The Bread of Life

A sermon preached this past Sunday at Church of the Incarnation as part of a sermon series, "Food & Faith." Listen here.

Today's the last of our food & faith sermon series, so I thought I'd begin by talking about bread. Humans have been eating bread for milennia—but 20^th-century Americans were the first to eat sliced bread. Factory-made, soft, pre-sliced and pre-wrapped—is there anything better than sliced bread?

The first company to sell sliced bread was Wonder Bakers, the makers of Wonder Bread. Wonder Bread is the iconic sliced bread, with its logo of blue, red, and yellow balloons and its brilliant advertising slogans: “Wonder Bread builds strong bodies in 8 ways.” (Later, when they figured out how to inject even more artificial vitamins, it became, “Wonder Bread builds strong bodies in 12 ways.”) Wonder Bread is pretty remarkable really; apparently, it’s even been used as a sponge to clean the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel.[1]

                                                                                                              

But we’ve just heard about some even more wonderful bread. Bread that's a cause for real wonder. Bread that makes people scratch their heads and ask, "What is it?" Bread so full of wonder that its name is a question.

I'm talking of course about manna, the mysterious, previously unknown food God provided the people of Israel in the wilderness. Manna appeared on the ground after the dew—“a fine, flake-like thing, fine as hoarfrost on the ground." The Israelites didn't know what it was so they named it "Watchamacallit." That's roughly what the word "manna" means in Hebrew: "whatchamacallit," "what's-it."[2]

We still don't know what it is. Some speculate that manna was honeydew, a sugary sticky liquid secreted by a particular kind of bug—that's right, bug poop. After all, that stuff is called "manna" in some Semitic languages. Or perhaps manna was something wholly new and miraculous. The psalmist calls it "the bread of angels." Whatever it was, angel's bread or bug poop, manna was white, reminded the people of Israel of coriander seed, and tasted like wafers made with honey (cf. Ex. 16:31). Some say that it tasted like whatever you liked best—like something from Willa Wonka's chocolate factory.

The manna came every day, and everyone could gather what they needed. But only what they needed—any leftover spoiled. The only exception was the sixth day of the week, when they could gather enough manna for two days, so that they didn't have to gather food on the seventh day, the sabbath. Israel ate manna for forty years while they wandered in the wilderness; it ended when they came to the Promised Land.

Manna was God's provision to feed his people in the wilderness. It was their daily bread given to sustain their lives in the desert. God gave his people manna that they might live; he rained down "bread from heaven" for his people to eat.

As "bread from heaven", manna points beyond itself. It points to Jesus.

In today's Gospel lesson, we heard how Christ identifies himself as "the true bread from heaven," the bread that "gives life to the world." Like the manna, "the bread from heaven," the Lord Jesus came down from heaven and become incarnate from the Virgin Mary and was made man. And just as the manna gave life to the people of Israel in the wilderness, so Christ Jesus gives life to the world.

Yet Jesus is better than manna—better even than sliced bread—because the life he gives does not end with death and because he satisfies our hungers. The people of Israel ate manna in the wilderness and they died, but Christ is the bread "which comes down from heaven" and whoever "eats this  bread will live forever" (Jn 6:58). The life Jesus gives outlasts death, because "by his death he has destroyed death, and by his rising to life again he has won for us everlasting life.”[3] Christ is more wondrous than manna—those who ate manna were hungry day after day, but those who feed on Christ Jesus will neither hunger nor thirst.

In the wilderness, Israel was hungry. Real hungry. Hungry enough to get a little desparate. Hungry enough that the grumbling of their stomachs consumed all memory of God's power in bringing them out of Egypt. The Plagues, the parting of the Red Sea—what are these when you're hungry to death? Believe you me, Israel was hungry in the wilderness.

The crowds alongside the sea of Galilee, across the way from Capernaum, were hungry, too. They'd just witnessed Jesus feed 5,000 people with five loaves and two fish, and there were lots of leftovers, but they hadn't had enough. Like Mick Jagger, they can't get no satisfaction—so they're looking for Jesus, hoping for more of the same, looking, in short, for "bread and circuses." Hungry for free food and a little excitement, smelling a little like teen spirit, singing that old Nirvana song, "here we are now; entertain us."

The crowd was hungry. Israel was hungry.

Maybe you're hungry, too. I'm not talking about physical hunger—I doubt any of you here are that kind of hungry—although now that I've mentioned it, you're probably only going to be thinking about lunch! I’m not talking about that kind of hunger; I'm talking about a deeper hunger. Call it spiritual hunger, if you want. Whatever you call it, if you're this kind of hungry, you know what I mean.

Maybe you're hungry to feed an addiction. Maybe you're hungry for sex, hungry for money, hungry for power; hungry for knowledge or meaning. Maybe you’re hungry to make sense of your identity. Maybe your debt is gnawing at you.

Or maybe you're hungry for peace, for a little bit of hope, for a return of joy. Maybe you're hungry for love. Maybe you’re hungry for righteousness or justice or truth.

But then again, maybe you don't feel hungry at all. You've eaten and had your fill; you're feeling fat and happy. Maybe you're satisfied with what you have or with what you can get. Maybe you're even a little complacent, feeling a little drowsy, leaning back in your chair, unbuckling your belt. However you slice it, you're not hungry.

Whether you're hungry or not, Jesus says to you today, "I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst." His words are for all of us. If you're hungry, hear this: Jesus will satisfy your desires. If you've eaten your fill, hear this: You'll always need more of him.

Jesus is the bread of life. Whoever comes to him will never hunger, and whoever believes in him will never thirst. But how does Christ satisfy our hunger and thirst?

Think about what hunger and thirst are for, about why we eat and drink. Most simply, we eat and drink to live. Our most basic hunger is for life. It's a hunger we humans share with all other living creatures. All living creatures—from the tiniest phytoplankton to the greatest blue whale, from house plants to homo sapiens—unconsciously or consciously—seek to live. All creatures hunger for life, because no creature has life in itself. The life of all creatures comes from the outside. The need all creatures have for some source of nutrition makes this absolutely clear; if we do not eat, we die.

All creatures receive their life from God, who is the Giver of Life. As Creator, God is absolutely and qualitatively different from all his creatures. God alone has life in himself. God's creatures do not; we live only insofar as he gives us life. As the psalmist puts it, "with you is the well of life" (Ps. 36:9). All God's creatures depend absolutely on God, looking to God "to give them their food in due season," as another psalm has it (Ps. 105:28). As creatures, our life comes as a gift from God the Giver of Life.

And so our hunger for life is ultimately a hunger for God, who is Life itself.

We’re all of us hungry for God.

Trouble is, we deny that hunger, that need. Our basic sin is to turn away from God, to turn, in our pride and self-deception, from the "well of life" and strike out to live from our own resources and for ourselves. Of course that doesn't work out so well—even if we don’t realize it. Our need for God is absolute; we need him more than bread; we are literally nothing without him. Deep down the hunger for God continually gnaws at us, try as we might to ignore it or to take the edge off by "eating" lesser things. But nothing other than God himself satisfies that hunger or slakes that thirst.

Here’s an illustration of what I mean: Audra and I once lived in Russia for a few months. After we’d been in Moscow a while, we got hungry for fajitas, and so we went shopping for tortillas. But we couldn’t find any! not even in high-end grocery stores. No tortillas, anywhere. Finally we settled on a substitute: lavaash—a thin, flat bread from central Asia that comes folded up because one piece is roughly a square meter in size. Now, I like lavaash a lot—but it’s a lousy substitute for a tortilla. It gets all mushy and falls apart. And that’s not what you want when you’re eating fajitas. Only an actual tortilla will do; there’s just no substitute for the real thing.

So, too, there’s no substitute for God himself. Nowhere else will we find the life we’re hungry for. Still, we're pretty good at distracting ourselves from that hunger for God at the core of our being—and our culture is particularly adept at producing cheap imitations—so many Wonder Breads—that can for a time produce the illusion of fullness. Half asleep, we wander in a wilderness.

That's why we so desperately need to hear Jesus saying, "I am the bread of life." Because in saying this, Christ identifies himself as the source of life. And he reminds us that we are indeed hungry. He reminds us that we do not have life from ourselves, but live only by God's gracious gift. He teaches us that we do not live by bread alone, but by him. As Augustine says, "We live by him, by eating him; that is, by receiving himself as the life we do not have from ourselves."[4] Christ is the bread of life; when we feed on him, he satisfies our hunger.

Christ is the bread of life; he gives himself for our nourishment; he gives himself for us to eat. We eat him when we believe in him, when we find our refuge in him. We eat him when we obey his teaching, when we walk in his Way, when we heed his voice. We eat him when we ruminate on Scripture, because he is the Word of God that all Scripture speaks. We eat him in prayer, eat him when he feeds us with his Body and Blood. Christ is the bread of life; he gives us everything we need. He is our Life.

In a few minutes, when we come to Communion, I’ll hold up a wafer of bread and say to you, "The Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven." It's true. Christ Jesus feeds us in this Bread and this Wine.

So, come on! Come eat your fill of the Bread of Life.

Come, if you're hungry. Come seeking Christ for his own sake, not for something else[5]—he alone will satisfy. Remember all that he has done for you, humbling himself, dying and rising for you, giving you new life.

Come, even if you're full, if you're not feeling hungry. You, too, come with empty hands. You, too, need to eat. You, too, need the nourishment Christ gives. Your life also is a gift.

To all of us, Jesus says, "I am the bread of life.” So, let’s eat!

Amen.

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[1] Art Morella, “How the Phrase ‘The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread’ Originated,” The Atlantic (Feb 8, 2012).

[2] Nahum Sarna, Exploring Exodus.

[3] Preface for Easter, The Book of Common Prayer 1979.

[4] Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 26.19.

[5] Cf. Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 25.2.

The Serpent and the Son: A Sermon for Trinity Sunday

Michelangelo, Brazen Serpent, Sistine Chapel, c. 1511-1512

As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, 

so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. 

                                          — John 3:14–15

Kaa, the Rock Python, is one of my favorite characters in Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. Kaa is an ancient and enormous snake. He's 30 feet long and 100 years old, with "beautifully mottled brown and yellow" skin. Kaa climbs trees as well as the monkeys who live in terror of him--and he moves along the ground as quickly as Bagheera the panther. Kaa fights like a living battering ram, and he has a killer hug. As Kipling puts it, "when he had once lapped his huge coils round anybody there was no more to be said."

Kaa, of course, is just one example of the many snakes that populate the human imagination. The serpent is one of the most powerful cross-cultural symbols; serpents writhe through mythologies the world over. Sometimes they symbolize fertility and rebirth because they shed their skins. And sometimes they signify healing. For example, Asclepius, the Greek god of healing, carries a rod with a single snake wound round it that has come to symbolize the medical arts. Even today the Rod of Asclepius is the most common symbol for emergency services and hospitals. Sometimes serpents are guardians, from the giant naga that is said to have shielded the Buddha from a storm, to the rattlesnake of Revolutionary America, with its warning, "Don't tread on me." And, of course, snakes are often the source of fear. Emily Dickinson wrote that she had never met a snake 

Without a tighter breathing, 

And zero at the bone. 

Snakes also slither across the pages of Scripture. In the beginning, the serpent deceives our first parents in the Garden. In the end, a great dragon is thrown down from heaven, "that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world" (Rev. 12:9). In between, there's nothing good about snakes: they're signs of evil and deception. The psalmist compares liars to snakes, and a proverb says that wine can bite like a snake. And it's not meant as a compliment. There's nothing good about snakes in Scripture. 

And then, there's the serpent Moses lifted up in the wilderness. In today's Gospel lesson, Jesus refers to that story, the story of the bronze serpent found in Numbers. Do you remember it? Moses has led the people of Israel out of Egypt, and they are wandering in the wilderness on their way to the promised land. The Israelites become impatient and begin to complain against God. They say they had it better as slaves in Egypt than they do now, hungry and thirsty in the desert. So God sends fiery, poisonous serpents among the people, which bite them—and they begin to die. Moses intercedes for them. And the Lord says to Moses, "Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a pole; and every one who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live." So Moses makes a bronze serpent and lifts it up on a pole, and anyone bit by the fiery serpents could look at the bronze serpent and live. (cf. Num. 21:4-9).

In John's Gospel, Jesus applies this story to himself. He says, "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life." The story about a serpent becomes a story about the Savior. And we see that the story about the Israelites is also a story about us and our salvation.

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"The Light of Christ": A Homily for the Great Vigil of Easter

Deacon Dorothy Budd carries the Paschal candle at the Great Vigil of Easter at the Church of the Incarnation, Dallas, Texas (Photo: Richard Hill)

Dear brothers and sisters, tonight is the night when Christ Jesus tramples down death by death.[1] This is the night when the light of Christ shines in the darkness; when the darkness of death is overcome by the gladdening light of the resurrection; when the dayspring from on high gives light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.

Tonight we began in darkness. Darkness that recalls the darkness of a world devastated by sin and under the dominion of death. It's darkness like that of the “shadowed forest” in which Dante begins his journey in the Inferno. “In the middle of the journey of our life,” the poet writes, “I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost.”[2] Tonight’s initial darkness dramatizes the condition of creation damaged by sin: the inky blackness shows that we, like Dante, live beset by death and with vision obscured by the deception of sin.

And more concretely the darkness recalls the darkness of a tomb outside Jerusalem, the darkness that covered the Light of the World as he lay in the tomb until the third day. Darkness that seemed absolute.

But, dear friends, the darkness could not overcome that Light! And tonight--beyond hope, beyond apparent defeat--the Light shines in the darkness. And we sing with joy when we see the Light of Christ. We exult because "darkness has been vanquished by our eternal King."

The light of the Paschal Candle points to the resurrection of Jesus, to the dawning of the new creation. For Christ, says Pope Benedict, "is God's new day."[3]
On the first day of creation, God said, "Let light shine out of darkness." And today--the eighth day--the same God has raised Jesus from the dead. And he is "the bright morning star" who says, "Behold, I make all things new" (Rev. 22:16; 21:5). The Light of Christ shines in his decisive victory over the power of death, and heralds the coming Day when all in Christ shall be made alive and "death is swallowed up in victory" (1 Cor 15:22, 54). The light of the Paschal Candle symbolizes the hope of the Resurrection, and the good news that Christ Jesus has delivered us from death.

The God we know in Christ Jesus is in the rescue business. He specializes in delivering his people just when things seem hopeless. Unexpectedly, he provides.

Out of nothing, he calls all creation into existence. On the mountain when Isaac was bound, he provides a ram. At the Red Sea, when Pharaoh's army was marching after the people of Israel and they were terrified, the Lord leads them through the midst of the sea on dry land. When Israel was scattered in Exile and they lamented, "Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are clean cut off," then the Lord God says, "Behold, I will open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people, and I will bring you home into the land of Israel." When Jesus lay dead in the tomb, God raised him up. And you--when you were dead in your sins, he made you alive together with Christ Jesus (cf. Eph 2:1-6).

God is in the rescue business: he delivers from death, and gives new life.

Tonight, we have good hope that we are about to witness God's gift of new life and his work of deliverance. For some among us are about to receive "the Sacrament of new birth." As the people of Israel passed through the waters of the Red Sea into freedom, so Kathleen and Theresa and Daniel and Laura and Noah will soon pass through the water of Baptism into a new life in Christ.

Baptism is the means by which God unites us to the death and resurrection of Jesus, and so leads us into new life. "Do you not know," asks St. Paul, "that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?" "We were buried with him by baptism into death," he says, "so that we too might walk in newness of life" (Rom 6:3-4). So in the baptismal liturgy we thank God for the water of Baptism, "in which we are buried with Christ in his death; by which we partake of his resurrection; through which we are reborn of the Holy Spirit."

God's gift in baptism is so rich that Christians have called it by many names. For example, Gregory of Nazianzus, the great fourth-century bishop/theologian calls it "gift, grace, baptism...anointing, robe of incorruption, bath of rebirth, seal, everything honorable." "It is a gift," he says, "because no offering is given for it beforehand; and grace, as given even to debtors; and baptism, as burying sin in the water; and anointing, as priestly and royal, since they were the ones anointed; [...]; and robe, as entirely covering shame; and bath, as washing clean, and seal, as a safeguard and a sign of authority."[4]
The church, though, has especially loved to call baptism "illumination." Gregory, for one, practically stumbles over himself in his rush to praise illumination, calling it "radiance of souls, transformation of life, engagement of the conscience toward God...help for our weakness...renunciation of the flesh, following of the Spirit, communion in the Word, setting right of the creature, a flood overwhelming sin, participation in light, dissolution of darkness." "Illumination," he says, "is the most beautiful and most magnificent of the gifts of God."[5]
Why illumination? Because in baptism we are immersed, submerged, drowned in the life of Jesus, plunged into the light of Christ, brought forth into God's new day. In baptism we renounce the Prince of Darkness and embrace the Light of the World; we turn from the darkness to the light; we are called into God's marvelous light. And in baptism our vision begins to be restored. We are illuminated by the One to whom the Psalmist says: "with thee is the well of life: and in thy light shall we see light" (Ps. 36:9).

On this night, when the darkness of death is overcome by the gladdening light of the resurrection, when Christ Jesus tramples down death by death, open your heart and your mind to the Light of Christ. "Look upon him and be radiant" (Ps. 34:5).

"Christ yesterday and today, the Beginning and the End. The Alpha and the Omega. May the Light of Christ, gloriously rising, dispel the darkness of our hearts and minds."[6]
Amen.


[1] The last phrase of course is from the great Orthodox troparion for Holy Pascha: “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.”

[2] Dante, Inferno, 1.1-3.

[3] Benedict XVI, Homily for Holy Saturday, 2012.

[4] Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 40.4, in Gregory of Nazianzus, Festal Orations, trans. Sister Nonna Verna Harrison (Popular Patristics; SVS Press, 2008).

[5] Ibid., 40.3.

[6] Quoting the beginning of the liturgy of the Great Vigil of Easter.

"Tell truth and shame the devil": A Sermon on Ephesians 6

The Ministry of Truth, Screenshot from Nineteen Eighty-Four BBC adaption (1954) 

Preached at Church of the Incarnation, Dallas, on the Second Sunday in Lent. Listen here.

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“Stand therefore, having girded your loins with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness.” (Ephesians 6:14)

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

These are the three slogans of the Party in George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. They are examples of the “reality control” or “doublethink” the Party exercises on itself and the citizens of Oceania. As the protagonist Winston Smith explains it, “doublethink” means “to tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them” and “to repudiate morality while laying claim to it.”[1] In the novel, the practical consequences of doublethink range from minor annoyances to the total inversion of moral sensibilities; from labeling a wretched, oily-smelling liquor as “Victory Gin,” to a theater audience loudly applauding footage of the bombing of a lifeboat full of women and children.

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” Slogans worthy of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, who said that if you tell them often and cleverly enough, people can be convinced that a square is actually a circle.

History is littered with the horrors born of such sinister manipulations of language.

And our own politics is not exempt from its temptations and dangers—no community is. Our politics today abounds with what the comedian Stephen Colbert calls “truthiness.” And talk of “euthanasia” and “enhanced interrogation techniques” darkens our discourse. But at least we retain morally-freighted terms like “suicide,” which is better than calling the same thing something like “self-life taking.”[2]

No human community is free from the temptation to use the kind of language that is, as Orwell put it, “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”[3]

Doublethink, propaganda, truthiness—such debased language is ultimately the progeny of “the Father of Lies,” the devil (Jn. 8:44). “That ancient serpent” (Rev 12:9) lives in falsehood and spins lies that breed violence and death. He is called “a murderer from the beginning” (Jn. 8:44) because death entered the world through the deception he worked in the Garden of Eden.

“Did God really say…? “You will not die.”

The devil is The Deceiver—with a capital “D”.

The good news is that the devil has been defeated; our Lord Jesus by dying and rising again has crushed the head of that great serpent.

The bad news is that although he’s mortally wounded, the Enemy still thrashes about in his death-throes, just as a great python whose head has been cut off lashes about with its tail. In his slide to nothingness, the devil’s still dangerous; his craft and power remain great.

But against his wiles the church stands.

The church can withstand the death-dealing lies of the devil, because God gives the church everything we need to know the truth and live truthfully. This, I think, is the gist of today's text from Ephesians 6:14: "Stand therefore, having girded your loins with truth and having put on the breastplate of righteousness."

This is the second in our sermon series on the armor God gives his people to enable them to stand against the wiles of the devil. Each Sunday during Lent we’re meditating on the passage from Ephesians we heard a little while ago. We’re examining what God gives the church to enable us to stand, to withstand the devil and all his works.

And what else is the devil than a deceiver? He and his ilk work to make lies seem truthful and murder respectable—to disrupt peace and destroy community. Spreading lies and injustice are his particular forte.

And the people of God are the special target of his fury, precisely because they are called to be a community of peace, a community that witnesses to God's reconciling work in Christ Jesus, a community in which there is no place for lying and injustice, a community that knows the truth and does the truth. In the first chapters of Ephesians, Paul describes the church as the community in which hostility and divisions have been overcome through the blood of Christ. "He is our peace," he says (Eph 2:14). Again and again he calls the Ephesians to "speak the truth in love" in order to inhabit their new identity in Christ, to become the community of peace that they are (cf. Eph. 4:15).

But the devil don't like peace. He never has. And so he attacks what makes for peace. The Enemy, in other words, knows what Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew. Bonhoeffer, the German pastor-theologian who steadfastly opposed the Nazi regime, says, "There can only be a community of peace when it does not rest on lies and injustice." "There can only be a community of peace when it does not rest on lies and injustice." Knowing this, the Enemy sets about making lies seem truthful and murder respectable. And he's damnably good at it.

The book of Isaiah, for example, shows how devastating the devil's handiwork can be. In Isaiah 59, there’s a stark description of a community whose peace has been shattered by lies and injustice: hands drip blood; lips mutter lies. Things have fallen apart, and Isaiah tells it like it is:

"Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands afar off;

for truth has fallen in the public squares, and uprightness cannot enter.

Truth is lacking, and he who departs from evil makes himself a prey." (vv. 14-15)

Notice the connection here between justice/righteousness and truth. It's a connection made throughout Scripture. For example, in Revelation the redeemed sing to God, "Your ways are ways of righteousness and truth, O King of all the ages" (Rev. 15:3). There's a sense in which justice and truth are interchangeable. As John Milton insightfully put it, "Truth is but justice in our knowledge, and justice is but truth in our practice."[4] So we might think of justice and righteousness as truthful living, doing what is right. Righteousness is doing the truth.

Back now to Ephesians and the belt of truth and breastplate of righteousness: Truth, we might say, holds it all together. God gives us everything we need to know and do the truth, in order to keep us from being undone by the death-dealing lies of the devil. God gives us what we need to shame the devil.

"Tell truth and shame the devil." It's proverb found in Shakespeare's first Henry IV play: "Tell truth and shame the devil." Commenting on this proverb the essayist Alan Jacobs says, "When we tell the truth...the Father of Lies...is deprived of his children." "Every time we tell the truth," Jacobs continues, "we put [the devil] in his place. And because he hates his place, and wants more than anyone has ever wanted anything to assume the place of God, he is deeply grieved and shamed when our truthfulness shows the world just how un-Almighty he is."[5] The devil seeks to make lies seem truthful and murder respectable. But our truthfulness brings his dark deeds into the light and exposes him for what he is: a death-dealing huckster. When we tell the truth and live truthfully, we shame the devil, we show "just how un-Almighty he is."

Want to stand against the wiles of the devil? Then don't lie. Ever! Practice telling the truth every day in matters big and small. "Speak the truth in love." Don't gossip. Avoid truthiness and doublethink. Learn to stand in the truth. Practice standing before the truth.

Remember the dramatic encounter between Jesus and Pontius Pilate in John's Gospel? Jesus tells Pilate that he's come to bear witness to the truth, and that "every one who is of the truth hears my voice." Pilate answers flippantly and evasively, "What is truth?" (Jn. 18:37-38) Pilate is not willing to listen to Jesus, not willing to hear the One who bears witness to the truth. And so he ends up colluding with the most massive miscarriage of justice the world has ever known. Pilate precisely did not stand against the wiles of the devil.

So, don't be like Pilate. I mean, don't give up on the truth; keep seeking the truth. Ask, "What is truth?"—but, unlike him, stay for an answer! Stay to listen to the voice of Jesus, who is the truth in person. Allow yourself to be addressed by the truth.

Here's a concrete way to do just that: Memorize Scripture. As Rowan Williams says, when we hear the words of the Bible, we hear what God wants us to hear.[6] We learn to listen to the voice of Jesus the Word by listening to the words of Scripture. Memorizing the words of the Bible is a practical way to write the truth on your heart, to learn to stand in the truth. “Abide in my words,” Jesus promises, "and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free" (Jn. 8:32).

Now, not only do we shame the devil by telling the truth, but also by doing the truth, by living according to the truth, by doing what is right and good and true. Job provides a good example here. Job, we read, is "a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil" (Job 1:1). The Adversary, Satan, accuses Job of fearing God only because of the good things he has received from God. Remove those things, sneers Satan, "and he will curse thee to thy face" (1:11). But Job proves Satan wrong—and so shames him.  Job loses everything—his children, his possessions, his health—but he refuses to turn away from God, he persists in living righteously, in doing the truth.

You see, one of Satan's most subtle schemes is to tempt us to leave off doing the truth when things get rocky; to tempt us to be more concerned with protecting our lives than about seeking to do the truth regardless of the cost; to tempt us to doubt that Jesus is telling the truth when he says, "Seek first [the kingdom of God] and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well" (Mt. 6:33). This is why Jesus reacts so strongly to Peter in today's Gospel lesson. When Peter rebukes him for speaking of his suffering and death, Jesus turns and says, "Get behind me, Satan!" (Mk. 8:33) Jesus rebukes Peter, because Peter is inadvertently voicing a demonic temptation: "Save your life, live for yourself." By refusing this temptation and remaining obedient even unto death, the Lord Jesus has definitively shamed the devil. Christ Jesus has "disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them" in the Cross (Col. 2:15).

By his grace we are also able to triumph over every evil, to withstand the devil by our truth and truthfulness. We do not stand in our own strength; the Lord is our strength. Stand clothed in the armor with which God himself opposes lies and injustice (cf. Isa. 59:17). Stand clothed in the righteousness and truth with which Jesus the Messiah girds himself (cf. Isa. 11:5 LXX). Clothe yourself in his truth and his righteousness. In Jesus, the truth in person, God has given us everything we need to know and do the truth, and so to withstand the death-dealing lies of the devil. "Stand therefore, having girded your loins with truth and having put on the breastplate of righteousness."

Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and shame the devil.

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[1] George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, II.9; I.3

[2] Cf. Hauerwas, “Casuistry in Context: The Need for Tradition,” The Hauerwas Reader, p. 277.

[3] Orwell, “Politics and the English Language.”

[4] Milton, Eikonoklastes.

[5] Alan Jacobs, Shaming the Devil: Essays in Truthtelling, xi-xii.

[6] Rowan Williams, Being Christian.