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“Please guide us, oh God, by Your Word and Holy Spirit, that
in Your light we may see light,
in Your truth find freedom, and
in Your will that peace which passes understanding. Amen.”
On my way to church this morning, I found a wallet overflowing with cash. I picked it up and quickly told my confessor, Mother Elizabeth. She asked me what I was going to do with it.
"I'm not sure," I replied. "I've got to figure out whether finding the wallet is a temptation from the devil or the answer to a prayer."
Temptation, whether on the first Sunday in Lent or in submitting to the regular pressures of daily desires, is very tricky business. Temptations show up in many forms: found wallets, gossip, gastronomic and other carnal indulgences, wishing terrible misfortune on adversaries and enemies (particularly in this political climate).
Biblically speaking, there’s:
Eden’s enticing snake, the golden calf at the foot of Mount Sinai, David’s lust for Bathsheba, Judas yielding to the thirty pieces of silver, and Peter’s scared-stiff denials that he knows Jesus at all.
Suffice it to say, there’s a lot of time and ink given to this temptation thing.
Today, we get a scripture classic:
Returned from His baptism, Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, is led by that same Spirit into the wilderness, where He is tempted by the devil over 40 days. Alone, starving, thirsty, weak, and vulnerable, the devil lures Jesus with bread for His empty stomach, all the glory and power any ego could possibly want, and a lifetime get-out-of-jail-free card. These seductions are paired with the idea that God is insufficient to keep Jesus safe and secure. All Jesus has to do to quiet these enticements is give in to the tempter.
In this scene, it’s bread, power, and safety — but it could be anything. The point is not the specific temptations, but the underlying nature of temptation itself. Think of this:
temptation is not turning towards something,
as in doing things we know we shouldn’t
(like the third trip to the dessert smorgasbord
or supersizing the Big Mac meal — extra special sauce, please).
Instead,
temptation is being pulled away from something —
the wellness and health you know deep down.
In Luke’s temptation story, temptation is being pulled away from something — namely, Jesus’ grounding in a relationship with God, and His sense of self bestowed therein. Jesus picks up on this, which is why, when the devil offers Him bread, He reminds him that God is to be trusted over all else. Next, Jesus is offered worldly power in return for allegiance and worship. Again, Jesus knows His truest allegiance can only be given to the One from whom He received it in the first place. Finally, the devil proposes that God is not trustworthy, goading Jesus to test that relationship. Again, Jesus refuses.
Here’s the point: the devil seeks to pull Jesus away from confidence in both God and the sense of self He has in God, eroding faith that God is enough — that He is secure in and worthy of God’s love. Bread, power, safety — it could just as easily have been found wallets, pursuit of youth, beauty, wealth, confidence, fame, or security.
On one level, we experience specific temptations, but on another level, they are all doing the same thing:
pulling faith, trust, and self-confidence away from God and our God-intended best selves.
In contemporary lingo, what the devil is up to is called *identity theft*.
They didn’t call it that in Bible times, but it has been a thing ever since. It goes as far back as Eden and Luke’s temptation story. Here, it is as contemporary as the daily barrage of media messaging that seeks to rob us of our identity—to shape our identity as something other than being beloved of God.
This goes way beyond media swindling (bad as that is). Consider the relentless advertising onslaught we are subjected to. The goal is to create a sense of inadequacy, followed by the implicit promise that purchasing the advertised product will relieve our insecurity.
Or how about messages from politicians? Look no further than the last election, and the one before that, and the one before that, and the one before that. Politicians’ messages are designed to stoke insecurity and fear — terrorism, immigrants, corporations, joblessness, low wages, grocery prices, high taxes. "The wealthy have too much," or "the poor want a free ride," depending on your political persuasion. The target shifts, but the message is the same:
"You should be afraid because you do not have.
You are not, in and of yourself, enough.
Elect me, and I will keep you safe and secure."
We are under assault every single day by tempters seeking to draw allegiance away from God, who, in the words of a contemporary creed, "has created and is still creating, and shows the face of the divine in Jesus." We are pulled away from God and that identity toward some other tantalizing substitute.
I, therefore, remind you what scripture and the best of church, faith, and liturgy have been saying since Eden, Luke 4, and before that:
Like Jesus emerging from His baptism, you and I—we are all God’s beloved.
All of us.
That is our grounding.
That is who we are.
The bedrock of our faith is that God loves you and all of us enough to send God’s very offspring into the world — Jesus, who took on our lot in life, suffering the same temptations and wants. He was rejected as we are often rejected, to die as we all die.
This is our core identity: God’s beloved.
And death can’t hold it back.
Lent is an annual embarking on identity reclamation because we are forgetful and attracted to — and distracted by — bells and whistles and all kinds of other shiny stuff.
With an eye to Easter, we remember that God raises Jesus from the dead to demonstrate that love — divine, all loves excelling — is more powerful than all the distractions in the world, and that our identity in God is more powerful even than death.
More on that as Lent unfolds each week toward Easter.
Your and my baptism immerse us in an identity that pours belovedness all over us. Identity is the *why* of baptism — not fire insurance.
Baptism is identity.
Whether you remember yours or not, hear again the words spoken when you went under the water: "I baptize you in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I baptize you."
*Baptizo*, the root word for baptism, comes from the process of a garment being dipped, soaked, dyed to a new color, coming out different than when it went in. Baptism identifies us as dipped, dyed, named, claimed, washed, forgiven, and redeemed, so that our lives and identity are outpourings of the Holy Spirit because of the way we live our lives.
So, welcome to Identity Reclamation Sunday!
How about this — and I mean it when I say it:
trace the sign of the cross on your forehead.
Come on, do it.
Trace the sign of the cross on your forehead and say to yourself as you do it,
"I am God’s beloved. I am God’s beloved."
Or, turn to the person next to you and make the sign of the cross on their forehead, saying,
"Remember your baptism. You are God’s beloved."
When you pass by that font every Sunday, touch it and remember that your identity flows from there.
This is not perfunctory church ritual.
This is identity-building.
This is identity restoration.
This is identity reclamation — confirming, conferring, securing your, my, and our identity as God’s beloved.
Not alone.
Never alone.
All of us together.
So, Lent … let Lent 2025 be a reminder of why we gather each Sunday:
to build identity,
to withstand temptation —
tempted in manifold ways to be
pulled away from God and confidence in ourselves
and our future as God’s beloved.
We come to church each Sunday, Lent or otherwise, for an identity check.
In the face of so many assaults, we come to have that identity restored,
to live in confidence of God’s abundant, life-giving, unconditional, unending love as the most real and true thing there is in life — the bedrock of our being.
How about this from Martin Luther’s playbook?
His biographers say that when he faced temptation and keeping the faith amidst challenging circumstances, Martin would shout at the darkness and confusion, How’s your Latin, "Baptizatus sum." "I am baptized."
Martin would face temptation and keeping faith amidst the most challenging circumstances of his life, saying those three words: "I am baptized."
It is said the words were carved on his professor’s desk.
Further, when he was holed up translating the Greek Bible into German so that regular people could read the scriptures for themselves — and struggling mightily through this momentous task, with doubt and discouragement meant to keep him from completing the task that he believed came from the devil himself — Martin threw ink pots at the tempter, saying, "Baptizatus sum. I am baptized."
He also said, in other times of doubt and crisis,
"I resist the devil, and it is often with breaking wind in his face that I send him on his way."
Not quite as sacramental as "I am baptized," but compelling nonetheless.
This is more than a timely sermon illustration or church history flashback, more even than a mere identity check.
But get this from Martin:
an act of bold defiance in the face of the tempter, opposition and resistance in the face of the tempter and the temptations, whether personal or communal. And, as such, these are important words about being Christian in a contemporary context where various "Christianities" vie for our allegiance and faithfulness.
In times of vulnerability, the complex forces seduce us with questions that defy our best and most grounded selves. In them, the devil's first move is to attack your identity and my identity as God's beloved.
So today, I offer you the three-word rejoinder:
**I am baptized.**
This is who I am.
This is where I come from.
This is also who I am not, nor will be.
So go ahead, get behind me, Satan —a nd by the way,
don't let the door hit you [where the good Lord split ya].
Or, put another way: in more than 40 years of pastoral ministry, serving different churches, preaching thousands upon thousands of sermons, spouting tens of thousands of words, presiding at hundreds of baptisms, saying the name and pronouncing, "I baptize you in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit," after all that, people have told me that what they remember, more than the three little words *I am baptized*, are six little words I added at the end of every baptism and each and every Sunday service benediction:
**God loves you no matter what.**
God loves you no matter what.
All the blah, blah, blah, and it comes down to that:
**God loves you no matter what.**
Words that flow from *I am baptized*.
They form and fill your identity.
You have been dipped and dyed and named and claimed and washed and forgiven and redeemed to a new life of grace and belovedness.
You are an outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
**God loves you no matter what.**
That is your identity and mine.
So, when an old, horned, cloven-hoofed Mr. Satan tempts you, remember who and whose you are.
**God loves us and will keep on loving us no matter what.**
And for this reason, by God, with God, we are enough to face any temptations that come our way.
Having said this, and remembering the found wallet overflowing with cash in the churchyard, Mother Elizabeth, I think I know what I need to do.
Dammit!
