Sermon: (10.00am, St Andrew’s, 22/02/26)
Standing proud in the heart of Manchester’s university district on the exterior of St Peter’s House a 22 x 13 foot billboard towered above the streets below giving a refreshingly affirming message to passing students and commuters. It said, ‘You are enough’. It would be easy to assume this is an affirmation of the kind of individualism that says ‘I’m alright, Jack’ as ‘I’m looking after No.1.’ However, as St Peter’s House is the base for the Christian chaplaincy team for the Manchester Universities and the Royal Northern College of Music, that’s unlikely to be the intended message.
The artist who created the piece, Micah Purnell, notes that, ‘Capitalist ideology aims to impart the notion that we are worthy of love and belonging - once we have bought into the product or service. Consumerism wraps things up in neat little packages and sells them as idealised gifts of perfection. Advertising props up this notion with the assumption that we are inadequate - stealing our love of ourselves, and selling it back at a price.’
He goes on to say that Brené Brown, a research Professor at Houston University, has found through extensive quantitative research that the one thing that keeps us from love and belonging is the fear that we are not worthy of love and belonging. She found that those who fully experience joy and live wholeheartedly have four characteristics in common: the courage to accept their imperfection; compassion towards themselves first; the ability to let go of who they should be in order to be who they really are, and to embrace vulnerability and unknowing. His installation, therefore, says, ‘You’re not perfect, you’re never going to be, and that’s the good news.’ You are enough, as you are.
The temptations faced by Jesus in the wilderness (Matthew 4.1-11) were all temptations to see his situation and his trust in God as being insufficient, or ‘not enough.’ His temptations began with the reality of his situation, the fact that he was hungry because of fasting for 40 days. He had not had enough food and the temptation was to say that there was not enough and use his power to create food from nowhere. Jesus responded by saying that the words of God were enough for him. The second temptation was in regard to his mission and his then obscurity. Jesus was on his own in the wilderness and was offered celebrity and fame because his obscurity was clearly not enough to achieve his mission. Jesus’ response was essentially saying that the path he was following was enough. The final temptation was linked but, instead of being focused on fame, was focused on power. Jesus’ mission was to save all humanity and he was offered power over all humanity as a shortcut to success and as recognition of the lack of power he possessed as an insignificant carpenter in a backwater of the mighty Roman Empire. Jesus responded by saying that God’s way was enough for him.
Jesus was tempted on the basis that who he was and what he had were not enough to achieve the mission he had been given. He was tempted to think of himself, his situation and God, in terms of scarcity and deficit. But deficit is not our modus operandi as Christians. We don’t have to look far for a mission statement for the church. Jesus said, ‘I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly’ (John 10.10). Living abundant life; that’s what the Father intends, the Son embodies, the Spirit facilitates.
Sam Wells, the Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields says that, as Christians, we are called to live in such a way that gratefully receives the abundance God is giving us, evidences the transformation from scarcity to abundance to which God is calling us, dwells with God in that abundant life, and shares that abundance far and wide.
Jesus is our model of abundant life; his life, death and resurrection chart the transformation from the scarcity of sin and death to the abundance of healing and resurrection; he longs to bring all humankind into reconciled and flourishing relationship with God, one another, ourselves and all creation.
In the middle of the wilderness where he literally had nothing, Jesus received God’s abundance, the abundant life that would sustain him throughout his journey to the cross, and beyond. Also, his time in the wilderness came immediately after his baptism where God had spoken to him saying ‘You are my own dear Son. With you I am well pleased’. God had essentially said to him then, ‘You are Enough’.
As such, we can defend ourselves against temptation as Jesus did. “As God’s children,” Tom Wright says, “we are entitled to use the same defence” as Jesus himself. “Store scripture in your heart,” he writes, “and know how to use it.” When we do, we are able to see through the temptation to think of all that we have as inadequate and, instead, to view our lives and all that we have as a gift from God knowing that, in him, we are enough.
Lent is commonly thought of as being about those things we give up but Lent is ultimately about our opening up. Opening up our lives to receive more of the abundance and the gifts that God is giving to us. In Lent, we give up some of our usual practices in order to have more time for God and to be with God. More time to open up to him and deepen our relationship with him. That was what Jesus was doing in the wilderness and, like him, we too can discover that, as we receive all that God is giving to us, God is enough, God's abundance is enough, our churches and communities are enough, and we are enough. Amen.
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Mumford and Sons - Begin Again.
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