In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

     I grew up in East Orange, New Jersey.  It’s not far from here so you may even have heard of it.  East Orange is a pretty town.  Single family houses, many of them with front porches.  Tree lined streets.  Some nice parks.  A handsome Episcopal church; two Catholic churches.

     A few blocks down the hill from where my family lived there was an intersection with some shops.  On the corner there was a pharmacy.  There was also a barber shop and a butcher--a real butcher--and a hardware store.  And a few other stores.

     But the store I remember most in that cluster of shops was Mrs. Kesselman’s deli.  It wasn’t called that.  It didn’t really have a name.  The green awning that shaded the sidewalk in the summertime simply said, “Delicatessen”.

     I loved going in there because it smelled so wonderful and Mrs. Kesselman was nice.  My mother and I would usually stop there on our way home from visiting my grandmother in Montclair, which we usually did on Saturday. We’d often have cold cuts on Saturday night bought from Mrs. Kesselman.

     One time, my mother complained to Mrs. Kesselman because she had raised the price of her roast beef.  Mrs. Kesselman paused for a second and then she said, “Mrs Carey.  Cheap and good you can’t have.”

     From that moment on, “cheap and good you can’t have” became a family saying.  It was cited, for example, by my mother if my father complained that she’d spent too much on this or that.  My mother would say, “Mr. Carey.  Cheap and good you can’t have.”

     Now, what, you may ask, has Mrs. Kesselman and her aphorism got to do with Lent or with today’s Gospel?  Well, let’s see.

     Today’s Gospel is about the temptations of Jesus.  There are three accounts of what happened.  The first is a very short reference in Mark in which Jesus, after being in the wilderness for forty days, was tempted by the devil.  Mark doesn’t tell us how he was tempted; only that he was and that afterwards angels came and ministered to him.

     Matthew’s version is longer and more detailed.  It lists three temptations. First, Jesus is urged by the devil to display his power by turning stones into bread; secondly, he’s challenged to throw himself off the pinnacle of the temple and yet to land on his feet, and finally the devil tries to get Jesus to worship him in return for wealth and power over all the kingdoms of the world.

     Luke’s version--the one we heard today is similar to Matthew’s.  It mentions the stones becoming bread, the temptation to irresponsibilty and rashness in throwing himself off the temple pinnacle, and the temptation to worldly wealth and power.

     So from these different accounts we can’t really know exactly what happened.  And we proably don’t need to.  We only need to know that Jesus underwent some sort of terrible moral crisis.  Some kind of crisis of conscience or crisis of faith. The Jesus of today’s Gosel is a very human Jesus; a Jesus we can identify with. Which one of us, in our lives, has not suffered a crisis of conscience or a crisis of faith? Which one of us has not been tempted?

     Why did this crisis come about for Jesus?

     In his baptism by John in the Jordan Jesus had become fully aware of his vocation.  His role, his reconciling and saving role in the world. But he had also come to the disturbing (perhaps even alarming) insight that he was also being called to be the “Suffering Servant” spoken of by Isaia the prophet.  The accounts of his baptism make this clear. He was to bring salvation to the people, yes, but the pathway to that  salvation was the way of sacrificial love, which included personal sacrifice and selfless service.

     By now Jesus was also conscious of his enormous personal gifts and special charisms, particularly his gift of influencing others--even to the point of having them abandon their families and ordinary lives to follow him and to listen to his message. He was a charismatic leader with a capital “c”!

     This may have been the source of the conflict that provoked a crisis for Jesus:  was there a way he wondered for him to enjoy and to use the gifts his heavenly Father had given him, but to avoid the suffering?  Could he become rich and powerful and yet remain a popular charismatic leader? Could he become the military leader his people longed for?  Perhaps even replace Herod as king? To overthrow the Romans and to live a life of luxury in a big palace and have others wait on him and fear his might?

     The Gospel story tells us that Jesus rejected those temptations to earthly power and riches and embraced instead the will of his Father.  Jesus was, above all, a Jew and for that reason alone he rejected  the pagan temptation to “have it all”;  the temptation to worship power and money and selfish desire and to seek in those things his fulfillment and happiness.  

     “I am the Lord your God.  I shall not have false gods before me.” Those words, given to Moses on Mount Sinai, must have rung in Jesus’ ears.  You either worship the One true God--or you worship power and money and your own selfish inclinations.  It is God or mammon.  One or the other.

     Cheap and good, you can’t have.

     And so it is with us too.  Cheap and good we can't have.

     There are, however, a couple of things that need to be said about this seemingly harsh and absolute dichotomy.  The first is that there is nothing wrong in itself with money or even with power or with many human pleasures like alcohol or sex or food.  We are not called to renounce these in every sense.

     The issue is not the intrinsic goodness of the things of this world.  The issue is who and what we worship and who and what controls us. When we worship the things of the world, they end up owning us.  And after a while they begin to distort us.  And in the end they can even destroy us.  If you “get on your knees” as it were, and make the pursuit of money or power or any of your own drives.... if you make any of those your gods, you will pay a price.

     “I am the Lord your God.  I shall not have false gods before me.”  Only by worshiping a loving and good God, do we receive love in return.  Only by worshiping a God who can save, are we saved in return.  Only by feeding on Him are we truly fed.

     Lent is surely a time to rethink our priorities, which is just another way of saying that it’s a time to think about the gods we are tempted to worship, to think about the demons that lie within us.

     Who and what comes first in my life--and why?  These are important questions to ask ourselves during Lent.  And if we don’t confront them in Lent, when will we? 

     We’re not likely to be tempted by the false gods of  big money, bribery or kickbacks or tempted by the possibility of enormous power.  The false gods that tempt us are the minor ones:  alcohol, food, tobacco, prescription drugs. These are the ones that come immediately to mind, but there are other subtler ones: the little tyranical gods of our own making: our selfish need to have our own way, our failure to listen to others, the temptation to procrastinate (that’s certainly one I know about), the urge to buy things we don’t need, the temptation to run up credit card debt, the tendency to feel sorry for ourselves, or perhaps our failure to confront a time-wasting addiction to the computer.  

     You can make your own list in the quiet of your own heart and ask God to help you.  Ask God to give you the grace to choose the good and not the cheap.

     “Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world.  And the devil said to him, ‘To you I will give their glory and all this authority; 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.’  And Jesus answered him, ‘It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’”

     I want to end with the words of a Lenten hymn.  We will probably sing it this Lent.

“Creator of the earth and skies, 
to whom the words of life belong,
grant us your truth to make us wise; 
grant us your power to make us strong.

Teach us to know and love you, Lord.
and humbly follow in your way,
Speak to our souls the quickening word,
and turn our darkness into day.

Amen.”