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 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.