Sermon: Once More Unto the Breach. March 10, 2019

Here’s the link to my sermon from March 10, the First Sunday in Lent, preached at Grace Lutheran Church. Just the text this week.

We’ve read this story before. God’s chosen servant, filled with grace and glory, goes forth from an encounter with the divine. Sadly, on the way to the promised land, this servant, Israel, gives in to temptation and wanders away into the wilderness. But now, so many years later, God’s newly anointed Son, the Beloved, has been filled with the Spirit to recapitulate Israel’s journey. But Jesus does not simply repeat the story of Israel in the wild. Jesus undoes their undoing. He is able to do what Israel failed to do, what we still fail to do. Jesus resists the devil’s wiles, beating him back with scripture and an unshakeable faith in God. As we enter now into Lent, the call is not so much to imitate Jesus as it is to stand safely within the victory that Jesus has won for us.