February 21, 2010 – First Sunday in Lent
Luke 4:1-13
Up in the Air
First Sunday in Lent – February 21, 2010
In his little sparring match with the devil to see who can quote scripture better,
Jesus quotes the book of Deuteronomy three times.
The book of Deuteronomy tells of the Israelites wandering in the wilderness for
forty years, so since Jesus is out in the wilderness for forty days,
I’m sure Deuteronomy is on his mind.
In the wilderness, the Israelites were tested, that is, their loyalty to God was tested.
In the wilderness, they were tempted to look to other gods for their well-being;
remember their complaining, their desire to return to Egypt, the golden calf?
In many ways, Jesus replays Israel’s history in the wilderness.
He too is tempted to give his loyalty to something other than God for the sake of
three things we know are essential to human life:
food, his own ruling of the world, and safety.
And throughout we wonder: will Jesus, unlike the Israelites, remain loyal to God?
Every year at the beginning of Lent we get one version of this story or another.
And it’s always timely.
I mean, our loyalties in life are constantly tested. Every day our loyalties are tested.
Many days the world we live in seems like a kind of wilderness:
a dangerous place where unpredictable things happen to us,
an often empty place where we question God’s presence,
a place where we’re not really sure we can trust God.
Oh, sure: we can trust God a little bit, that’s not so hard.
But can we trust God completely? Can we really give all our loyalty to God?
Can we trust God enough to be dangerously generous?
Can we trust God enough to put another’s need ahead of our own?
Will God really provide for us day by day or do we need to take matters into our own hands?
Will God really put our lives right? Will God really put the world right?
Should we bother sacrificing our time and talents and money for the sake of God’s mission?
Or is it just wasted time and resources? Can God really be trusted?
Often if we’re honest – if I’m honest with myself – the answer is no.
And we consistently give in to other loyalties, giving in to those little voices in our heads that
are so much like the ones inside Jesus’s head this morning.
And the problem is, those voices, like the ones inside Jesus’s head,
always sound eminently reasonable.
This week I went to see the film Up in the Air, directed by Jason Reitman and
starring George Clooney.
Clooney plays Ryan Bingham who works for a company whose business is
firing people: they are hired to fire people for other companies.
And so he travels throughout the USA, flying from major city to major city to do just that,
his sole purpose being, apparently, to accumulate as many American Airline
frequent flyer miles as possible.
His goal? 10 000 000 miles. He’d be the 7th person in the world to do it.
More people have walked on the moon, he says.
And so he keeps on travelling, and keeps on firing people.
Our job, says Bingham to a co-worker, is to take people at their most fragile, and set them adrift.
Nice, right? But in his mind this isn’t a bad thing; indeed he makes being fired sound reasonable.
Every person who ever built an empire or changed the world sat where you’re sitting now,
he tells people whom he has to fire. And they were able to do that because of
where they’re sitting now.
He tempts people into thinking that freedom consists of being set free from
the loyalty they had offered their companies and co-workers.
On the side, Bingham does motivational speaking, in which he tempts people to think that
freedom consists in being free not only from stuff like
knick-knacks and momentoes and cars and houses:
he also tempts people to think that freedom consists in being free from loving relationships with
friends, family, and other significant others: they weigh you down, he says.
He himself is always moving on, always up in the air, without deep friendships,
a stranger to his own sisters, the major airports of the USA his only home.
Throughout much of the film, it appears as if Ryan Bingham is the devil,
tempting people with a charming smile to give their loyalties to
something other than human relationships.
He himself is tempted into thinking that the point of a human life is in being free from
responsibility to others.
He himself is tempted into thinking that human fulfillment can be had in
pointlessly accumulating an impossible number of frequent flyer miles.
But when he finally hits the magic 10 000 000 number flying over Dubuque,
he is confronted by the real devil in the guise of an airline captain played by
Sam Shepherd who leaves the cockpit to congratulate him.
Looking at Bingham he says, “We appreciate your loyalty.”
And Bingham has kind of an epiphany: turns out that Bingham is not the devil after all.
Turns out he’s been conned into mis-placing his loyalty from the realm of family and
friendships and workplace into the realm of accumulated air miles,
as Matthew Boulton notes in the Christian Century. (Feb. 9, 2010, 43)
When he realizes he really should give his loyalty and his heart to a woman he’s
begun to fall in love with, the rug is pulled out from under him when he discovers that
she has absolutely no loyalty to him.
Turns out her relationship with him was just an escape from her own responsibilities to
her husband and kids, whose existence Bingham didn’t even know about.
And so, at the end of the film, he ends back up, sadly, Up in the Air.
Lent is a time for discovering where our loyalties truly are.
And it is a time for turning them around when they’re not placed where they should be.
As the film makes clear, we live in a culture extremely suspicious of loyalty.
We are out for ourselves. We are not swans, says Bingham, who mate for life. We’re sharks, who don’t, but who prey on others and who have no loyalty higher than themselves.
But . . . we are not sharks.
We are made for faithful, lasting, loyal relationships with God and with one another.
See the thing is, the good news this morning is: God can be trusted.
We don’t need to hoard. We don’t need to always be thinking the way a predator does.
We don’t need to look out for ourselves. We don’t need to accumulate air miles for our purpose.
God will provide what we truly need.
In the wilderness of our lives, God is truly present and will provide us with what we need.
God will sustain us. We are not alone. We are never left up in the air. God can be counted on.
We don’t need to mis-place our loyalty or give it to something else.
With Jesus we can learn to watch and wait in Lent. We can give our need to God, and wait.
God will come. God will redeem. And God will heal.
This week I led a funeral service for a person who had been baptized and confirmed at FLC.
He suffered from schizophrenia from an early age and had an extremely troubled life.
He went through scores of doctors and was prone to impatience and violence.
He eventually ended up propped up against a building on Main Street,
where some angel found him and waited on him and got him into the
mental institution in Selkirk. He was there for many years.
And it seemed he mayen’t ever get out and lead a normal independent life again.
But he never lost hope in God’s fundamental trustworthiness.
He never lost faith in trusting God that he was made for something better.
He had the well-worn confirmation Bible that was given to him right here attesting to that.
And one day, with the ministrations of a good psychiatrist and the presence of
terrific social workers at Social Services, he decided the time had come.
For the last three years of his life, he lived in his own apartment on St. James,
formed significant relationships, read widely, painted, conversed freely and
became known for qualities that all human beings aspire to:
generosity, encouragement, gentleness, thankfulness, helpfulness, forgiveness.
Family members who had lost touch with him for the last 3 years couldn’t believe
What they heard at the funeral, couldn’t believe this was the same person.
But this person waited and watched for the God who can be trusted.
And he resisted the temptation to give up on this God,
whose loyalty to us is made manifest to us this morning in
Christ’s body given to us, in bread broken and wine outpoured for us.
This is a God who can be trusted.
Let us resist the temptation to trust anyone or anything else for our well-being.
Let us remain loyal to God, and loyal to one another, loyal to our family members,
loyal to our friends, loyal to our co-workers, loyal to the poor,
and loyal above all to God’s mission to bless all these relationships through us. Amen
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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