Lessons from the Wilderness

Lessons from the Wilderness The Dover Church
March 13, 2010 – The 1st Sunday of Lent
Scripture: Psalm 32, Matthew 4:1-11


This lesson, and believe me, it truly is a lesson, comes up on the first Sunday of Lent every year. I wonder, however, if we can hear what we just heard with beginner ears. It is so far from our normal realm of possibilities and expectations that our minds, conditioned by an unrelenting diet of normalcy, might just tune it out while waiting hopefully for something more palatable in the sermon or next week. With attention spans what they are these days, the very thought of Jesus doing anything for forty days, let alone any of us mindfully devoting ourselves to one thing for forty days, seems beyond belief.
And what is that one thing? Nothing less than being lead by the Spirit into the wilderness to fast for forty days and then be tempted by the devil. This was not something that Jesus stumbled into like Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life. The sequence of events in Matthew’s gospel moves from Jesus’ Baptism in the Jordan with the heavens opening, the dove descending, and the voice saying, “This is my beloved son, with whom I am well please,” to our lesson for this morning, Jesus being lead by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil, to Jesus beginning his ministry in Galilee. There is a clear progression from initiation to preparation to implementation. Temptation was clearly an essential stage in Jesus’ spiritual development.
Where shall I begin for most obvious points of divergence from our normalcy? Is it being lead by the Spirit into the wilderness for temptation? For most of us, should we ever be tempted to ascribe anything to the Spirit’s leading, it’s probably to the good stuff: happiness and plenty, satisfaction and progress, a greater sense of self-awareness and fulfillment. But trial and temptation? No. That’s not the Spirit. That’s bad luck.
Or perhaps it is the lengthy fasting as a preparation for the coming temptation. If any of us were facing a really serious trial of some sort, we would probably be tempted to follow the example of the condemned man who eats a hearty meal and watches a movie while waiting. But Jesus empties himself of distractions, food and company, in his preparation for the devil.
And let us not forget the Tempter himself. The Hebrew word Satan means “the tempter,” and that is what he does, tempts, deludes, ensnares. Most Christians that I know, and that includes me, do not give the devil all that much thought. I did give this some thought this week, why this should be the case, and this is my excuse: I avoid thinking about evil because my life circumstances do not force me to. After all, we do not live in the kind of a place where the reality and power of anything we might think of as the Devil, let alone any sort of definitive experience which we might call an ultimate time of trial, comes our way. Dover is not the scene of ethnic cleansing, famine, plague, devastation, oppression, inescapable injustice, or violence. This is a place of opportunity and choice, a place of comfort and well compensated hard work, a place of education, which is yet another reason why the devil and his ways don’t really frighten us. We either think that we know better or don’t have to know so we don’t bother finding out if there has been an oversight in our superior educations.
And yet, and yet, I am pulled up short every day when I follow our Lord’s advice and pray the prayer he teaches us, every time I pray “lead us not into temptation, rather deliver us from evil.” I have to point out that the version of the Lord’s Prayer in the Gospel of Matthew says “lead us not into the time of trial rather deliver us from the Evil One." My Dover mind wants me to think in terms of the trivial temptations which come my way but which I am able to resist through my own intestinal fortitude and better judgment, rather than any sort of an ultimate time of trial. My Dover mind wants me to think in terms of small case evil, as in any incidental evils which may befall me, rather than Evil with a capital "E," as in the Evil One. In short, while our Gospel lesson for this morning is an illustration of the very things we pray for in the Lord’s Prayer, I tend to do my best to avoid having to think about, let alone face that myself.
Did you notice how reasonable the offers were which the devil put to Jesus? Turning stones into bread? That would seem to be just the thing after forty days of hunger, wouldn’t you think? Rescue from death? Rule over the kingdoms of the earth? What is wrong with any of that? It may not have occurred to you, but these are, in fact, the very things Jesus eventually does according to the Biblical witness. So why not now? Why not from the devil?
The late Peter Gomes, Minister and Professor at Harvard Divinity School and a preacher and I writer I admire immensely, wrote this: “The temptations point out the fact that Satan usually appeals to us at the point where we feel ourselves spiritually strong, for where we think we are strong is not the place where we invest our defensive energies. We think that Satan will attack us where we are weak, as if Satan is as rational as we are, but the proof of Satan’s cleverness is that he appeals to those points where, more often than not, we feel secure.”
The devil is basically offering to set Jesus up as a version of the Roman Emperor, who promised his people Abundance, Efficiency, Security, and Power. Bull’s eye! These are the temptations the devil dangles before Jesus. Are these not the very ideals so many of us strive so mightily to achieve or attain in our lives? Are these not the very ideals that our world holds up for us? How can ideals such as these, the very places where we feel spiritually strong and secure, how can they be potential evils? Gomes writes, “…most of the world’s enormous evils have resulted from the pursuit of some notion of good. Many modestly virtuous people have committed deeds of outrageous evil in pursuit of an inadequate definition of good, with each villain of history probably thinking of himself as up to ultimate good. Both omelets and destiny, however, require a few broken eggs. The landscape of human history is littered with the debris of ideals sacrificed to the idol of the ideal…”
I will always remember my visit to the Nazi concentration camp at Sachsenhausen. At the end of a street through a residential neighborhood in a suburb of Berlin, a neighborhood full of normal people who watched as more than 45,000 prisoners were marched through their neighborhood into the camp, and no one ever marched out; a neighborhood full of ordinary citizens upon whom the ashes of the ovens fell like snow, yet not one knew what was going on at the end of the street. The enormity, thoroughness, intentionality, and thoughtfulness of the evil perpetrated in that place defied my comprehension. It was all that I could do to imagine the place run by a bunch of monsters and ogres, subhuman, mindless lunatics. I kept asking myself how anyone in their right mind could have worked there and done that, until I finally asked the guide. He looked at me with a certain disdain for my idealism and ignorance, and said, “the men who worked here were accountants, professors, teachers, policemen and artisans, church going husbands and fathers, who saw themselves as defenders of their country in its life and death struggle with mortal enemies. These guys were taught that the communists, socialists, trade union leaders, political dissidents, homosexuals, POWs, Jews, and Christian pastors who hadn’t gotten with the program were some of those mortal enemies. They were doing their duty.” An extreme example, I admit, there is probably none more extreme, but I think that the motivations of the most atrocious perpetrators of astounding evil in recent human history have all been idealistic.
We are not here this morning to point the finger in horror and shock at wicked old Nazis about whom we cannot do a blessed thing. We are here to be challenged by our Word from God and the example of our Lord in the details of our lives about which we can do something. How many eggs do we break in our pursuit of our ideals? How many eggs do we allow to be broken on our behalves? This is Lent and we are on our way to the Cross, which is why I have given you each a little cut nail to take with you through Lent this year, to hold as you think about how each of us and all of us are deluded, ensnared, and tempted in both the specifics and in the broad strokes of our lives. Jesus said, “happy are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” It is only by following the Spirit into the wilderness and facing our temptation, by leaving behind the props of normalcy, expediency, efficiency, productivity, comfort, convenience, custom and habituation, that we can come to that purity of heart where we will see a God who is much bigger than the ideal of the good and idol of ideals we pursue, either willfully or blindly, and know if what we are about is of God, for God and through God, or not; to seek our answer to the Tempter's question: "if you are really a child of God, if you really want to follow this Son of God, what are you going to do about it?"