Wilderness - Temptation

Temptation

March 8/14

As most of you know I have been on a journey since 2011 around what I am able to eat and more importantly what I am no longer able to eat.  It all began with not feeling well and losing weight and a general malaise – I still do not know what started it but one day I thought I was able to eat what I wanted to eat when I wanted to eat it – and then I was not – and all of a sudden food I had eaten all my life cause me much discomfort – bread, eggs, baked goods, chocolate cake – pasta and cream sauce.  I had a bunch of tests, went to doctors, 2 MRI’s, 2 scopes, 3 Ultrasounds later – and still there is no name for what it is that ails me – but a couple of health practitioners have helped me understand that there is now and will always be certain foods that my body no longer is able to tolerate and if I wish to be comfortable in my body, I need to no longer eat them – or drink them too.  I have had to give up tea – and even though I still want to be able to eat and drink as I once was able to – even though I am tempted to eat a sandwich or a piece of cake – and drink a pot of tea – I can’t.  Even if a serpent coiled down a tree and offered me a piece of chocolate cake – and this used to be my favorite thing, with the promise that I would suffer no side effects – I still would not.. I still – or would I?  That’s a tempting offer…hmmm, what harm does a piece of cake do?

What harm does knowing the difference between good and evil do?  What harm does eating the fruit offered by the snake do?  Temptations….what are your temptations – what beguiles you?  What entices you away from what you know?  What seduces you into behaving in a manner that is not authentic?  What are your temptations?

The temptations before us are those things that take us away from living in relationship with God and with each other
The temptations before us are the voices that drown out the insistence of God that we who contain the very spark of God are beloved and belong to God.
But this season, in alerting us to the temptations to which we might succumb, also offers us a way out.
Because the season of Lent offers us space for reflection.
The six weeks between now and Easter invite us into re-discovering who we are as children of God and rediscovering Gods divine spark placed in us as we were created.

We do things a bit strange in the church – it is one of the things I appreciate about the church is that we live in the world just a little bit different than the rest of the world.  Take for instance the yearly cycle of the church.  We measure time differently – what for the world the New Year begins the first day of January In the Church it is the first Sunday in Advent.  Easter, our most sacred of celebration days is not on a set day in a calendar, it changes every year and is decided by the cycle of the moon.  Our church year is not attached to the secular calendar of national holidays and long weekends, they focus on human nature and God’s timing.  The season of Advent marks the coming of the Christ, the season of Epiphany reminds of the light of God at work in the world, Ordinary time reminds us of the wonderful truth that it is midst of the very ordinary march of days God gets into our lives and into the world.  We now begin the purple season, the season of Lent, the time to remind us that Easter is coming, and so we take time to prepare ourselves to be ready to experience the significant gift of life and death and resurrection that Easter represents.  Lent gives us 40 days to prepare our hearts, prepare our minds and to prepare our spirits, to re-experience the joy of Easter.  All of us have times in our lives that we feel distant and far away from God, and Lent offers us the opportunity to explore this separation, and to grow closer to our Creator. 

Lent begins in the wilderness.  Lent has often been equated with a wilderness journey.  It is not only in our Christian story that we find the wilderness as a place of learning, refinement and deep encounter with God – our Hebrew ancestor’s  lived forty years in the wilderness, learning how to be a people of God no longer slaves to the Egyptians.  Moses spent 40 days on a mountain and found God in 10 commandments.  Elijah spent 40 days in a desert and searching everywhere for God and eventually found God in a still small voice.  Ancient civilizations of all ilk use wilderness time as refinement and growth time.  Think about vision quests that our Native brothers go on as an initiation ceremonies, or walk about that aboriginal people of Australia have journeyed on.  Rebecca Lyman writes:  “Our modern attraction to wilderness is often the heightening and clarification of self through natural beauty in the absence of civilization, but in the Bible wilderness is not a national park, but a place of isolation and death. Infested with demons and seemingly without God, this untamed and unknown place was entered only at great risk. To be in the “wild” is where one can become lost and die. This is the root of our word “bewildered,” which goes back to the physical and emotional state of being lost. 

And this is the place that Jesus goes to today.  We have jumped back in time from the mountain top transfiguration experience of Jesus we read about last week, and are now at the beginning of his public life.  He has just be baptized by his cousin in the Jordan and still wet from that encounter, he goes out or is driven out into the desert, into the wilderness.  The next 40 days and nights are his pilgrimage, his crossing from a life of obscurity to public ministry, from life as just another regular person living in the ancient Mediterranean world, to becoming a popular preacher and healer that attracts so many people to hear him that he becomes a threat to the religious authorities of his day and eventually leads him to the cross.   Wilderness is the place he goes to clarify his vision, his vocation, his purpose, and his relationship with God.  The place where he goes and encounters temptations – the temptation to leave who he is and what he knows about himself and God.  

David Lose writes:  while the “content” of the devil’s temptations include the capacity to turn stones to bread, call upon angels for safety, and the promise of power and dominion, each again is primarily about identity. Notice that the devil begins by trying to undermine the identity Jesus had just been given at his baptism in the previous scene. “If you are the son of God,” that is, functions to call that identity into question. As with his exchange with Adam and Eve, the devil seeks to rob Jesus of his God-given identity and replace it with a false one of his own manufacture.

Notice, too, that Jesus resists this temptation not through an act of brute force or sheer will, but rather by taking refuge in an identity founded and secured through his relationship with God, a relationship that implies absolute dependence on God and identification with all others. Jesus will be content to be hungry as others are hungry, dependent on God’s Word and grace for all good things. He will be at risk and vulnerable as are all others, finding safety in the promises of God. And he will refuse to define himself or seek power apart from his relationship with God, giving his worship and allegiance only to the Lord God who created and sustains him.” (David Lose:  Dear Working Preacher)

So where are our wildernesses, what are our temptations?  Very few of us will ever get the opportunity to take a month and a half and go out into the bush alone.  Our lives do not permit it.  Yet we all have had wilderness time, wilderness moments. The wilderness is more than a place on a map, it is also a place inside ourselves, places of barrenness, places of loneliness, places of fear, of hopelessness, of sadness, and focus.   Maybe it looked like a hospital waiting room to you, or empty apartment or house you moved to after your relationship failed, or the empty rooms in your house after your youngest child headed out to independence.  Maybe it was that empty place inside, that happened after you lost your beloved partner.  Sometimes wilderness is a grey bleak place within ourselves that seems impossible to get out of and you have no idea how you ended up there in the first place.  Barbara Brown Taylor  “Wildernesses come in so many shapes and sizes that the only way you can really tell you are in one is to look around for what you normally count on to save your life and come up empty.  No food.  No earthly power.  No special protection--just a Bible-quoting devil and a whole bunch of sand.

Needless to say, this is not a situation many of us seek.  Most of us, in fact, spend a lot of time and money trying to stay out of it; but I don't know anyone who succeeds at that entirely or forever.  Sooner or later, every one of us will get to take our own wilderness exam, our own trip to the desert to discover who we really are and what our lives are really about.

But – and here is the hope, here is the grace, here is the love:  There is God, in the midst of wilderness, in the midst of sorrow, grief, and the depression and the anger, and the fear and the loneliness – there is God.   

"Go to the place called barren, 

Stand in the place called empty. 

And you will find God there." (author unknown)

The Spirit of God breathes everywhere within you, just as in the beginning, filling light place and dark…green earth and dry. Thus does God renew the face of the earth. God always breaks through at your weakest point, where you least resist. God’s love grows, fullness upon fullness, where you crumble enough to give what is most dear

Where are our wildernesses?  Where are the places that we come to the end of our own resources and we need to let go of the presumed control and open ourselves to the angles that will minister to us -   This is the gift of wilderness.  This is our journey with God.  

I am not promising that this journey into lent / into the wilderness will be easy or comfortable – but I am promising or more to the point – what God is promising is:   challenge and purpose, hope and love, and most of all companionship for the journey, grace in the midst of struggle, guidance in all things and hope for the future.  As we share in a moment the sacred food – taste the nourishment for that will sustain you on your wilderness wanderings.  With promises like that how can you not trust the unknown and walk with confidence out into the wilderness, trusting that you are never alone, that God is with us....Thanks be to God.  Amen.