Zion United Methodist Church had been closed for some time before I first saw it.  The congregation had long ago died, or moved away, or drifted to one of several Southern Baptist and Pentecostal churches nearby.  But the building was falling apart at a little crossroads near my first pastoral appointment in South Carolina.  Something had to be done.

It was true.  The roof leaked, and pigeons nested in the eaves.  Persons unknown and unseen had come at night and taken all of the pews, and everything else but part of the altar rail.  In the little church-school rooms out back, these same folk or their neighbors had stolen the flooring and even some ceiling joists.  The place was dangerous. We worried that some night an unknown scavenger might well get himself hurt.  So the trustees of the charge – my first appointment in South Carolina – decided to sell the building.  When even the Baptists didn’t want the building to use as a church, we invited sealed bids and sold it to the highest bidder.

Only two sealed envelopes actually arrived, and it turned out that two thousand dollars was the high bid.  For that investment, plus the costs of renovations, the new owner converted the shell of that old church into a gas station and country store.  He had a sense of history, though.  He christened his new enterprise “Zion Grocery.”

It was nice to see the old building rehabilitated and the lot around it cleaned up.  It was good to see some life at the place.  Still, driving by one afternoon, it stung me to see hanging on the walls of that former site of weddings, funerals, revival meetings, and Sunday worship the signs advertising cigarettes and beer.  More unsettling was the notice on the newly installed gas pumps near the road.  It said simply:  “Self-Service.”

The image of that one sign haunted me for a long time.  Not just that the building had changed owners and therefore changed purposes.  I understood that.  But I couldn’t help but wonder how many church buildings should have had their own invisible sign announcing:  “Self-Service.”

You see, when you go to buy gasoline, you expect to serve yourself.  It’s quick, easy, and with pay-at-the pump self-service is fast and convenient.  I can’t remember when I’ve walked inside a gas station to pay a clerk for my fuel.  But I wonder how often people expect their church families to be self-serving in the other sense:  taking care of the members first – or the circle of those who make it somehow into the ‘family’ of faith.  Sometimes I wonder if the church of Jesus has lost its way in taking care of its own needs first of all.  

Jesus said somewhere that he came not to be served, but to serve.  And just before he died, according to the gospels, he gave the assignment of serving others to his followers.  When I drove by the Zion Grocery, their new sign calling patrons to serve themselves triggered my musings about the death of the Zion Church community.  For I knew this:  the church as a community had fallen apart before the building that housed the worship had fallen into disuse and begun to decay.  Had they died as a congregation, I wondered, because they had lost their way theologically?  Were they gone because they had lost their bearings as a people of faith, serving themselves first?

The lessons for today remind me of the danger – the temptation, to use a theological word – of loving ourselves first and ignoring the needs of our neighbors. And here at the beginning of Lent we’re invited to take an inventory of the deepest recesses of our hearts and lives. Indeed, Lent is a time when we’re called to reflect on both the sins and the successes of our own individual lives, our lives as a congregation, and maybe even our life as a nation before God.  If that focus is appropriate, then one helpful question just might be:  Are we here to love ourselves first and most, or are we called to love God and others first, as we would love ourselves? 

In the first lesson, the first human couple eats the fruit that God has forbidden that they even touch.  They do so because they want something for themselves:  they want to know as God knows. The act is selfish in this sense:  they depend on themselves, not on God. Their disobeying God breaks their communion – the community – with God.  Why?  Because they have started to focus first on themselves. Not on God.  Not on God’s good garden.  Not on even each other.  But their focus is on themselves.  They see themselves, as if for the first time, and, for the first time, they see that they are naked.  And they are afraid.

In the gospel lesson, Jesus is faced with a similar question.  Having been claimed by God in his baptism, “You are my son, the beloved,” Jesus next goes into the wilderness carrying little more than the God’s blessing and its holy, haunting implication.  Having been blessed by God, he must decide:  how will he use this blessing, this calling, this power? 

The three temptations make it clear that even Jesus wrestles with the notion of serving himself and his needs first.  He is hungry; no surprise after a forty-day fast.  “If you are hungry,” Satan whispers, “take care of yourself.  Serve yourself first.  Turn a stone into bread.”  Failing that, perhaps you feel a bit lonely, ignored.  “Go for the dramatic, Satan suggests.  “Bring some attention to yourself first.  Jump down from the temple and show the world who you are.”  Finally, Satan suggests taking the power that the gospels will later tell us has belonged to Christ all along:  “Serve yourself.  Let me make you the ruler of the entire world.”

Musing on this story in his book simply called “Sermons,” Harvard chaplain Peter Gomes suggests that Matthew’s point in here is not to warn us about temptation, and therefore warn us away from something during Lent.  The purpose of the season is more compelling than our ageless human struggle with attractions of the flesh.  Rather, the story is about the deeper spiritual task of confronting ourselves.  In these 40 days of Lent we, too, look at ourselves to discover clarity about our purposes.  Claiming the faith and claimed by it as well, we are called to do precisely what Jesus does in his forty days in the wilderness:  we confront ourselves rather than serve ourselves first.  With Jesus, we delve more deeply into our hearts; we face our temptations. Jesus, says Gomes, “confronts his vulnerable points and his spiritual conflicts.”  With Jesus, like Jesus, we confront our very selves. Confronting ourselves, Gomes then continues, “means looking at ourselves behind the elaborate social cosmetic we create in order to protect ourselves from our own vanities.  [This] confrontation with our ego and ambition and fear – is the ultimate confrontation with the devil and the evil he incarnates.” (Gomes, Sermons, page 52.)

So today we stand together at the table of the one who calls us to follow him, even to the cross.  We come to face ourselves in our deepest fears and true needs, hinted at in our temptations.

As you receive the sacrament this day, hear the words that accompany them:  “The body and the blood of Christ, given for you.” Hear.  And remember the Christ gives himself for you, even before you could be grateful for the gift.  We follow a savior who loves us first, and who therefore calls us to follow him in serving others first.  Not ourselves.

Thanks be to God for such a remarkable gift.

Amen.