1st Sunday in Lent
Texts: Luke 4:1-13;
Deut 26:1-11; Rom 10:8b-13
TEMPTATION AS VISION QUEST:
REPENTANCE AS BEING ‘WOKE’ IN A CLIMATE OF NATIONALISM
God sent an indigenous man to save humankind from the evils of human empire — or what today we are calling “nationalism.”1 Could the Good News of Jesus the indigenous Messiah be any more timely at this moment?
Here’s the bad news: we’ve been taught to understand the message of the indigenous Messiah Jesus in the context of being empire, of being the people in charge. As white Americans we have ruled over people of color, including the indigenous peoples who already live in the lands we came to occupy. We’ve been taught that it’s part of our mission to save them from their pagan ways. We’ve told ourselves that we have Jesus, the only one who can get us to heavenly afterlife. So we’ve done things in our history like kidnaping indigenous children, taking them from their parents and tribal community, in order to place them in schools which seek to force them to believe what we believe and to do things like we do them.
If you are interested in penance for this kind of sin, watch something like the TV series 1923 (starring Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren), whose second season started recently. One of the central subplots is to follow the story of one young Crow Indian woman, Teonna Rainwater, who has had enough of being beaten for not conforming, so she violently lashes out in self-defense and runs away. (In the picture in your Sermon Notes, she is the one in the middle.) I found it painful to watch. It is shame-inducing to think that we Christians could have ever thought that such things were central to our mission. Yes, being Woke is painful, which is why those who are embracing nationalism in the name of Christ today are trying to stamp it out.
In this past year of sermons, under the shadow of Christian Nationalism, I hope we are unlearning our imperial background in order to read the story of Jesus and relearn it through the lens of indigenous peoples who are oppressed by empire — oppressed, in short, by all nationalistic programs throughout history. As we begin our Lenten journey to the cross in this season of repentance, we are invited to repent of that former, shameful mission of trying to force other peoples to believe what we believe. We are the ones who need saving from our own past efforts at empire. And the ones best in position to help us are our indigenous neighbors who our way of governance has oppressed for centuries. I find that they are very willing to help and guide us, since it means that they gain allies in the renewed attempts at nationalism which currently threaten them.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, if this is what being Woke means, then I’m all in. I watch histories like the one portrayed on TV in the show 1923, and I want to repent and find a new way to a Christian mission that is more faithful to the mission of Jesus of Nazareth, the Jewish indigenous man who came to save us from empire — even if it’s our own history of doing empire. Jesus, sometimes to the chagrin of his own people, was actually there to save the Romans, too.
Luke’s Gospel, in fact, is the one most likely to have been written with Roman citizens in mind. Luke addresses his Gospel, as well as the Book of Acts, to Theophilus — who may be an actual individual but is more likely a generic Greco-Roman citizen. In some ways, then, Luke’s Gospel is the most challenging to us who have a history of imperial oppression over other peoples. Luke’s Gospel is the one with by far the most stories about wealthy, powerful men who are confronted with the foolishness of their ways. Later in this lectionary year, we will be confronted with six sequences focusing on wealthy men, often contrasted to the poor, really poor.
But that’s perhaps why Luke’s Gospel is the one that also most highly emphasizes repentance and the forgiveness of sins. What I’ve been suggesting so far this morning is that being “Woke” is an apt name for repentance. It is having our former frame of reference exposed as sinful and offering us a new, more faithful frame of reference that’s consistent with the indigenous man God sent to save us. And a main ingredient of the new frame of reference is that instead of a way of life based on retribution, punishment of sins, God in Jesus the Messiah is offering us a way of life based on a unilateral forgiveness of sins. A way of life based on Grace instead of so-called “Merit.”
So let’s begin that Lenten journey this morning with a few minutes looking at the temptations of empire. Last week, in reading the Transfiguration, we suggested that it could benefit from the perspective of indigenous traditions known as vision quests. Today’s Gospel reading portrays the initiating vision quest of Jesus’ ministry.2
Vision quests begin with a time of preparation and cleansing, a time of clearing one’s consciousness as much as possible to be more open to God’s Spirit. What has immediately preceded today’s vision quest story is Jesus’ baptism by John in the Jordan River. People often ask, “Why did Jesus need baptism if he was sinless?” John’s baptism was a ritual of cleansing in preparation for the vision quest in the wilderness that God’s Spirit was about to lead Jesus into.
In order to be ready for his mission of saving humanity from empire, Jesus needed to resist the typical temptations of empire. The first temptation involves the economics of empire. The devil — Satan, as Jesus will later refer to him — tempts Jesus to extract raw resources, simple stones, and to manipulate them for his own gain. It is also a temptation to place so-called “kitchen table” concerns always at the center of things. Is the economy working for me and my family? Jesus quotes the Sabbath economics of Deuteronomy to put this temptation in its place. There is more to life than our kitchen table issues of whether there’s enough for me and my family. According to God’s Covenant Word given to the people of Israel during their forty years in the wilderness, they are to live being fed by God’s manna, gathered everyday except the Sabbath, on which day they remind themselves of where their livelihood comes from: not from their own merit, but from the abundance of God’s gracious care. Do such Sabbath-oriented economics call us to some new ideas other than, say, capitalism? I think we will see this question pop up over and over again during this year of Luke’s Gospel.
The second temptation is the heart of the matter — point blank being confronted with the typical human governance of empires, our various forms of nationalism, “in an instant.” Tragically, it only takes an instant to see all the empires of history under the rule of Satan, because if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. They are all alike in their foundational belief in the sacred use of violence to divide the world into Us-vs-Them and then rule over the others, the “Them.” When Jesus again responds with a quote from Deuteronomy, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him,’ he is centering himself, and those who would follow him, on the fact that no human being can ever be served as the ultimate emperor or authoritarian leader. Only God rules over God’s Creation. We are merely called as God’s stewards to serve one another and God’s Creation. That’s what good about the American experiment. That we would believe all human beings to be created equal, none with the right to rule over others. In a democracy, we are called to share governance with one another in a spirit of mutual service. In short, I think we are called in this moment to confront and resist — nonviolently, of course — those who don’t seem to care if we might lose our democracy in favor of an authoritarian leader — a leader who would gladly rule over us and force everyone to conform to his way, a way based on retribution not forgiveness.
Jesus’ response to the second temptation leads into the third. To Jesus’ call to worship only God, Satan himself quotes scripture, Psalm 91:11 to be precise, twisting it into a call to manipulate God’s freedom to rule. It is the temptation to think ourselves favored by God in a way that we can simply do as we please — even something as stupid as jumping off of a high temple tower — and God will come to our rescue. It is the temptation to see ourselves as so close to God that we can do anything with impunity, that we are somehow exempt from any consequences for the actions we take. In effect, we become gods unto ourselves. Luke will show us rich fools throughout his Gospel who behave in this way. Does it sound familiar to any billionaires we know? When we follow the way of Jesus the Indigenous Man, we are called not test God by behaving as if our actions don’t have any consequences. If you suddenly cut aid to starving children in Africa, for example, the consequences are that they are more likely to starve to death.3
Let’s finish our reflections by briefly considering the one who is tempting Jesus, the devil. Later in the Gospel, Jesus refers to him as “Satan,” when he says, for example, “If Satan also is divided against himself, how will his kingdom stand?” (Luke 11:18). Jesus understands that the human empires ruled over by Satan are based on the principle of dividing us into a million versions of Us-vs-Them. So the end reality is that the satanic human empires are also divided against themselves. That’s why they always fall in the end.
I heard last week that the Pentagon was directed to purge its website of all “DEI” or “Woke” stuff. All the material and photos which had to do with diversity in the armed forces needed to be purged. Strangely, among the things taken down was a photo of the plane which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Now, I can think of peace-related reasons why we might want to remove that photo. But in the name of DEI? Why? Oh yea, the name of the plane was the Enola Gay. I guess we can’t have planes named gay on the defense department’s website. Do you see how silly, and sad, this can get?
Siblings in Christ, you and I are called to follow in the way of Jesus the Indigenous Man, who came to save us from the human kingdoms forever divided against themselves. We are called to live by forgiveness rather than retribution. Let us take up the call of this season to repent of our having giving into the temptations of empire, in order to instead follow the One executed by empire on the Cross — the one who can help us to say “No” to these temptations and begin to enter into God’s reign, especially at this time of living under the shadow of a rising Christian nationalism. Amen.
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, March 9, 2025
Notes
1. The most immediate background to this statement about seeing Jesus as an indigenous man whom God sent to save us is last week’s sermon, “Transfiguration as Vision Quest: Seeing the Face of the Other in the Face of Jesus.” But that sermon points back to a sermon last Spring (Proper 4B), when the insight of Jesus as indigenous was highlighted for me in the experience of our Synod Assembly, where Cherokee elder Vance Blackfox gave the Keynote Address.
2. Ched Myers, Healing Affluenza and Resisting Affluenza: Luke’s Jesus and Sabbath Economics (Fortress Press, 2025). I first came across the insight of Jesus’ temptations as vision quests in Healing Affluenza, 60ff. Myers recommends Steven Charleston’s The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (Morehouse, 2015), which I then read and became featured in last week’s sermon (Transfiguration C). Quite a bit of what follows on reading the temptations as vision quest are based on insights from Myers, Healing Affluenza, 59-62 and 107-112.
3. The background to this statement was billionaire Elon Musk demolishing the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
