Psalm 32: 1-5—A Psalm of David
Count yourself lucky, how happy you must be— you get a fresh start,
your slate's wiped clean.
Count yourself lucky—
GOD holds nothing against you and you're holding nothing back from God.
When I kept it all inside,
my bones turned to powder,
my words became daylong groans.
The pressure never let up;
all the juices of my life dried up.
Then I let it all out;
I said, "I'll make a clean breast of my failures to GOD."
Suddenly the pressure was gone—
my guilt dissolved,
my sin disappeared.
The Gospel—M atthew 4:1-11 (The Message)
Next Jesus was taken into the wild by the forty days and forty nights. That left him, Spirit for the Test. The Devil was ready to give it. Jesus prepared for the Test by fasting of course, in a state of extreme hunger, which the Devil took advantage of in the first test: "Since you are God's Son, speak the word that will turn these stones into loaves of bread." Jesus answered by quoting Deuteronomy: "It takes more than bread to stay alive. It takes a steady stream of words from God's mouth."
For the second test the Devil took him to the Holy City. He sat him on top of the Temple and said, "Since you are God's Son, jump." The Devil goaded him by quoting Psalm 91: "He has placed you in the care of angels. They will catch you so that you won't so much as stub your toe on a stone." Jesus countered with another citation from Deuteronomy: "Don't you dare test the Lord your God."
For the third test, the Devil took him to the peak of a huge mountain. He gestured expansively, pointing out all the earth's kingdoms, how glorious they all were. Then he said, "They're yours—lock, stock, and barrel. Just go down on your knees and worship me, and they're yours." Jesus' refusal was curt: "Beat it, Satan!" He backed his rebuke with a third quotation from Deuteronomy: "Worship the Lord your God, and only God. Serve God with absolute single-heartedness." The Test was over. The Devil left. And in his place, angels! Angels came and took care of Jesus' needs.
God, it seems as if the days speed by and we are left wondering where the time went. Enable us to slow ourselves down and quietly listen to our hearts—yearning to see more of you as we journey toward Easter. Amen
For many of us, Lent is a scary, deserted place—full of wilderness, temptation, suffering and pain. For those of us who lived a tradition of “giving up” something for Lent—there was the annual chore of deciding which of our luxuries we would give up—and for some of you, that meant in addition to that which your church already demanded. So, all in all, Lent isn’t a favorite time of year for many folks. For some, the best thing about Lent is that it lends credibility to the notion of Mardi Gras—that wild and uproarious party-hardy time just before we enter into the somewhat boring, lean, even mean, days of Lent. And, indeed, for another some of you, Lent was, and maybe is, a foreign time that doesn’t quite make sense.
For all of us, I want to suggest a way of looking at Lent that I hope will revive your interest in these next days, regardless of your past experiences of Lent or whether you have no experience at all. And to do that needs just a little explanation. Lent is a 40+-day period between Ash Wednesday—which is the formal beginning of Lent and Holy Thursday (which some of us call Maundy Thursday), which is the Thursday of the Last Supper before Jesus was crucified. For the early Church, Lent was a period of time of preparation for baptism. All of the modern traditions have moved away from merely looking at Lent as a time of deprivation and fasting and have begun to look at it as a season of repentance and soul searching. Thomas Keating, Trappist Monk, said, Lent is a time for “confrontation with the false self.” He noted that the purpose of fasting and prayer is to allow God to strip away all that would muddy our focus.
Lent invites us to seek God with our whole hearts—to “clean house or heart”, if you will. The Psalmist says, “create in me a clean heart, O God”! Now the problem with the word “clean” is that we tend to think in opposites and the opposite of clean is—Dirty! And so we get bogged down and most of us find ourselves backing up a bit from the notion that we are ‘dirty’. We may have been told that for years, and we are not going there again. I believe that what confines us in our exploration of Lent is just such limiting thinking. I would suggest that the opposite of a clean heart spiritually is a cluttered, chaotic heart—too busy—pulled in too many ways to make room for contemplating the suffering and resurrection that is about to happen.
The heart has long been used as a metaphor for our deepest selves—we say things like, “in my heart, I believe” or “her heart is broken”. We have even said, “he died of a broken heart”. And so, we seek to know how to bring our whole selves to God—our deepest hearts—to live our entire lives in sync with the desires of our hearts, and our encounters with the holy—to both see and hear the truth of the journey and make that journey our own. And so, we look, in the best possible place we could look, to the life of Jesus and he begins the very same journey we are now invited to undertake. As we enter Lent and consider the commitments we make to grow our hearts in the will of God, we first go with Jesus to the desert, to be tempted, to see more clearly that which would keep us from an open heart.
Return with me to the first sentence of our Gospel lesson today: “Jesus was taken into the wild by the Spirit for the Test.” Satan didn’t lure Jesus into the desert, as we so often think, the Spirit of God took Jesus to the desert to give him the knowledge and skills that he needed for the journey. What an amazing thought—that we are tested, not just because God allows Satan, or evil, or the world (whatever makes the most sense to you), we are tested because there are things we need and want to learn. There is a very old musicians’ joke that asks: “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” The answer, “practice, practice, practice.” It’s not quite so humorous for most of us when the question is “how do you get to spiritual maturity?” and the answer is the same: “Practice, practice, practice!”
Now assuming that we have some security that we and Jesus are being tested for a purpose and not for sport, let’s look at the so-called temptations, themselves. First, Jesus was hungry, why the man hadn’t eaten for 40 days and if we believe, and I do, that Jesus felt all the things that we do, then we have to know that Jesus was pretty darn hungry. Satan, whatever that looks like for you, takes advantage of Jesus’ hunger and taunts him, telling him to prove that he is God’s son by speaking the abracadraba word that will make the stones into bread. Even in the midst of his incredible hunger, Jesus says, “You don’t get it—a person doesn’t stay alive just by bread, but by feasting continuously on the word of God.” There are many sophisticated analyses of the temptations of Jesus—mine, not so much—it just seems so obvious to me that Jesus is calling himself and us to put first things first—to focus on what really matters—what’s a little physical hunger when compared to the spiritual fullness of living in the “steady stream of words from God’s mouth.” The never-ending, always-present, hunger and thirst filling stream of God’s words and will for our lives.
Second, after Jesus strongly rebukes Satan, they go to the Holy City. Satan takes Jesus to the top of the Temple. And again, he challenges Jesus to meet the world’s expectations of what the Messiah was to be—a magic-working, show-stopping king who could do tricks to prove that he had a special connection to God—that God would send the angels to catch him in this daredevil attempt. Jesus, much wiser, and more “grounded” as we might say, than Satan gave him credit for, simply says, “Don’t even try it!” But far more important is the fact that Jesus shows us that when tempted to go for what is popular in the world, to make a name for ourselves, or to climb higher than everyone else, our goal is to trust in God to care for us.
Finally, Satan takes Jesus to a very high mountain and tells him to look around. “I can give you all of this, all you have to do is worship me. All you have to do is compromise your own values and your spiritual insights and you can have it all!” Jesus was getting pretty ticked off by now and simply says: “Worship God with single-mindedness and single-heartedness.” At that, the test was over, Satan left and God ministered to Jesus by sending angels to meet his needs. Jesus had learned what he needed to learn for the next step of the journey and we by enduring the testing with him learn as well. To put it in words that my still cluttered mind can remember—this is what I take from the test:
First, put first things first. If I look to get fed anywhere other than the will and words of God, my hunger for quick and easy fixes will slow my spiritual journey to a standstill. I’ll admit it, I don’t like to be hungry. Whether hungry for physical or spiritual food, I get cranky and irritable. Jesus leads us to the ever-present, ever-flowing stream of God’s presence that will sustain us until the food, either food for the body or food for the soul comes. Secondly, meeting the world’s expectations takes us away from the divine nature of God that is given to each and every one of us. Third, nothing, not power, not wealth, not popularity, is worth compromising our spiritual knowledge of the rightness of God’s plan for us and for our world. And finally, God does send angels to minister to us—whether they appear in casseroles at your front door, inspirational emails, an unexpected phone call, or simply a friend’s “I Love You”—those angels do come to minister to us.
And so, it is Lent again. And I leave you with a Blessing for the Journey into Self:
May the Wind of God drive away impurity
And bring fresh and vigorous possibility to your soul.
May the freeing Spirit unbind those places within
Held captive by hopelessness, anxious thoughts and internal discord.
And may you find a middle place of awareness,
Between the blowing and the stillness, to feel and watch the movement from old to new. And, together, we say:
Amen and amen.
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