Psalm 91; Romans 10:12-15; Luke 4:1-13
First Sunday of Lent: February 21, 2010
Lent begins with temptation and ends on the cross. It’s a sober reminder that life’s journey is not free from sorrow and that there are tempting forces in this world that bring destruction upon us and others.
Today, we start with temptation: Jesus in the desert. Here we have a text about Jesus and the devil engaged in a dialogue. Words like “evil” and “the devil”, or “Satan” are generally not things that roll easily off the tongue. Even when the word “devil” makes it into our conversations, it is usually in playful, lighthearted ways.
But the first Sunday of Lent asks us to take seriously those less-than-positive forces that pull and tug on us in so many ways. Regardless of what you call it, there is working in us and among us and beyond us an opposition to love, health, wholeness and peace. We know this both through experience and observation. Think first about yourself. Think about all your good intentions to be kinder or more patient or more loving to someone in your life who can sometimes be trying. Think about how regularly you do things that you ought not do and never get around to doing the things you know that you should.
These forces are present on a larger scale as well. I have been thinking lately about how often good people do bad things; in some cases really bad things. I have thought about, for example, young men who get caught up in war so much they no longer have any sense of right and wrong. They rape and terrorize. In places Darfur, Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, we’ve seen atrocities we can barely stomach talking about.
This seems extreme, and surely – we want to tell ourselves – those are people who have bad tendencies to begin with – those are sociopaths. But the truth is, we see time and time again that given the right set of circumstances most of us – good people – will find ourselves caught up in evil. Now, that “right set of circumstances” usually doesn’t come along but once in a lifetime, if that. Because of this, we can pretend that we wouldn’t do such awful things…and maybe we wouldn’t. But good people do. At the very least, almost all of us find ourselves complacent in the face of evil from time to time.
This is what our passage is talking about. It’s about how we can resist these forces when they come along. We should not, when we read this passage, picture a red creature holding a pitchfork surrounded by flames. Here, the devil is the personification of all temptations – all destructive and alluring forces out there. When we hear “devil”, we should picture those forces that tempt good people to do bad things. Jesus himself knew these forces. If you think this little interchange between Jesus and the devil was a walk in the park for Jesus, then you’re forgetting that he was human just like us.
The temptations Jesus faces are particularly seductive to him. The devil is offering Jesus the chance to have incredible power, but it’s presented as the power to do good; power to feed others, to rule in place of corrupt emperors and priests, to live forever. Jesus resists each time knowing the kind of power being offered to him is corrupting power. It’s power over others, over nature and over the very rhythms of life and death. This kind of power, tempting though it is, never ends well.
If we are to learn from Jesus and his own confrontation with evil and temptation, we see that to combat evil forces, we must draw near to God – however we imagine or understand God. Cleaving to God, living in God, living in tune with God, however you want to say it, this is how to find our way through the evils of the world – both small and large. We have to be grounded in something solid, something trustworthy and something beyond corruption by the forces that tempt us if we are to keep our bearings in this world.
But, given the illusiveness of God – the mystery, the unknowability – it’s not always easy to know how to do this, how to draw near to God. And many times what we think we are supposed to do in order to be closer to God doesn’t always seem to work for us, and we’re left wondering one of two things: Am I not doing this right or well enough, or is there really no God to whom I can draw near.
I have seen so often, in my life and in others’, a lot of frustration over things like prayer, reading the bible, worship, because it seems like they’re “not working”. I know people who berate themselves for not going to worship, even though when they do go it is an uncomfortable, even painful experience. I know people who feel guilty because they think every good Christian should pray, but they have tried and God feels no closer after they pray than before. I know people who try to contort themselves and force themselves into the mold of some ideal spiritual person. But in this effort, they loose themselves – trying to be something they are not – and consequently they lessen their chance to be genuinely, authentically connected to God.
This year during Lent, we are going to look at what the scriptures tell us about different ways we might draw close to God. Moving closer to the cross each week – or rather having the cross move closer to us – will be a symbol for moving closer to God and what God wants for us and our lives. And hopefully, as we draw closer and closer to God, those temptations that would divert us from the sometimes difficult choices we must make in the life of faith will hold less and less power over us.
But as we talk about moving closer to God we will see that how that happens does not look the same for all of us. That may seem obvious and like it doesn’t even need to be said. But unfortunately, I think we forget to affirm this in the church, instead communicating either explicitly or implicitly that there are things we should do or need to do if we want to grow in our faith and relationship to the divine. It is a recipe for frustration.
We’re going to look at six spiritual “types” – one each week of Lent. We will look at head spirituality, pilgrim spirituality, servant spirituality, heart spirituality, mystic spirituality, and reformer spirituality. We are all complicated individuals. None of these will fit us perfectly, and more likely than not we fit multiple spiritual types. But my hope is you might find something you connect to in at least one of these ways of being spiritual that gives you ideas for what you might do to move closer to God. I also think you might find some freedom and grace in knowing it’s okay to let go of some of the “shoulds” that intrude on your spiritual life.
Today, Jesus gives us a great example of head spirituality. I think the “head” gets short shrift these days when it comes to spirituality. I often hear people – colleagues especially – complain that we speak too much to the head and not enough to the heart in our worship services and churches. Our faith is too “heady”, they say; the implication being a heady faith is not as good as spiritual faith, as if the two are mutually exclusive. But some people truly do learn best through study and debate and reflection and reading.
Notice how Jesus responds to the devil: The exchange between them is almost an intellectual battle. Three times the devil offers Jesus an opportunity to seize power, and in each case, the response Jesus gives when faced with the temptation begins with three words: “It is written.” He quotes scripture. Now, some of us rightly have a bit of a knee jerk reaction when we start talking about quoting scripture to each other. We tire of people yanking verses out of context in order to make their point. Memorization of scripture becomes a weapon and such recitations seem far less about God than about personal agendas and hatreds.
But there’s something deeper going on here with Jesus and the devil than just a back-and-forth war of words and texts. Jesus is drawing on his relationship to God formed in part through study of his scriptures, and teachings in the synagogues and conversations with other Jews. In short, he was raised Jewish. Judaism has always had a very strong “head” component when it comes to knowing God and living as God intends. In fact, for many Jews both then and now, studying the torah is seen as the most holy thing you can do.
Often temptations come in the form of seductive ideas, philosophies and ideologies. Often we are presented with information in this world meant to convince us of something or influence us in certain ways. Sometimes people, in order to manipulate us, depend on our inability or unwillingness to think about what we’re being told or sold. Sometimes advertisers and charismatic leaders seeking power over us depend on the public not being critical thinkers.
These are times we need to have a way to articulate our faith and theology in order to counter competing truths. The practice of thinking about and talking about what we believe, even on an abstract level, can give us the tools we need when things get confusing and the temptations are subtle yet powerful.
During the rise and rule of Nazism, many good people went along with Hitler’s worldview and ideology, which did not, at first, seem so extreme. But once caught up in it and believing in it, it seems people stopped thinking about what that ideology implied and in fact brought about. In fact, many were able to participate in – either actively or through complacency – the killing of the Jews because they just went along with the dominant thinking of their day. These were not, by and large, bad people. They were people like you and me. In fact, many of those folks were religious. The problem was their faith was not grounded enough in something outside the political, social systems of the day, and so they were left impotent in the face of evil.
On the other hand, we know many people of many different faiths and traditions did resist the evil. One example were some Christians who were, by and large, academics – they taught in seminaries, studied, wrote large books about theology. When they saw what was going on, when faced, you might say, with the devil, their response was much like Jesus’. Among other things, they produced a document called the Barman Declaration. Essentially it was a series of statements that began, “it is written.” They affirmed the theological truths they had spent years constructing and studying, and it was clear to those paying attention that their theology was a direct threat to the German government. At least one person, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was imprisoned and killed for it. Obviously, writing this declaration was not just an academic exercise.
We need the theologians. We need those who put into words the divine intent and do so in a way that speaks clearly against the seductive forces of our day. Jesus had studied the scriptures enough to have them embedded in his very being. His knowledge and understandings kept him grounded in the face of very compelling alternatives. God was with him in the form of ideas and words that could speak to the complex issues of the moment.
Maybe you are a “head” type. If so, it should be clear that the spiritual disciplines and practices that make sense for you are study, reading, reflection, writing, critical thinking. These are practices that have the potential to prepare those with a head spirituality for their own encounters with the devil.
Of course what we will see each week in Lent is, because not everyone fits into every category, we need each other. Each of us does our part to grow spiritually, and then shares our journey and learnings about God with others. We need theologians, but we also need the pilgrims, the servants and the intuitive types. We need the mystics and the reformers. When we seriously engage in the spiritual practices that work best for us, we come to know God from one or maybe two angles. That’s not enough – God is too big.
It doesn’t make sense for each of us to force ourselves to do all of the different spiritual practices. But neither does it make sense to think we don’t need each other in order to truly resist all of the temptations out there. So, if you are a head type – go study! But please, share what you learn with the rest of us. Amen.
