Rev. Eric Anderson Pastor's Corner, Sermons

Sermon: Small Wisdoms

February 22, 2026

Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7
Matthew 4:1-11

I don’t remember the first time either of my children did something I had specifically told them not to do. I’m sure there was a first time. It’s been lost amidst all the other times. It’s one of the things my kids did as they grew – they knew that growing older meant shifting boundaries. Sometimes they’d test to see if the boundary had changed.

I remember that I didn’t do some things when they did something I had specifically told them not to do. I didn’t kick them out of the house, the way God sent Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden. Mind you, I did kick them out of the house eventually, when they’d graduated from college. But that wasn’t a consequence of misbehavior, that was just a consequence of growing up.

So what small wisdom can we take away from the story of Adam and Eve? It’s unwise to listen to talking snakes – which we don’t have to worry about on an island that doesn’t have land snakes. It’s unwise to do things you’ve specifically been told not to do by God – that’s certainly true, but you probably knew that already.

What happens after you do the thing God specifically told you not to do? You lose Paradise. You no longer live in a pristine world. The world is not a perfect place any more.

The world is not a perfect place.

It’s wise to know that the world is not a perfect place.

When Jesus confronted his temptations, he already knew that the world was not a perfect place. He’d just been baptized by John the Baptist, who washed people in the Jordan River so that their sins might be forgiven. You don’t need baptism in a perfect world.

But baptism doesn’t change the reality of temptation. That’s another small bit of wisdom. It’s astonishing how many people have lived their lives with the conviction that because of their baptism (or something else baptism-like) they, and only they, were right. I struggle with that one all the time. I like to be right, I work to be right, I have a professional obligation to be much more right than wrong. Right?

If I let myself grow accustomed to being right, I’m at risk of shortcutting the work, or relying upon prior rightness to get me through changing conditions, or mistaking “I was right given what I knew” for “I was absolutely right,” because I probably wasn’t.

God’s call. Baptism. Participation in the church. Success in work. Contributing to the harmony of a family. Leading in a community. None of that sets temptation aside. It’s always there, and it leaps out when you least expect it.

“However we think of the devil,” writes Warren Carter at Working Preacher, “the figure’s presence in the Gospel personifies the vulnerability of human life and life in relation to God. No one, not even God’s anointed agent, is free from having their identity and loyalty tested.”

Jesus didn’t escape temptation. You and I aren’t going to, either. It’s an imperfect world, and we are subject to temptation.

Temptation looks like good things. That’s another small wisdom. Temptation isn’t just shiny distraction. Temptation looks like blessing. In the case of Jesus, the temptations look like things he did later on. As Audrey West writes at Working Preacher:

Jesus refuses in the desert to turn stones into bread to assuage his own hunger, but before long he will feed thousands in the wilderness with just a few loaves and some fish (Matt 14:17-21; 15:33-38), and he will teach his disciples to pray to God for their “daily bread” (Matt 6:11).

He refuses to take advantage of his relationship to God by hurling himself down from the heights of the Temple, but at the end of his earthly ministry he endures the taunts of others (Matt 27:38-44) while trusting God’s power to the end upon the heights of a Roman cross (Matt 27:46).

He turns down the devil’s offer of political leadership over the kingdoms of the world, and instead offers the kingdom of the heavens to all those who follow him in the way of righteousness.

I’ve always found the last temptation, the realms of the earth, somewhat odd. The devil offered political power to someone he addressed as Son of God. Think about that for a minute. The Son of God already has power over the nations of the earth. The devil offered him what he already had.

Similar things happened in the other two temptations. Jesus had the power to create bread. He could have called the angels to him – and when the devil had gone away, they came without his call.

Temptation offers what we already have.

Another small wisdom. Temptation offers what we already have.

Sometimes, what’s tempting about it is a relief from labor or effort to achieve it.

Or, the temptation is to lift ourselves out of our humanity into some exalted condition.

As Debie Thomas writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “These days, I read the story differently.  The devil doesn’t come to make Jesus do something ‘bad.’  He comes to make Jesus do what seems entirely reasonable and good — but for all the wrong reasons.  The test is a test of Jesus’s motivations.  A test of his willingness to identify as fully human, even as he is fully God.”

Another small wisdom: Temptation urges us to be something other than fully human.

Temptation also invites us to raise others up to more than human. Jesus’ last response to the tempter is to quote Deuteronomy 8: “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.” The devil has offered himself for worship, to be raised up above humanity and above whatever kind of being he is.

In addition, the offer to rule the nations ignored the people of those nations. What did they want or need? The devil didn’t ask. Those people weren’t important.

There’s a pair of small wisdoms: It’s temptation when you’re invited to raise someone else higher than human, and it’s also temptation when you’re asked to treat other people as unhuman.

That’s why all the “isms” – racism, sexism, homophobia, cultural imperialism, and so on – are so destructive. Each of them invites us to raise ourselves above other people by denying their full humanity.

Is there any small wisdom about resisting temptation? There is, but it’s hard. I wish it was as simple as reading Scripture and holding onto its directions – and that’s not simple. Plenty of faithful people well steeped in the Bible have fallen into temptation, myself included. I think the wisdom is, as best you can, try to resist temptation in company with other faithful, supportive people. Jesus did it alone, it’s true, and at some point in the process there’s nobody who can make the your decision for you. But Jesus did rely upon the religious tradition in which he’d been raised. He relied upon their recorded words and their recorded examples. He relied upon his relationship with God. He may not have summoned angels to him, but he trusted in their presence.

Jesus managed to resist temptation with those supports. Those might be enough for you and me. But as for me, I’m going to ask for more help if I possibly can.

There’s another small wisdom here that’s really uncomfortable. It’s the wisdom to find power in weakness, security in vulnerability. In John Milton’s poem Paradise Lost, he introduced the Son of God as a terrifying figure casting lightning bolts at the rebellious angels. There’s no sign of such a force in the Gospel accounts of the Temptation. A human, hungry Jesus faces a self-confident, more-than-human granter of wishes. It’s also uncomfortable to note that these temptations foreshadow the end of Jesus’ earthly ministry: bread that would represent his broken body, the nations triumphant over the Son of God, the Temple that gazed upon his crucifixion. As Amy Frykolm writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “True power is the mysterious path that Jesus walked. It comes with no guarantees. It is self-giving surrender, the strangest of paradoxes, and it leads to the cross.”

That’s a scary small wisdom.

It brings up one more small wisdom: that there really is resilience in the vulnerability, there really is strength in the weakness, there really is victory in the defeat. To quote an old hymn, there are angels hov’ring ‘round. As Debie Thomas writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “Sometimes our journeys with God include dark places.  Not because God takes pleasure in our pain, but because we live in a fragile, broken world that includes deserts, and because God’s modus operandi is to take the things of death, and wring from them resurrection.”

The world is not perfect. Temptation is real and we are vulnerable to it. Temptation looks like good things, not just shiny things. Temptation often offers what we already have. We may be tempted to lift ourselves above our humanity, or to set someone else as superhuman, or to regard others as subhuman. As best you can, find help to resist temptation. Find power in weakness. Remember that from death God brings resurrection.

Small wisdoms to bring us through temptation.

Amen.

by Eric Anderson

Watch the Recorded Sermon

Pastor Eric makes changes while preaching, sometimes on purpose, sometimes accidentally. The text as prepared does not exactly match the sermon as delivered.

The illustration is Mountain Landscape with the Temptation of Christ by Joos de Momper the Younger (btwn 1600 and 1650) / Sebastiaen Vrancx – Web Gallery of Art:   Image  Info about artwork, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15417048.

Rev. Eric Anderson What I'm Thinking

What I’m Thinking: Temptation

Each Lent we tell the story of Jesus’ Temptation – because like Jesus, temptation is a part of our lives.

Here’s a transcript:

Lent begins this Wednesday, so I’m thinking about the fourth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 4:1-11). Each first Sunday in Lent, the Revised Common Lectionary tells the same gospel story (if from a different gospel each year). That story is the Temptation of Jesus.

As Matthew put it, after his baptism, Jesus went into the wilderness “to be tempted by the devil.” There were three of them that Matthew named. First, that the devil advised Jesus to transform stones into bread because he was hungry. The devil then invited Jesus to leap from a high place to demonstrate the protection of the angels to everybody else. Finally, the devil took him to a mountain and showed him all the realms of the earth, and said that they could be his if Jesus would just worship him: him, the devil. Jesus refused them all, and the devil left, and the angels came and ministered to Jesus.

Why did the editors of the lectionary place this story in front of us at the beginning of each Lent? I think it’s because it is a characteristic that we share with Jesus — not necessarily a direct encounter with a personification of temptation or evil (I suspect that those experiences are rare).

We do, however share with Jesus the experience of temptation, now don’t we? We know that there are times when we are invited to do things, to say things, to act in ways that are contrary to what God expects of us, to what society expects of us, to what our faith community expects of us, to what we expect of ourselves. Temptation may be small or it may be great. It can range from certain kinds of hungers to the temptation to ultimate power.

We share the experience of temptation with our Messiah.

Hopefully we also experience the resistance of temptation. Jesus did not rely solely upon his own inner strength to do so. He went back to the Scriptures. He went back to the things that he had been taught as a youth and as a young man: things that would help him to decide between what was right and what was wrong, what was good and what was better, what was fit to the circumstance and what would not help in this moment.

Somebody who is hungry should eat. That’s simply true. But in that temptation, Jesus refused to use his power to make stones into bread. And I think it could only be because he was tempted by the one he was tempted by.

So one of the questions for us is always: where is the temptation coming from? Are we hungry simply because we’re hungry, or are we in being invited to satisfy our hungers in ways that transform us into something we should not be? We should not be someone who exercises our power erratically or selfishly. We should be people who exercise our power on behalf of others.

Jesus resisted his temptations because he had the support of the wisdom of the ages and, of course, because he was he was. May we resist our temptations with the support of the wisdom of the ages, and with the aid of Jesus, who was who he was and is who he is in our lives.

That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.

Rev. Eric Anderson What I'm Thinking

What I’m Thinking: New Beginning

For the first Sunday in Lent, we visit the story of Jesus’ temptation – and the change in his life it marked.

Here’s a transcript:

I’m thinking about the first chapter of Mark’s Gospel (Mark 1:9-15). Each of the three years of the cycle, the Revised Common Lectionary tells the same story using one of those first three gospels. This year, we hear from Mark’s Gospel about Jesus’ temptation after his baptism.

Mark told the story in its briefest, sparest, form. Mark simply wrote that after his baptism, Jesus went out into the wilderness. He was tempted by the devil, and the angels served him. Then after John was arrested, Jesus went to Galilee and there began to proclaim the message: “The realm of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the good news.”

That baptism changed the course of Jesus’ life. Before the baptism by John, Jesus had not gone around preaching or teaching; after the baptism, he did. But I think there’s something else, maybe a little subtler, that changed during this moment of temptation, these days of temptation.

You see, at the end of each one of Matthew’s, Mark’s, Luke’s accounts, the angels served Jesus. Well, that same word, “served,” comes up a couple of more times over the course of Mark’s Gospel. It was used to describe what Peter’s mother-in-law did after Jesus cured her from an illness. It was used to describe what the women did who accompanied Jesus and his male disciples around Galilee and then further down into Judea. But most of all, it was the word that Jesus used to describe himself: that the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve.

At this moment of deprivation and exhaustion, Jesus received the service of the angels, but moving from there Jesus would become an example of service to us and to others. Jesus would accept the aid of those around him, but Jesus would provide far more support and nurture and guidance and growth than I suspect any of them realized even at the time.

Jesus faced his temptations, received the renewal of the angels’ aid, and then let the course of his life be changed. Beginning a new life, if you like, a life of service and of self-giving for those around him, and for you, and for me.

That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.