Readings: Deuteronomy 26:1-11; Romans 10: 8b-13; Luke 4:1-13

I went last weekend to the concert down at the Leeuwin Winery in the south west. We haven`t been since we lived down there but when I heard who was singing I couldn`t resist. Carole King, a singer/song writer from the 60s 70s 80s and even today was performing, at the ripe old age of 71. I had spent my whole entire late teenage and early 20s singing along to her beautiful slightly husky voice and lyrics that spoke about love and life and hope. It`s amazing to think she is still performing and performing so well. The concert was fantastic and by the end we were all up standing and swaying to the music, hundreds of slightly weathered people, belting out the words to songs that were indelibly etched in our brains somewhere just waiting for the moment to let them come forth. That`s the mystery of music, it grabs us at certain times and becomes part of who we are, part of our history. But it also connects us to one another as a common bond of shared meaning.

When we look at who we are today there are songs and people and experiences that shape the way we see our world and how we should live together. As Christians we come from a long tradition where people have seen God as the great unifier, the great identifier, we belong to God and we see the world through the eyes of that divine presence. We are bonded together through the universal love of God revealed in Jesus.

The readings today touch on this.

In Deuteronomy a ritual sacrifice is described, in which the worshippers claim their place in the long sacred story of their people. `A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous.`(26:5)

In the reading from Paul`s letter to the Romans, we are given the earliest form of Christian creed through which people claimed their identity as Christians: `If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.` (10:9)

The question of identity is written also between the lines of the gospel account of Jesus` ordeal in the wilderness. Jesus` sense of who he was had to be tested out, it was to be challenged in the extreme. We are being reminded in these passages as to who Jesus belonged to and by extension who we belong to. What was at stake was God`s kingdom of justice and peace and love. Jesus went into the wilderness, was tested and then returned. He came back into the world, representing a different way of living and a different kind of empire.

We may have come a long way in all our scientific discoveries and our understanding of what it is to be human, but on the other hand we still are asking the same question people 2,000 years ago asked. Who do we belong to, where do we find meaning and purpose in the ebbs and flows of life. What connects us to each other?

Maybe this is where meeting on a Sunday morning has some merit.

Frederick Buechner has got a little book Listening to Your Life which I have used before. This is what appeared on February 12:

He describes an encounter with a lad attending a religious discussion group, for those not wanting to go to church. Buechner writes, `At one meeting he turned to me and asked, `So what`s so good about religion anyway?` And I found myself speechless. I felt surely there must be something good about it. Why else was I there? But for the moment I couldn`t for the life of me think what it was. Maybe the truth of it is that religion the way he meant it - a system of belief, a technique of worship, an institution - doesn`t really have all that much about it that is good when you come right down to it, and perhaps my speechlessness in a way acknowledged as much.

`Unless you become like a child, Jesus said, you will never enter the kingdom of Heaven. Maybe what is good about religion is playing that the Kingdom will come, until - in the joy of your playing, the hope and rhythm and comradeship and poignancy and mystery of it - you start to see that the playing is itself the first fruits of the Kingdom`s coming and of God`s presence within us and among us.`

What`s the good of religion, what`s the good of coming together on a Sunday like this? Well I think it gives us a pointer and a reminder of who we are and where we have come from and who we belong to.

And when society challenges us to join its individual and extreme and often unjust ways, and when hardship, when trouble and strife and frustration and grief overwhelm us and when we lose hope about the way the world is and wonder if anything will really change, it is a good thing to know and really believe.

Much like I belong and will always belong to Carole king and those who love her music and who I swayed and danced with the other night. I also belong and connect to you, my fellow travellers. And all of us belong to the divine presence we call God, the mystery that surround us, embraces us and calls us forward into life. And who was revealed in the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth.

We are all in this together. And I would not want to be anywhere else.