“ You must worship the Lord your God.”
 
The story is told of an English comedian who came to Edinburgh to perform. His favourite technique was to look at someone in the audience who appeared to be uninterested, and to try to make that person laugh. If he could make that one person laugh, the rest of the audience would be easy. So he saw the perfect person in the audience, an old Edinburgh woman who looked very serious, if not downright grumpy. All through his act, he kept looking at her. The rest of the audience seemed to enjoy his act, but she looked sterner and sterner. Finally the show ended and he knew he had to talk to her. So he sought her out and said, “Did you enjoy the show?” “I certainly did,” she said, “in fact you were so funny that it was all I could do, to keep myself from laughing.”
 
Worship can sometimes be like that. Going to church is not about enjoying ourselves, but at the same time it is not meant to be a chore, something we have to do, to make amends with God. That is not what worship means. We worship to be happy; we are meant to enjoy God, enjoyment is a Christian word. So in today’s Gospel Christ refuses to worship the devil, to change stones to bread, to do anything at all which will take him away from the joyous worship of God his Father.
 
We cannot turn on and off the joy of worship, like hitting the switch on the electricity, or turning a tap. We go to church to be inspired, and this means we depend on the power of the Holy Spirit. The great writers on prayer warn us that prayer does not always generate a great deal of feeling. The power of the Holy Spirit penetrates the whole human being, and there is more to a human being than feeling.
 
Yet we seek peace in prayer and worship. The trick is to try to be indifferent to feelings, not to be continually looking for “highs”, which might be followed by very deep “lows”. Instead we follow Our Lord into the desert, to trust in God alone, to live by God’s word. We should remember, though, that Jesus also sang hymns at the Last Supper before he went to Gethsemane. Good music is a part of the worship of God, and the Psalms are fundamentally songs. The singing does not need to be perfect, it just needs to be sincere. Above all, we should remember how important worship is. In the story of Christ’s temptations in the wilderness, which we heard as today’s Gospel, the devil was trying to disrupt Jesus’ worship. It speaks volumes that the devil saw worship as the most important thing to disrupt in a human life. The devil wanted to be worshipped, not for its own sake, but because idolatry is the best way to stop people worshipping God.
 
We are called to take worship seriously. It is not a distraction from the rest of a good life. Instead worship, when it is well done, takes us into the heart of life. A life without worship is a life without meaning. If someone says that he or she is unhappy, we could start by asking, how does that person worship?
 
The Sunday Eucharist is the beginning and the end of Christian life. It takes all that we have done of any value and makes it part of the sacrifice of Christ, and so it is the end of our week. It also gives us food and drink for the week to come so that what we do, we do in Christ. This makes it the beginning of the Christian week.
 
Christ in the desert explains the meaning of worship: it is the love for the best that there is; it is a willingness to let God our Father show himself to us and the world, and it is to stop being afraid of joy. If we read through the Gospels, we can see how many times Jesus tells his disciples that they do not need to be afraid. He says it to us too: we need never be afraid. Christ leads us through the desert; the desert is not our final home, but the way to the new Jerusalem.