.

“The room did not make them perform. The performance made them the room.”

Meanwhile, the women’s team responded from outside the room. They kept it professional, citing professional commitments in declining the White House’s invitation, while telling reporters about how fun it had been at the Olympics hanging out with the men’s team, how they had supported each other and hung out. It’s the response that the room requires of the excluded; anything more vocal would be labeled by those inside the room as an overreaction.

But inside that room of successful athletes, flush with the emotion of a huge win, when the time came, when the one with more power to bestow called upon them to perform, to become the room, most of the men’s team did. They didn’t stick up for the women’s team whose support they had enjoyed over the prior two weeks of national camaraderie; instead, they became the room, the one that  ignores the women’s team’s generational greatness and keeps average NHL salaries ten times higher than the top end of the PWHL’s top salary. They may not have realized the bargain they had made by laughing along, but their complicity strengthened the walls favoring men and disadvantaging women that tempters work to reinforce every day.

Maybe we should be grateful for such a clear example of how the temptation Jesus faced can present itself in our world. According to Matthew’s gospel, immediately after his baptism, Jesus fasted in the wilderness for 40 days. Remember, Jesus lived in a time and place of deep uncertainty and insecurity. Soon after this period of fasting, and after moving to Capernaum, maybe to find a safer place to live, Jesus learns that John the Baptist, his cousin and his ministry partner, had been arrested.

After 40 days of fasting, one imagines that Jesus was exhausted. At this moment when his defenses, one would think, were at their weakest, the gospel tells us that Jesus was approached by the devil—which we should read as a metaphor, as a concept deeper than literal fact—who offered bread, personal safety, and power. The things he had the least of, and the things that always, in seemingly all times and places are hoarded by a privileged minority.

In the story, Jesus refuses to take the bait, and points to his spiritual ancestors, who taught that our portion of bread, safety, and power, as we repeat every week in the Lord’s Prayer, is granted by God and God alone. When the moment of temptation came, his spiritual grounding, made strong over 40 days of contemplation, was stronger than either his rumbling stomach or his fear of the Rome-appointed temple leaders or centurions. His ability to withstand the temptation of personal gain is so powerful that we devote a month and a half of the church year to amplifying Jesus’ nonviolent response to the temptation of short cuts to safety and power.

 I’m guessing that none of us have faced down the devil like Jesus did, but I’ll bet that we’ve all been in the room. And we’ve all been the ones standing outside the room. We know the pull to that performative acceptance when someone holding power—be it physical power, or positional, or financial, or social—pulls us into an act of othering as happened in that locker room, that moment of weaponizing difference by subtly or obviously putting one trait above another. We’ve probably all, at times, taken the risk of stepping away from the herd and not laughing, not joining the group. And we’ve all felt the ick that collects on our souls when we play it safe and go along with the room.

We’ve also all witnessed to the false bargain that’s truly on offer in these situations. We act out of a want for safety, but what we receive by participating in the room is a mere moment’s reprieve, followed by the knowledge that at some point, the one who dehumanizes will want more from us. Our agency, collected in a bag, is the cost levied by the room. The men’s hockey team, for example, became human props illustrating that The Boys are behind the president’s agenda at the State of the Union address, whether they actually are or not.

Lent, beginning with this deep dive into Jesus’ temptation in the desert, calls us to honestly assess our present relationship to God and Jesus’ teachings in our lives. Over the next few weeks, we will look at the seemingly impossible things that Jesus asked people in his day to believe is God’s will.

But it begins and ends with stories of Jesus modeling how to face temptation. Over and over, when groups tried to stop him from healing the afflicted or feed the hungry, Jesus refused the temptation to preserve his own personal safety and power by forsaking the marginalized. Through his actions and words, he taught us how paltry the reward of giving into temptation is compared to Gods infinite economy of grace.

This Lenten season, may we examine our lives honestly, and may we prepare ourselves for temptation. May we root ourselves where the prophets tell us God offers living water: in loving acts to our neighbors and in faith that death does not have the last word. Amen.

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[1] https://thehumanityarchive.substack.com/p/the-room