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| Time of testing |
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(Please feel free to email questions or comments) February 21, 2010 Psalm 91: 1-2. 9-16; Luke 4: 1-13 May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, O God, who sent your word to live among us. Stories of spiritual quests are very much a part of the human tradition. Just yesterday in the New York Times, a columnist named Charles Blow wrote about a young woman he met who recently went off to Costa Rica for a month to try to connect with the spiritual side of herself. She told the writer she had gone from religious to non-believer to spiritual – a journey familiar to many people these days. That sense of going away to find oneself happens over and over. Some Native American tribes have a tradition of sending young men off into the wilderness on a spiritual quest as part of their coming of age. Writer Elizabeth Gilbert wrote eloquently of her travel around the world seeking meaning in her life in the best seller Eat Pray Love. People go away to retreat centers near to home and far away both to refresh their spirits and to engage in a deeper spiritual quest. So the story of Jesus heading out into the wilderness fits right into that tradition of someone clearing out the clutter in life as he or she prepares for something new. It’s what we do as we prepare for our journey through Lent. The version of the story we heard today came from Luke, but the Gospels of Mark and Matthew also have the story of Jesus wrestling with who he was and how he should proceed. In this story, Jesus offers a pattern for those who would be his followers. He rejects the things that could distract him from his mission, putting his trust in God even when the short-term gains seem so attractive. And Luke adds an unnerving touch at the end of his version of the story: “When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.” This was not like the final exam and Jesus got it all right. He struggled over and over again, right until that night before his execution when he prayed that things might turn out differently, right up to his last moments of life on the cross when he wondered if God had forsaken him. The writer of Psalm 91 – the psalm that is the basis for that hymn “On Eagles’ Wings” that has become so familiar in the last generation – seemed to have no such doubts. The writer created images of a God who is always there, who will not let any evil befall us, whose angels will bear us up and not let us hurt even a foot on a stone. It sounds so wonderful. And then we bump against the reality of life. Bad things do happen, whether you believe in God or not. Earthquakes devastate a poor nation. An economy gone haywire destroys the dreams and the livelihoods of families. A loved one dies. A beloved rejects you. And you know what it must feel like to be in the wilderness. I’ll bet many of us here have our own tangible image of a place that felt like the wilderness. The charred ruins after a fire. The empty room where a family member used to be. The parking lot outside the building that used to be your workplace. The places are different for each of us. But they are very much part of our lives. The words of Psalm 91 are not a magic formula that can protect us from the realities of life. They are bigger than that. They are an image of a God like an eagle who carries us on vast wings even when we are feeling bound to the muck of this earth. The words are a promise that we are not alone, even when it feels like it. Jesus surely felt alone in that Judean desert where he had gone on his soul quest. He fasted – not out as a self-inflicted punishment for sins, but as a way of stripping away the excesses of life. He stayed apart from other people – not out of an anti-social spirit, but because he needed to focus on what was within himself. This is part of the model for us. What he found in himself was not so pretty, however. Not only was he personally famished after days and days in the desert. He also knew full well the hunger that comes with the grinding poverty of an oppressed people. Maybe he could just work a miracle and turn stones into bread. He could help himself and others. No need to engage in the hard work of teaching people how to share their bread. And what could he, one man in a small country, do to make the world a better place? He began to think of all the deals he could make that could transform the world. He could lead the Jewish zealots, bargain with the Romans, cut deals with the merchants to finance his dream of a new kind of world. He could do this if he could get enough attention. He thought back to the words of Psalm 91. God’s angels would keep him from dashing even a foot against a stone. He could climb to the top of the temple, draw a crowd, leap into the crowd like a rock star, knowing he would be safe. He had the words of Scripture to protect him, didn’t he? He may have been aware that he had great power within himself. He knew this quest was bringing him to spiritual perfection. He knew … He knew that he was getting too full of himself. He knew better than to test God. Don’t test our God, he told himself. Trust, but don’t test. He could feel the doubts swirling through his mind, then subsiding a bit. He knew the lesson of this quest was coming clear. Wealth, power, glory … they were not what his life would be about. He could not even be sure he would be protected from death. As he set out to teach people there is a different way to live that does not depend on wealth and power and glory, he could sense a cross coming closer and closer to him. When Bonnie Van Overbeke and Nancy Baumgardner and Petra Streiff and I were in Israel and Palestine last fall, we went to the Mount of Temptation, just outside of Jericho, about 17 miles from Jerusalem. This is honored as the part of the Judean desert where Jesus went and faced these temptations. The desert is indeed very rugged here. Another day near here, we hiked alone across a valley considered to be the valley of the shadow of death referred to in the 23rd Psalm. The landscape is stark, the heat is unforgiving during the day and the cold is perilous at night. The sense of isolation is unnerving. But the Mount of Temptation is more of a tourist site. We rode cable cars up to the top. Jesus did not have it so easy. And once we were at the top, we had a chance to go into Temptation Cave – that’s the gift shop. Actually, that may be an apt metaphor for our time. For us, the devil may well be in our stuff, in our need to cling to it, in the hopes we invest in the things that give us status, in the power we seek to protect those things. In this story, the devil wanted Jesus to bow down and worship him. In our culture, the gods that call to us, that seek our servitude, are the gods of stuff. The gods of the market research our wants and desires, create desires we never knew we had, lure us to buy things that we think will make us feel good or that promise to ward off fear. When we step back during the season of Lent and disconnect from even just one of those things that the culture tells us are so important to our well-being and security, we are reflecting the actions of Jesus in stepping back from the great opportunities he saw before him. Jesus somehow managed to see beyond the appeal of turning stones in to bread, of making just a small bargain to rule the world, of throwing himself into the crowd. What Jesus had to discover about himself is that he could not shape his own future. He had to rely either on deals that would compromise his integrity or rely on trust in God’s grace, but either way, he came to see that all power and wisdom did not reside in his own being. Jesus came to understand his own limits. He rejected the false gods that were trying to claim his allegiance. He asks us to do the same. That’s the challenge for this Lent. How do we clear a space in our lives to figure out what’s essential and what’s fluff? How do we break the bonds of a culture that wants us to consume in order to validate our self-worth? How do we come to see ourselves not as the center of the universe, but as God’s beloved who share this world with people also created in God’s image? Writer and preacher Barbara Brown Taylor suggests that maybe we all need a little spell in the wilderness, a few weeks of choosing to live on less, not more; of subtracting things from our lives instead of adding things. Do this, she says, “not because your regular life is bad but because you want to make sure it is your real life, the one you long to be living.” We may not have a chance to go to Costa Rica for a month or even to a retreat center in rural Wisconsin. We may not head physically to the Judean desert. But as we head into the journey of Lent, we can each find a wilderness place where we can make sure that the lives we live are the lives we want to live, where we can test our values instead of testing our God. Welcome to Lent 2010. May the journey be a rewarding one. |