Traveling lighter

• Deuteronomy 26:1-11
• Romans 10:8b-13
• Luke 4:1-13
• Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16
  

In the summer of 1994 I walked from Yosemite Valley to Mount Whitney on the John Muir Trail.  It was 20 days in the wilderness, not 40.  And I wasn’t fasting.  I was carrying over fifty pounds of food, fuel, clothing and equipment on my back.  On the first day out, as I climbed the two thousand feet from Happy Isles to the top of Nevada Falls, with the weight of my pack making every step an effort and the pain in my hips, my shoulders and my neck almost reducing me to tears, I felt like I’d made a terrible mistake; and there was no way I was going to be able to keep this up for over 200 miles.  But I summoned up the will to fight through those thoughts, and as the day went on the climb became gentler, and I got deeper into the backcountry and left the crowds behind, and settled into a good, steady rhythm of walking and rest.  And the next day, and each day after that I got a little stronger, and the pack got a little lighter, and my doubts about completing the task I’d set myself grew less.  By the time a week had gone by, I had walked through Yosemite National Park, past Devil’s Postpile and Mammoth Mountain and was in the John Muir Wilderness heading toward Kings’ Canyon. 

It was a fairly remote section of the trail, and even though it was July I hadn’t seen another soul since the afternoon of the day before.  The particular morning I am thinking of was overcast and cool with a light rain falling, but I’d eaten a hot breakfast and had the right gear for the weather, and was feeling good.  I was hiking along at what I thought was a damn fine clip, when a slightly-built man, who appeared to be of East Indian origin, in shorts and running shoes, a windbreaker, and a fanny pack, passed me on the trail.  He did not stop to chat, and to this day I have no idea how he got there, or where he was going.  For all he know, he was out for a day trip from his lavish base camp, well-supplied by mule train, but the impression he left me with was of a wandering yogi, coursing through the mountains swift and free as an eagle.  And all of a sudden I was self-consciously aware of the great bulk of my backpack, and my lumbering pace, and I felt a bit of a fool.

Because one of the things you find when you try to get away from it all is that renouncing worldly goods and comforts can become as much a form of competition as getting goods and comforts often is.  It’s not that I set out on my hike to prove that I was better than anyone else.  It was something I was doing for myself, to prepare myself mentally and spiritually to embark on a whole new phase of my life.  After seven-and-a-half years of living an alternative lifestyle in intentional spiritual communities, I was about to move into the city and get an apartment and a job and to try out living like an ordinary American.  But my encounter with the runner on the trail showed me that, while my initial intention in making this journey might have been humble and true, my newfound strength and confidence as a wilderness traveler had begun to go to my head.

I was just a little too proud of my courage in enduring the loneliness and dangers of the trail; a little too proud of my austerity in living, for weeks at a time, with nothing but what I could carry on my back.  I was just a little too proud of the distance I was traveling and the time I was making as I went.  I had left behind the home I’d known, and did not yet know where I would find a new one, and for the time being I was free of the trammels and turmoil of life down there in the flatlands; I was free of grubbing for money and jostling shoulder-to-shoulder with the other rats in the race, and was feeling more than a little sorry for those poor saps who were not so free.  But when that man ran by me in his jogging shorts I saw that my burden was not as light as I imagined it to be.

We have a tradition in the modern West of romanticizing wilderness.  We like to imagine it as a pristine world apart, reflecting back to us a peace and purity that is the total opposite of the noisy, ugly, frantic cities where we live.  But the truth is we don’t know how to travel in the wild except by bringing our world with us, even if it’s only what carry on our backs and in our heads.  Long solitude in nature shows us the naked truth of our dependence on human society, and how deeply our acquired cultural values and personal neuroses are embedded in our souls.  But the haunting beauty and grandeur of wild places can also give us a sense of the transcendent ground of all personality and culture that is the mystery of God.  That awareness doesn’t free us from the need and responsibility of life in human community.  But it does often leave us feeling inspired and even impelled to go about living it differently.

 And this is something I think the Bible understands.  There are a lot of stories of wilderness journeys in the Bible, but they don’t idealize the wilderness as a place that is desirable in itself, a place one would want to stay, if one could.  Maybe it is in part because the wilderness in biblical lands is a stark, desert landscape, but in these stories it is what anthropologists call a “liminal space,” a place you go through on the way to a new way of being.   The desert, in these stories, is a place of preparation, of stripping away what is not essential, and learning hard lessons, so as to be capable of handling something new, a new way of living that is a gift from God.

In the story of the Exodus, Israel wanders in the wilderness and goes through various tests and trials in preparation for receiving the gift of the Law.  They then screw up, and screw up again, and so must undergo more testing, for a total of forty years, in order to be ready for the gift of the promised land.  And the Gospel of Luke tells how, after the Holy Spirit came down on Jesus at his baptism, that same Spirit led him out into the wilderness.  There he fasted for forty days and the devil came to him, to test him; to test his understanding of what it meant to be the beloved Son of God, and to see if he was ready to return to Galilee on the Spirit’s mission of proclaiming good news to the poor.

The church is the continuation that mission.  And that means sharing Jesus’ gift of the Holy Spirit, which we received in a singular way in our own baptism.  It means sharing in Jesus’ identity, as members of his body and brothers and sisters in the family of God.  The whole purpose of the worship of the church is to continually receive these gifts, to renew his spirit and identity in us, so we might play our part in Christ’s messianic mission to the world.  We do this every week in our celebration of the Eucharist.  Every Sunday is a little Easter, the centerpiece of which is the remembrance of Jesus passion, death and resurrection. Just as the spring is the annual renewal of the life of the earth, Easter is the annual renewal of our lives in the spirit and identity of Christ, by our participation in Jesus’ journey through death to new and inconceivably abundant life.

To prepare mentally and spiritually to make that journey with him, we observe a season of fasting and penitence, which the church has traditionally imagined as like a journey in the wilderness.  It is a time of surrendering superfluous luxuries and distractions to discover what is most essential in our practice and our faith.  It is a time to confront the ways we are tempted to use religion as a patch over our unhealed neuroses, and a prop to our unquestioned assumptions, an apology for our cultural values, and above all as a means to our own ends.  But this journey of Lent is not an end in itself.  It is not a process we control.  No one cares, least of all God, how strong our willpower is, how many desserts we have forgone, or how many hours we have logged in bible study, meditation, and prayer.  All that matters is that we are ready, when the journey is over, to receive the gift of a new life.    

       

Overcoming temptation

Genesis 9:8-17
Psalm 25:1-9
1 Peter 3:18-22
Mark 1:9-15

On Friday night, my daughter went to a sleep-over birthday party at a friend’s house, and so my wife and I went out for dinner and a movie.  In the car on the way downtown the subject of possibly enjoying some ice cream later came up, but we decided against it, after a brief discussion, in which the observance of Lent was a deciding factor.  We got to the cinema, purchased our tickets, and, as we were going in we saw, by where the ticket taker stood, a little placard advertising a particularly delicious brand of locally-made ice cream on sale at the concession stand.  And Meg turned to me and said, “Temptation is everywhere.”

Temptation is everywhere.  That’s also the thesis of the prayer that began the scripture readings in this morning’s service, the Collect of the Day: “Come quickly to help us,” we prayed, “who are assaulted by many temptations; and, as you know the weaknesses of each of us, let each one find you mighty to save.” 

Now it’s hard to see how that prayer applies to the kind of temptation we met at the cinema.  Unless we have some kind of life-threatening disease, seeing a sign for ice cream, is not that big a deal.  It might cause our self-control to waver for a moment if we’ve sworn off sugar for Lent.  But it’s hardly a situation that calls for God to intervene in might.  Is our salvation really at stake in choices like this?  Isn’t the worst that could happen that we’d have to admit our willpower is not what we’d like it to be?  We’d take a little hit to our pride, but that might even be a good thing.  Pride, after all, is our greatest source of temptation.

I don’t mean pride like “Gay Pride” or “Black Pride,” an antidote to a long history of suffocating under a blanket of shame.  I’m not talking about a healthy sense of self-esteem.  Pride, in the classic terminology of Christian moral thought is actually the opposite of that—it’s a kind of inflated sense of oneself that masks a crippling insecurity.  Out of fear of what we truly are, pride hoards the God-given energy of love.  It turns it backward toward a false image of the person we like to think we are.   Cut off from the ever-circulating flow, love grows cold.  Afraid to break and take new shape pride hardens the personality into a rigid form.  The virtues we admire most in ourselves become distorted counterfeits of the original gifts.  And the places where we are most open to healing connection, our weaknesses, are where we build the strongest defenses against knowing the truth of ourselves, of others and of God.

Whether or not we eat ice cream during Lent doesn’t really make a whole lot of difference to God, or to us, one way or the other.  But the Christian tradition understands that all our temptations taken together, small and large, yours and mine, are the multifarious devices of a single great tempter.  And the purpose of this enemy is to flatter, distract, entice, bewitch, seduce, threaten, madden, frighten, and cajole us—whatever it takes—into denying who we really are as children of God.  And how we respond to this assault over time, through our thoughts and actions, does make a difference.  Because these temptations really do have the power to destroy us, in the sense of turning us away from the very source of our lives, and their true purpose.  They can lead us away from the path of life that really is life, to a place of desolation, where we are helpless in the face of the stark and inexorable power of death.

The Bible considers the temptation to pride a serious danger, not only to us as individuals, but also to societies.  We moderns like to tout the amazing advances of technological and industrial civilization, whose medical science has prolonged our life-expectancies well beyond the traditional three score years and ten.  We point with pride to the cornucopia of goods and services, pleasures and therapies, entertainments and comforts, that are available to us as never before.  We can enjoy ripe summer fruits airlifted from Argentina in the dead of winter.  We can watch live TV in the back seat of the car on a device the size of a checkbook. 

It scarcely troubles our self-satisfaction that the system that provides us with these delights still fails to meet even the most basic needs of the great mass of the world’s poor.   We take what we have and seek to have more, as ours by right of superiority—the blessings of our ingenuity, industry, and thrift.  The desperation of the shantytowns and migrant camps of the poor is a sad commentary on them, but has nothing to do with us.    

But the poor know something that is still mostly hidden from the fortunate few—that the consumer society, whose production of endless novelty and momentary gratification seems to us so innocent, convenient, and fun, is destroying the earth.  As this truth impresses itself upon us more and more, casting a strange and somber light on all our harmless little temptations; it pulls back the veil on the pride of the human race. 

We call ourselves homo sapiens, the undisputed masters of the species of the earth, entitled to take what we want without regard for the “lower forms of life.”  And yet we are at precisely that moment in history when we are waking from our dream of domination, to see that our own survival and flourishing is inseparable from that of the larger earth community.  We are indeed a unique and extraordinary species, which can be a temptation to despoil, or a sacred trust of wise and loving care.

The late Thomas Berry, the thinker who achieved the deepest integration to date of the scientific story of earth evolution with the Gospel, described the urgent task of this moment as the “reinvention of the human at the level of the species.”  And this reinvention is the work of Jesus Christ.  He is the human person who masters the tempter through perfect obedience and loving acceptance of his rightful place in the order of things.  Jesus is not caught in between a death-trap world of temptations and a heaven he can aspire to but cannot reach.   In his story Satan is no one to fear, and temptation loses its menacing power.  The Gospel reveals that it is no more than the necessary process of purification, the tempering of character and will that prepares the human heart for the high calling of God.  

We are accustomed to thinking of temptation from within a dismal view of human nature.  The belief that we are basically rotten, that the image of God in us is lost, gives us a very modest notion of what overcoming temptation can achieve.  By the grace of God, one might manage, through great effort, not to be so terribly bad after all.  But at his Baptism Jesus discovers something else entirely.  “You are my Son, the beloved,” says the voice from heaven, “with you I am well-pleased.”  And the Holy Spirit comes upon him, and gives him a mission.  It sends him to Galilee and beyond, in truth and power, bearing the good news of God’s favor and love towards us all.  But first the Spirit takes him out to meet the tempter, to perfect his patience and humility.  There, in the place of hunger and thirst, of fear, and loneliness, Jesus finds paradise.  He accepts the fellowship of the wild beasts, and his dependence on the ministrations of heaven.   And so he restores the peace of the original human nature, before we succumbed to the tempter who played upon our pride.  

This is the work of Jesus Christ, and it continues when his forty days in the desert are done.  It is the way he follows all the way to Jerusalem, where he deals the tempter a mortal wound in his death and resurrection.  It is the same way we, who are baptized into that victory, are now privileged to follow.  In Christ we have the hope of being like Noah and his family, of one day emerging from the waters of the flood, of standing again on the ground, in the company of all God’s creatures.  In Christ we can imagine a day when we no longer war against each other or against the the earth, but have mastered ourselves and accepted our rightful place upon it, as witnesses and guardians of God’s covenant with all life.   

The great migration

Genesis 12:1-4a
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
John 3:1-17
Psalm 121

The story of our faith community begins when God speaks to a man named Abram.  He tells him to leave behind everything he knows, and to set out on a journey.  God does not tell Abram where he going, only to go to a place that God will show him. And he tells Abram that he is sending him for a purpose.  “It is my purpose,” says God, “but you will experience it as a blessing.  And not only will you be blessed, but you yourself will become a blessing, a blessing to all the families of the earth.”

The story says that Abram answered the call, and set out on the journey, and his son-in-law, Lot, went with him.  So right from the beginning this was not a solitary, heroic quest; it was a family migration.  And that is the way it has been ever since.  The Jewish family traces its ancestry back, through all the centuries of dispersion and exile, and returning home, of captivity in Egypt and Exodus, of pastoral nomadism desert wandering, to Abram (later called Abraham).  They trace their lineage through Isaac, the son of Abraham’s wife Sarah, but the Muslim family also claims Abraham as their ancestor, in a bloodline that began with Ishmael, the son of Sarah’s handmaid, Hagar.  In the same way the genealogies of Jesus in the gospels of Matthew and Luke trace the family tree of Christ back to Abraham.

But in his letter to the Romans, the Apostle Paul says that this biological descent is not what makes Abram our ancestor.  We may be Jews, or we may be Gentiles, says Paul, but we are members of the family of Abram either way, because we share his faith in God.  When we hear the word that calls us to leave behind our old gods, our old ways, we set out on a great journey, toward the promised destination of all human wandering.  And our right of inheritance in that homeland is not grounded in our genetics, but in the grace of God who creates all things new.  When we set out in faith to make the migration, we are reborn into a new family--a family of blessedness, that blesses all the families of the world. 

Some of you heard the story I’m about to tell on Ash Wednesday, but I come back to it today because some of you weren’t there, and because it is about the point of departure on a journey of faith.  When I was a boy, about nine years old, my school friend Mark invited me to church with his family.  The church I usually attended with my parents was a large, beautiful, architecturally-significant structure in a park-like setting, in the finest neighborhood in town, but on this Sunday I rode with my friend’s family to a non-descript cinderblock structure on the wrong side of the tracks.  The preacher was a younger man in shirt-sleeves with slicked-back hair who paced around on the stage speaking extemporaneously into a microphone he held in his hand. 

And I don’t remember anything he said, but I do remember that while he was speaking I suddenly understood that my life was intended for me by an all-knowing, loving, and compassionate wisdom.  In a brief but unforgettable encounter, this wisdom communicated itself to me, so that I knew that nothing about my life was random or meaningless or wrong, and that I had no reason to be anxious or ashamed or fearful about the future, because the same presence I was feeling in that moment was behind everything in the world, and would never abandon me, because it was eternal.

As quickly as this moment had come, it was over, and as my ordinary consciousness reasserted itself my first thought was about Jesus.  I was, after all, in a church, and there was a guy up there talking about Jesus, so immediately I wondered, “what does Jesus have to do with what I just experienced?”   And what came to me was that Jesus was the journey ahead.  He was given to me as the key, if you will, to making that moment the enduring truth of my life, to integrating it into my ongoing every day experience.  And I would have the rest of my life to learn who he is and how he works.

As I say, this entire experience happened very rapidly, maybe in just a couple of minutes, and while it was happening my friend Mark saw tears streaming down my cheeks and that I was powerfully moved, and he decided that in that moment I had been “born again.”   From that point forward he took it upon himself to educate me in the rights and responsibilities pertaining to my new status.  And I think poor Mark found it confusing that I showed so little enthusiasm for his doctrine, and no inclination to return with him to his church.   But the thing is, what he had to say to me about God and Jesus and salvation never seemed remotely connected to the loving wisdom I had encountered on that day.

I guess you could say my friend Mark was a little like Nicodemus, the Pharisee we meet in today’s reading from the Gospel of John.  He can see the outward signs of the presence of God, the tears streaming down the cheeks, the deeds of power and transformation.  But something is missing from his understanding.  Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night, in the darkness of his ignorance of who Jesus really is, but he tells Jesus what he already knows: “We know you are a teacher who has come from God.”  But if there is implied in that statement, a desire for something not yet known—a deep and searching question—we never hear it.  You get the impression that Nicodemus may be interested in what Jesus has to say, but he is basically struggling to fit it all into his existing conceptual and doctrinal framework.   And it’s not fitting very well.

Because Jesus wants Nicodemus to go on a journey.  In the verses that follow, the Gospel of John takes us on a whirlwind tour from the superficial signs of God’s presence to the inner workings of God’s purpose in Christ.  It is a kind of crash course in the great gospel themes of the journey of salvation, from baptismal rebirth in water and spirit, to seeing and entering the kingdom of God; from the new freedom of the Spirit, to believing the testimony about heavenly things; from the incarnation and ascension of the Son of Man to the strange medicine of the cross that gives final liberation from the captivity of death and evil.  This rushing current of religious imagination brings us at last into the very heart of God, to the loving wisdom that sent his only Son into the world, that the world might be saved through him.

  

People sometimes speak of the season of Lent as a journey.  It is a time to remember that our life in faith is a long searching, and that we still have a long way to go.  It is a time to jettison the extra cargo, to pack light, so we can cover some ground.  And the destination of this journey is not an end, but a point of departure.  The season has its origins in the ancient church, in the final weeks of preparation for baptism at Easter.  In those days baptism was not an individual thing.  At the center of the church’s Easter celebration, it was a remembrance and participation in the moment when the family of Abraham, and every person in it, and the whole created world, was reborn. 

And even if you had been baptized already, maybe long before, every year there was a part of you that went down with the neophyte into the dark waters of Christ’s descent into death and hell.  Every year there was a part of you that came up out of the water, newborn, and was anointed with the oil of the spirit and clothed with the white garment of Christ’s resurrection.  And I think that the veterans began to join in the neophytes fast of Lent because they also wanted to be ready.  They wanted to be open so that when the family gathered to enact again the drama of God’s love for the world, they were open to receive the gift of the only Son.  They wanted to set out on the great migration again from the beginning, a little closer to the goal.