One of my jobs every Spring, as April and I get ready to plant our garden, is to figure out where we will plant everything. When I first set about planning the layout, I would actually try to sketch it all out, methodically trying to plot out every square inch of space to maximize the number of plants we could fit. It was a bit like a game of Tetris for me. These days, I plot things out in my head rather than on paper, but the same basic thoughts go through my mind. I want to maximize the space while still making plants accessible and with enough room to produce well. My mathematical mind loves when things are in order and make sense.

When our kids were young, we had only one car, a Dodge Neon that we affectionately called Lexi. As you might imagine, it was a rather small car for a family of four, especially when we would take a long road trip. It was particularly challenging to pack everything we needed for a road trip when we had to pack diapers, a pack’n’play, a baby tub, and an adequate supply of baby food, along with all of the regular items we’d need for time away from home. I remember standing at the car, staring into the trunk, then looking at the items that needed to be packed, and silently calculating how I could arrange them in order to utilize any available space, including packing things on all sides of the kids’ car seats. It was an intricate dance. I would put something in, then reconsider and take it back out. It may have looked like a frustrating task, but I always enjoyed it. I do the same sort of thing with bagging my groceries. I’m pretty sure it drives April crazy how particular I am about the way my groceries are bagged. I even put items on the conveyor belt in the way I want them bagged. And I get annoyed when the checkout person ignores my order and bags them however they want. Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that I like order.

When God created the heavens and the earth, the Bible says that the earth was tohu vavohu. The earth was formless and void. It was empty and chaotic. There was no order to it. Then the Spirit of God swept over the earth, and God spoke order into the chaos. God made night and day, sky and earth, land and sea, plants and animals and humans. In the creation story, we see that order is essential for life on earth. In fact, in the book of Genesis, the names of the first humans actually mean “dirt” and “life.” Adam is a derivative of the Hebrew word adamah, which means “earth” or “dirt.” And the name Adam gives to his wife is chavvah, which means “life” or “breath.” From the dirt comes life. We proclaim that at our Ash Wednesday service every year: From dust you came. To dust you will return. But the steadfast love of the Lord endures forever.

Kara Eidson in her book A Time to Grow, which is serving as our guide through this season of Lent, she references the movie The Lion King. In particular, she shares the conversation between Simba and his dad where Mufasa talks about the balance of the earth and respect for all creatures. Then Simba says, “But don’t we eat antelope?” Mufasa explains how lions eat antelope, but lions eventually die and return to the earth where their bodies feed the soil causing the grass to grow, which the antelope eat. And he ends his talk saying, “And so we are all connected in the great circle of life.” The world is ordered. God made order out of chaos and continues to do so, despite our best efforts to create more chaos.

The main way in which we create chaos in the world is through sin. Kara Eidson says that “the simplest definition of sin is anything that draws us away from God.” Sin is a disruption to the order that God created for our world. Sin separates us from God by drawing us back toward that realm of tohu vavohu, that realm where everything was formless and void. If there is no order or truth or structure, then all of it becomes empty. Life no longer has a shape to it. If life no longer has a shape, how can we come to an agreement about what the world looks like? We can’t, because there is no longer anything to compare our experiences to. Sin draws us away from the order of God’s creation toward a place (an existence)  that is pointless and ever-changing.

In our passage from Luke, Jesus goes out into the wilderness to fast and to pray. After 40 days and 40 nights, Jesus is exhausted, hungry, and thirsty. He is ready to head home. But he is met by an adversary, who we’ve come to call the devil. The devil comes to Jesus with three tests to give him. He has picked three things that no human should be able to resist. He tempts Jesus with food, with riches, and with power. Those are temptations that we all face…often. So, let’s look at each in turn.

Jesus is hungry. The devil knows this. He knows that Jesus has been intentionally depriving himself of food as an act of trust in God. In front of Jesus is a stone, and the devil says to Jesus, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” The devil knows that Jesus has power and could probably turn the stone to bread if he so chose. But he also knows that if Jesus were to do that, it would be an act of selfishness and a lack of faith in God. The choice to turn that stone into bread would have gone against the natural order with which God had created the world. Stones were meant to be stones. They were not designed to turn into bread. If Jesus had done as the devil wanted him to, he would have been choosing to turn away from God and invite a little bit of chaos into the world.

The second temptation that the devil uses on Jesus is the temptation of riches. The devil shows Jesus all the kingdoms of the world. That would be pretty wild. Was it like looking at 30 different monitors, each with a different kingdom, kind of like in a surveillance room where 30 TVs are connected to 30 different cameras to see all the places within a store or location. OR maybe it was one image at a time and the devil just used his finger to swipe over to the next kingdom image. OR maybe they were just up high enough that the devil could just turn Jesus around in a circle and Jesus could see all of the kingdoms just by looking all around him.

At any rate, the devil shows Jesus all of these kingdoms, and then he says to Jesus, “To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.” I can give you more riches and authority than you could ever imagine, the devil says. And I can give it to you. All you have to do is worship me. If that temptation were presented to me, the main questions I would ask myself are, “What is all of this wealth worth to me?” and “What am I willing to sacrifice to acquire it?” If Jesus had chosen to take the lands as his own, he would have been going against the order that God has established. Everything was created by God and therefore everything belongs to God. The more we seek to acquire for ourselves, the more that “stuff” drives a wedge between us and God. The more riches we accumulate, the more we begin to forget that everything belongs to God.

The third temptation that Jesus faces is the temptation of power. The devil tells Jesus to jump from the cliff where they are standing, and then command the angels to save him. Jesus certainly had the power to do this. But Jesus knew that salvation belongs to the Lord. We were not meant to save ourselves. We were not created to be fully self-sufficient. Jesus knew that i the jumped off the cliff and was saved, it would look like God has chosen to save him and God would be praised. But Jesus also knew that if he threw himself off the cliff and God didn’t save him, that God would be viewed as cruel and uncaring, but Jesus knew that the order of life is that people live and people die. Some are saved from death for a time, while others die without warning and at unexpected times. Yet through all of that, God is a God of mercy and love. God longs to save God’s people. Jesus didn’t need to run any tests to prove that. He already knew, because that was who God was and who God is and who God will continue to be. That is simply the order of things.

Sin draws us away from God’s designs and toward chaos. But God calls us to return to his original designs. God calls us to return to who we were created to be. And God calls us to show others the way to do that. That’s what I think true evangelism is. It’s not about communicating a specific set of theological beliefs. Evangelism is about helping to restore us to who we were truly created to be. It’s about helping others to find that restoration as well.

As we look around our world, that task may feel impossible. It definitely seems daunting, and a bit scary. We may feel like it is too big, like nothing we could could even make a ripple in the enormous sea of chaos and disruption. But perhaps we are trying to think too big. Kara Eidson, at the end of her reflection on the first week of Lent, quotes Barbara J. McClure, saying, “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are  you free to abandon it.” Attempting to return to the order into which God created us is challenging, but every journey begins with one step. So let’s step away from the chaos and back toward the order of God’s good creation. Amen.