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.   

Satan up close and personal

1 Samuel 8:4-20, 11:14-15
Psalm 138
 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1
Mark 3:20-35

Yesterday I decided not to help someone.  It was nobody I knew—a man who had called the church and gotten a number for pastoral emergencies from our recorded telephone greeting.  He told me that he’d called fifty churches and that I was the first person to call him back.  He was asking for more than I usually give, two nights in a motel, and it would have been more than usually inconvenient for me personally to do it.  That was a factor, I admit.  But he was single male.  From the way he described his situation, it sounded like he’d survive.  And you can’t say “yes” to everyone, not if there’s going to be money in the discretionary fund when an even more pressing need arises.   I didn’t judge him as unworthy of help.  I didn’t feel justified in what I did.  But I did tell him that I had decided not to help him, and that I was sorry, which I was.  A few minutes later I got a text message calling me a “false prophet” and a “dog.”

Dom Helder Cámara, a Roman Catholic bishop in Brazil in the 1960s and ‘70s, famously said, "When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist."  This is what happens in unjust social systems.  People turn against each other.  I’m not suggesting a moral equivalence between the lonely man in need of shelter and the Brazilian ruling class.  I’m not putting myself in the same league as Helder Cámara, equating courageous obedience to God’s commands concerning the poor with lame rationalizations for shirking them.  I’m just noticing something common in our experience, that place where inequalities of wealth and power, and the work of being present to them, gets us called names. 

In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus has been going around Galilee, preaching in the synagogues about the kingdom of God, about how close it is, about the shift in consciousness that brings people into it.  He has been healing and casting out demons on his own charismatic authority.  And he has been making provocative connections between the sicknesses he cures and the social and religious conditions in Galilee, between paralysis and debt, between hunger and Sabbath laws, between leprosy and priestly codes of purity.  The tension between Jesus and the established authorities is mounting and they send some scribes down from Jerusalem, Public Information Officers, to issue grave warnings that Jesus is a black magician.  He may have authority over the unclean spirits, but don’t be fooled.  He is in league with Beelzebul, the prince of demons.   This is the secret source of his power.

Jesus responds to this accusation in a remarkable way.  He doesn’t deny the charges.  He doesn’t accuse his accuser in return.  Instead he joins with the premise and plays with it.  “If I am using the power of evil to drive out evil,” he says, “then that’s really a good thing, is it not?  Because if the devil is divided against himself, he is like a kingdom at war with itself, or a house divided.  And that means that his power is at an end.”  Speaking this way, Jesus not only disarms the fear and hatred which the scribe’s words were meant to arouse against him.  At the same time, he turns the attention of his listeners away from the imaginary bogeyman Beelzebub, and toward the real danger that hangs over their lives.  For, even though he is having fun with the silliness of the scribes’ slander, he is not making light of evil.  Jesus, in his teasing way, directs our attention toward the real spirit of evil in the world, the one who works by making accusations, demonizing enemies, dividing kingdoms and houses and people against themselves, and bringing all down to ruin together.

Jesus then goes on to say something even more surprising.  “But no one can enter a strong man's house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered.” I think it is safe to say that Jesus is not advocating burglary.  The strong man must be Satan, and the property that should be plundered from his house is us, the human beings on every side of a divided kingdom.  It is all of us who are captive to the spirit of inequality, and division, and insult, and Jesus seriously intends to set us all free. 

But to do that you need to get your hands dirty.  You need to lay yourself open to the charge of being a criminal, to take the place of a robber, as Jesus will do on the cross.  You can’t bind the strong man without getting very close to him, “up close and personal” as the saying goes.  The other day in traffic with my family we saw a bumper sticker that read, “God bless our troops, especially our snipers.”  Well, that approach doesn’t work with Satan.  You can’t snipe at him from a distance.  You can’t blow him up from 7,000 miles away with a pilotless drone.

In the last year or so I have been approached at one time or another by organizers for four different groups who are trying to bring together faith communities to build grassroots power for social change.  Of course they want me to get involved, or more precisely, to get me to get you to get involved, and I have to explain to them that we are still in this start-up situation and have our hands full just getting our own fallen house in order.  But it is intriguing to me that at a time when churches and synagogues are shrinking and closing their doors, and younger people are staying away in droves, and nobody in the society at large seems very interested in what we have to say, someone should be knocking on our doors looking to us for leadership to save the day.   Maybe these organizers didn’t get the memo about the decline of the church.  Or maybe there’s something else going on.

At the end of today’s gospel lesson Jesus’ mother and brothers and sisters come to the door looking for him.  They’ve become uncomfortable with all the attention he’s been getting, and the signs of trouble brewing.  They’re worried about him, and are trying to get him to come back home and return to his senses.  But when Jesus hears that they are outside, he looks around at the people who are sitting with him and says "Here are my mother and my brothers!  Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”  Here is an alternative to the society in which inequality sets people to blaming and cursing each other.  Here is a vision of a single human family in which all are united in the freedom of obedience to no one but God.  Maybe the organizers want to talk to us because, however imperfectly our communities of faith realize this vision, as segregated as we may still be by divisions of class and language and ethnicity, as haltingly as we may practice the ethical obligations that are the natural working out of this vision, at least we keep the vision alive.  At least we know that this is what our life together is supposed to be like, and that we are in need of repentance and forgiveness when it is not. 

And if binding the strong man, the spirit of inequality and bigotry and hatred, really demands that we get personally involved, maybe the organizers understand that only the power of the Spirit can give people the courage, and the stamina, and the capacity for bearing the truth, to stick with the work of liberation all the way to the end.  Only people who know that the key to the new age that the world is literally dying to enter is a complete change of heart will steer clear of grandiose fantasies of power, and the seductions of self-righteousness.  Maybe the new politics that the world needs really do start here, where we can take the risks, and make the mistakes, and learn the lessons of loving one another across our divisions, because we have been loved and because we have been forgiven.

The Big Disease

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

The name “Lent” means “spring.” “Spring,” as in the time when the hills are green with new grass and the buds break forth with blossoms and leaves.  There are lambs and calves in the pastures, and a feeling of freshness awakens in our own hearts, as the days lengthen with the promise of a new cycle of growth and creativity.    So it may seem incongruous that “Lent” should also mean a season of prayer, fasting, and self-denial.  If new life beginning to spring up all around us, shouldn’t we be living it up?  Wouldn’t we do better just to jump on the rising wave of natural energy and ride?   

I say this in all seriousness because it is not always easy for us to see a connection between the annual renewal of creation and the practice of repentance.  One way I think about it is to remember something my father said to me once—“After you were born, and I saw how much joy you had, how full of life you were, I knew I had to change.” If you are a parent you may have experienced something similar.  The birth of a child can be like a new birth for the parents as well.  A sense of fresh possibility, a new and powerful desire to give and to love unselfishly, arises in us and flows through us in ways that can take us quite by surprise.   

But then, almost without our noticing it, the sense of grace and wonder begins to fade.  It’s not that nothing has changed, or that we stop being devoted to our children, but that life returns gradually to a new normal state.  One day we realize that the things we were doing gladly and devotedly now feel like chores. In place of the anxieties and vexations we had when we were childless, we have new anxieties and vexations.  But our way of getting vexed and anxious is just the same.  And something analogous could be said about all the new beginnings of our lives: the new love affair, the new school, the new job, the move to a new town.  

So maybe Lent gets its penitential character out of the recognition that if we are going to make good use of the opportunity that another spring is offering us, it is not enough to enjoy the fresh new energy that is coming to us for free.  We need to meet that energy with some spiritual effort of our own.   We need to break up the clods in the gardens of our hearts, and crumble the compacted crust on the surface of our minds.  We need to make a seedbed where God’s gift of new life can take root and flourish.   If the fresh start is going to become a lasting transformation it will be because we removed the obstacles we continually put in the way of God’s power to change us.  

When Mark’s Gospel tells us that after his baptism Jesus was in the wilderness forty days, and there he was tempted by Satan, it is reminding us that initiation into a new state of being has two parts.  First there is the epiphany, the ecstatic experience of communion and the gift of expanded consciousness.  But if this is to become a lasting breakthrough there must be a second and much longer step, the arduous process of dissolving our resistance to the new understanding, of purging the soul of habits that no longer serve.  These steps do not necessarily occur in that order.  In fact, the ancient practice of the church was to take them in reverse.  The Lenten season was a time of intensive spiritual labor and preparation.  The 40 days of Lent corresponds to the 40 weeks of human gestation.  It was a time of outer renunciation and inner discipline, and it culminated at Easter, with the moment of rebirth in the sacramental mystery of baptism.

 As modern Americans our understanding of the possibilities and perils of human transformation is profoundly different from that of the people of ancient times.  One indication of how this is true is that we are certain that our understanding is far superior to theirs.  We take it on faith that we are saner, smarter, more reasonable and less superstitious than they were.  And so we find their notion of spiritual powers that are hostile to God and destructive of her creatures distasteful and weird.  We reject as exaggerated if not downright false the notion that there is in every human heart not only the potential but the innate inclination toward greed, self-deception, and violence.

And because we deny the existence of the big disease, we stay busy as beavers going after the symptoms.  We have our technological fixes and our public policy proposals, our free-market solutions and our military interventions, our psychotherapeutic treatments and our pharmaceutical remedies; we have our spiritual programs and our auto-suggestive techniques.  We argue with each other till we’re blue in the face about who’s right and what’s wrong.  Meanwhile the human race and the planet it lives on gets sicker and sicker every day.   

So what if the bible is actually correct?  What if we’re all wrong?  Every one of us.  Deeply, fundamentally wrong.  Not because God made us that way but because of some ancient and mysterious power that holds us in its sway, a congenital desire to take control of the universe and fashion an existence on our own terms, separate from and equal to God.  What if we’re sinking into the quicksand because of our hardened determination to substitute our own way for God’s way, to replace God’s wisdom with our knowledge, to defend the person we imagine we are instead of becoming the person God created us to be?  What if this were not something we choose, but something we fall victim to, before we even know what’s going on?

And what if to say this was not a condemnation?  What if it were not intended to instill terror or heap up guilt?  What if it were not meant to bully you into surrendering your freedom, but simply to say, “This is how it is—but it doesn’t have to be this way.” What would we do then?  Well, we’d have to be reborn.  We’d have to commit ourselves to a truly radical transformation.  Not just a momentary epiphany, but a deep, lasting, and continual process of change.  Change not just as individuals, but as a species.  We’d have to go back almost to the very beginning and start over.  Not by a spasm of destruction but by an unfolding drama of universal re-creation.

Mark’s gospel recounts the story of Jesus’ baptism and temptation in the wilderness as the beginning of just such a drama.  The heavens’ splitting open and the descent of the spirit upon the waters recalls the creation of the universe in the opening chapter of Genesis.  God’s words to Jesus “with you I am well-pleased,” reminds us of the refrain that punctuates the creation story, “and God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.”  The description of Jesus in the wilderness, “He was with the wild animals and the angels ministered to him,” is a picture of Adam, the first man, in the Garden.  And who did Adam meet in the garden, but the serpent, the tempter.   

And here the drama turns against script.  Mark does not give us any details of the contest between Jesus and Satan, but he does tell us what comes next.  Jesus emerges from the desert not with the bad news of human weakness and punishment for disobedience, but with good news of God’s victory.   What we are given here is not the story of one man’s spiritual quest, but the opportunity of new life for the human race.   At the river the Spirit anointed Jesus as the beloved Son—the first-born of a new humanity.  In the wilderness that transformation was tested and proved able to overcome the ancient adversary with all his tricks and disguises.  Now into Galilee he comes, with a message for everyone: It’s time.  God’s just rule is here.  Turn your life around completely, and believe this—I just met Satan.  And you know what?—he’s no match for you and me.