First Sunday in Lent

I tell my son that he is a hero. He loves to play pretend. And it is not an uncommon occurrence that as I am making my way through the house I am greeted by a ½ sized Spiderman, or Batman or Superman as he runs off chasing the bad guys down the hall slinging webs and wielding swords as he goes.
So I tell him that he is a hero.
In a sense, all of us are heroes. We are all fighting in the same battle, our Bible texts make mention of that battle today. Our epistle from James tells us to remain steadfast under trial. Our Gospel tells us of Jesus out in the wilderness doing battle against the devil. Our Old Testament text tells us of Abraham standing firm and believing God when he was tested. You and I are all like heroes engaged in battle, fighting against evil and hoping to win the victory. Every day the contest begins anew.
So what kind of a hero looses every battle he enters?
Not a very good one! After all, isn’t that what it means to be a hero? Aren’t heros supposed to win? We wouldn’t want to see Batman if the Joker wound up winning. We wouldn’t want to see Spiderman if the Sandman ruled the day. A hero is supposed to win. If you and I are heroes then how is it that we loose so often and so regularly? What kind of a hero looses every battle!
You and I are heroes, of a sort. Waging war and fighting battles on the arena of sin and temptation. We loose all the time – but Christ who fights for us has the ultimate victory in us and despite our losses the victory in the end belongs to the Christian. We are the anti hero. Christ is the true hero.
But still we fight. In spite of our losses. In spite of our failures we fight.
The battle is over sin and temptation. Just like in the Gospel text for today, where Jesus squared off against Satan, we too fight battles of temptation. God has given to us Christians His commandments and we arm ourselves to battle against the temptation to break those commandments. We read the commandments. We rehearse the commandments. We study up on the bible. We go to church. We are strengthened for the day of battle. And then the encounter comes. The day comes when we are weak, when we are tired, when we are stressed, when we are distracted, when our defenses are down, and there comes the devil. . Eager to provide just the right temptation, to point out the opportunity that you have to do that thing, you know what it is. That thing that violates God’s command, that you struggle with, that you fight against. Satan is there to eagerly give you the opportunity. Every hero has his arch enemy. Batman has the Joker. Superman has Lex Luthor. We battle Satan.
If only he was our only enemy. It gets worse. Not only do we fight against Satan. Satan has friends. Friends who live in the world. Friends who gang up on us and fight against us. Friends who help to provide those opportunities to sin. Friends in the world who despise the Word of God and the Command of God. Friends who believe that God’s commands are too strict and too stringent, that they will damage you self esteem, that they should be thrown off and thrown away and so they do, and they tell you that you should too. We fight against the devil and the world
But if only those two were our only enemies. It gets worse still. The eager accomplice of the devil and his friend the World is our very self. Our sinful nature. We love to sin. We can’t wait to sin. We are eager for every opportunity to indulge the sinful self, to throw off God’s commands to do the things we do. The hero inside of us in easily overwhelmed and easily outnumbered. It is a dark day when the Superhero is too weak to enter the battle, when the superhero cannot even get up to fight. There is no chance. It’s not even a fair fight. We sinful Christians make lousy super heroes.
Superhero movies are all the rage these days. A fan favorite has been the Spiderman franchise. One of the promotional posters from the last movie depicted Spiderman hanging upside down from his web face to face with his reflection in the glass windows of a sky scraper. The Spiderman that stared back at him from the reflection was dressed all in black.
If you saw the movie, you know the storyline. Spiderman was taken over by a black substance that fed off his anger. Spiderman became selfish. He fought for revenge instead of justice. He became evil.
There was a scene in the movie where Spiderman recognized the ill effects of this blackness that had overcome him and he began to struggle against it. He tried to pull it off and tear it away and emerge from its grip.
We would like to think of that as a metaphor that describes our struggle with sin. We would like to think of sin as a substance that has grabbed a hold of us and all we have to do is dig deep enough to find some good in our hearts. All we have to do is fight against that blackness that comes on to inspire evil in us and we can defeat it. We would like to think that the good is there in all of us and like Spiderman we have the power to win.
We don’t. remember, we are lousy Superheros. We don’t have the strength. We don’t have the power. We don’t have the will to even enter the battle. WE are doomed to loose.
But there is one. There is one who fights for us, who fights on our behalf. There is one who has the strength, who has the power, who has the will to win.
We saw this hero in action today in the Gospel. Our arch enemy came against him with all he had. He pulled out every trick that he has used for thousands of years against us – there are none that are new – every temptation that has seized you is common to man. But with this man and against this man the devil’s tricks were strangely ineffective. He appealed to his appetites. He appealed to his pride. Yet nothing worked. Those same battles that would have taken us under were of no effect against this man. This man fought back. He fought off the temptation and the tempter was forced to flee.
That hadn’t happened for a while. Not since the garden had this tempter met with such resistance. Even there Adam and Eve proved to be an easy target. Yet this man was different, this Jesus was different. His only weapon was the Word of God, but that Word was powerful. That Word was truth. Satan could not be get around it. He was soundly defeated. Jesus won the day.
And so it went. Wherever Jesus went, wherever the Devil had his strongholds Jesus entered. He commanded Satan. He fought against him. He overpowered him. He fought him off. He sent him packing. Jesus won victory after victory in his battle with the devil.
But the battle wasn’t over Jesus. The battle wasn’t over his soul. The battle, the thing that Jesus came to fight for, to earn possession of was you. Jesus came to fight against the devil, against the world so that he could have you.
In order to earn this victory, in order to take possession of the spoils the cost was going to be high. There would have to be blood. There would have to be sacrifice. So Jesus, the hero of heroes surrendered himself. He himself became the victim. He suffered defeat so that you could be set free. The cross became the place of Jesus’ ultimate demise, where he was defeated for you. He took responsibility for your wrong, for your sin so that you could be set free.
When Jesus the hero came up out of the Jordan River, when he had defeated the devil in the wilderness, he came for you. And as he came he preached. Mark has written down for us the sermon that he delivered. “The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the gospel.”
The kingdom comes with the king. Salvation comes with the savior. The war is won with the warrior. Jesus was those things. He was the King who came to be your savior, the warrior who came to fight for you with his own blood and death. What is left for you it the second half of the sermon.
Repent and Believe the Gospel!
Repent! So many times we think that this is something that we do. Repentance is my work. It is my action. It is me saying I am sorry, feeling bad for my sin, turning my back on my old way of life, deciding to follow Jesus. But we can’t! We can’t do it! Look into your heart! Look at what you find there. Nothing but sin and evil and weakness and death. Even your good works, even those things that everyone else thinks are good you know your motives. You know you are less than sanctified.
I found out recently that an old friend thinks of me as righteous because of how I handled an overbearing counterpart. In his eyes I was patient and longsuffering. The truth is that I was lazy. And that’s the way it goes with our righteousness – even our righteousness is dirty before God. So we repent! We turn in horror from who we are. No excuses. No self justification. No pretending we’re not that bad. We just recoil in disgust.
And Believe. Believe in the Gospel.
In spite of what we find when we look inside, Jesus the hero who fights on our behalf, who has fought for us has declared us to be righteous. He has declared you to be without sin. You are perfect because he has loaded your sin on himself. He has taken the blame for your sin so that it is no longer yours.
Ralph Burns died on Friday. He has been approaching that moment for weeks now. He knew he was going to die. So did the devil. So the devil came at him with everything he had. I know because he told me. But Jesus did not leave Ralph to fight this battle alone.
The devils weapons are arrows – small flaming arrows of accusation. “See” he says, “look at what you have done. You are no Christian. Christians don’t do those things, think those things, say those things.” Those arrows find the holes in our armor.
But faith! Faith extinguished those arrows. Faith holds on to promises of Jesus.
Sunday mornings, we have as a regular part of our worship the confession of sin. We all say the words, “I am a poor miserable sinner” and always the response is the same. I speak back to you the words of the absolution. “For the sake of Jesus I forgive you your sin in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.” IT comes. It goes. We move on to the next thing.
Not Ralph. Not as he lay on his death bed. Not as he fought and battled against Satan. He was a sinner. There was not denying it. He knew it. He felt it. Yet Jesus spoke to him words of forgiveness using the mouth of his pastor. Ralph believed those words.
Repent and believe the Gospel.
Satan’s fiery darts were extinguished. “Pastor” said Ralph, “It’s so nice you can say that.”
And so to you. Repent. See the sin inside your heart and run away. Repent and Believe! Just as I said to Ralph so I say to you. Your sins are forgiven in the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Amen. Now may the peace that passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.