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“To Be Tempted”, Jeff Wright, 3/9/14

“To Be Tempted”

A sermon preached at

Heart of the Rockies

Christian Church

(Disciples of Christ)

Fort Collins, Colorado

March 9, 2014

The story of Jesus’ temptation is a meditation on the practice of faithful living in contexts that want to seduce. I think that as this story comes up in the lectionary, it is profoundly pertinent to our time and place with God. Everybody knows, liberal and conservative, that ours is a time of cheapening and thinning and forgetting and accommodating, until our power to be freely and faithfully human is too difficult and too demanding. The church is the place where we reflect on and decide to be differently human.

Walter Brueggemann,

Texts: Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7 & Matthew 4:1-11

The season of Lent has its roots in the Scriptures, as we’ll see in our Gospel lesson this morning, Mathew’s account of Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness. A time of prolonged introspection and prayer was already a tradition in Jesus’ day, going back as far as the early days of the nation of Israel, where in the book of Exodus we read of Moses’ forty day fast on Mt. Sinai (34:28). During Lent, we acknowledge that our vocation as Christians is not merely to trace Jesus’ footsteps historically – to dispassionately learn about his spiritual journey – but to lace on the sandals of faith and walk with Jesus to our own Jerusalem and the cross that awaits us there, in the hope that there’s new life beyond the grave: the graves we dig for ourselves and the graves into which life can deliver us. This morning, at the outset of our Lenten journey, we join Jesus in the wilderness of temptation, both his and ours. [Matthew 4:1-11]

I want to begin by pointing to three misconceptions so that we can sweep them away early on. Otherwise, they’ll get in our way this morning. The first regards Jesus being tempted. Many Christians have a hard time imagining that the Son of God could have experienced temptation. A lot of Christians think of Jesus as a kind of Superman. They think that when things got tough for Jesus he ran into a first-century phone booth and came out supernaturally changed, “able to leap tall buildings, faster than a bullet and more powerful than a speeding locomotive.” That’s not what we’re told in the Bible. Jesus was as vulnerable as we are. Episcopal priest Robert Capon puts it like this: “Jesus was born among us as Clark Kent; he lived among us as Clark Kent; he died as Clark Kent; and he came forth from the tomb as Clark Kent – not some alien hotshot in blue tights who, at the crucial moment [a moment when the rest of us would faint dead away], junked his Clark Kentness in favor of some out-of-this-world way of being (Kingdom, p.40).” Jesus was vulnerable to all of our weaknesses and limitations: hunger, thirst, exhaustion, illness, and temptation. We can believe the Bible when it says that Jesus was tempted.

Which brings me to a second misconception, about temptation itself. The word is often thought to be synonymous with weakness or questionable character. But Disciples preacher Fred Craddock invites us to see that “Temptation isn’t a measure of weakness; it’s a measure of strength (Craddock, Cherry Log, p.16).” Weak character is seldom tempted. “The stronger you are, the more capable you are, the more opportunity you have, the more power and influence you have, the greater will be your temptation (Craddock, Cherry Log, p.16).” Craddock writes this about Jesus’ temptation. He says, “There is nothing here of debauchery but rather the attraction of upward mobility. No self-respecting devil would approach a person with offers of personal, domestic and social ruin. That’s in the small print at the bottom of the temptation.” You’ll recall in our reading from the account in Genesis that the Tempter in Eden didn’t ask Eve and Adam, “Do you want to be like the devil?” The Tempter asked, “Do you want to be like God?”

Which brings me to a third misconception, about the devil. The reality of evil is too easily dismissed when we picture its incarnation in a red suit with a pitch-fork tail. I’m pretty confident that we’d find it easy to refuse that tempter, even if he showed up in a suit with a business card with the title Satan written across the face of it. The reality of evil is more insidious and deceptive, temptation too. That’s why I don’t picture the Evil One there in the wilderness with Jesus. I’m not sure what Matthew pictures when he says that the tempter came to Jesus there in the wilderness.

But I see Jesus. Just Jesus. Jesus alone in the wilderness, alone with his thoughts in the heat of the day and the cold of night. This is a more sobering portrait to me: Jesus there in the wilderness, alone. Because this is how I experience the Evil One – in the voices that speak within offering alternatives, opportunities, possibilities. And the voices in our culture that tempt us to be something other than the beloved, created in the image of God.

In our reading, did you notice when Matthew said that Jesus was led into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit? Jesus was fresh from his baptism in the River Jordan, where when he came up out of the waters he saw heaven open and the Spirit of God descending like a dove upon him, and heard the voice of God, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” His ministry lay ahead of him. The Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness to be alone for a time, to imagine the opportunities and the challenges, and to choose between them. To decide about how he’d live, now, having received a standing ovation from God, having received the power of God’s Spirit, having been chosen for ministry in a hurting world.

This is what’s going on in the wilderness. God leaves us free to decide. Jesus is deciding how to go about his life, to be at work healing a broken world, to deliver humankind from the consequences of our sin into the arms of a loving God. He’s choosing how he’ll live his life from day to day. A person chooses. Every day, we make choices, momentous choices.

A young adult was in my office, talking about the life he used to live and how he’s so grateful that God has turned his life around. He was imagining his future, all the opportunities that lay ahead of him, all the difficulties that lay behind him. He was relishing the joy of his new faith. I had to tell him. I didn’t want to tell him. But I had just read this morning’s text. I had an obligation to tell him. I said, “You think you were tempted before, but you’re just on the front end of temptation now that you’re putting God first in your life, now that you’re deciding to follow Jesus.” Because this is what temptation is all about. It’s about deciding what our life is going to look like now that God has assured us of his love, how we’re going to live our lives now – by way of God’s forgiveness and grace – in what Old Testament professor Walt Brueggemann describes as “a time of cheapening and thinning and forgetting and accommodating, until our power to be freely and faithfully human is too difficult and too demanding.” We put it like this around here: It’s our choosing to be not conformed to the world, but transformed by God’s love.

In the midst of life’s crises and opportunities – the little ones that come daily and the once-in-a-lifetime kind – we choose who we are and who we are becoming. Jesus never said it would be easy. We’ve been given the freedom, the awesome, terrible freedom to make choices that have enormous consequences in the world. All the while, human nature is complex, circumstances can be ambiguous, life is difficult, and God is a mystery. This is why we call it the wilderness of temptation.

You recall how Jesus responded to the temptations. He quoted scripture. Jesus reached back into the texts, the stories that had shaped the community in which he had been raised – a community that had taught him that ours is a God of love and that we are God’s beloved. Alone in the wilderness of temptation, of discerning and deciding, it turns out that Jesus wasn’t alone after all. Jesus was sustained and emboldened by the community that had shaped his understanding of God and God’s hope for the world, its beliefs and practices and their holy texts, the ways they lived their life together.

Yesterday, during our Tour of Life with the youth who are preparing to be baptized, we gathered for lunch around the Table here. Pizza, salad and lemonade, served from the Lord’s Table. Because we want to raise our kids to see that the believes and the practices and the texts we hold as holy have everything to do with their ordinary, everyday, coming-and-going lives, where they may hear the voice that assures them that they, too, are God’s beloved with whom God is well-pleased, this God of deep love who opens before them a life of great promise and joy.

This is why we gather as often as possible around this Table: to be reminded and sustained and emboldened, to share our stories about God’s loving intervention in our lives, to share our faith, to share ourselves. These resources are still quite adequate to shape a life, to shape a community, to shape a world.

Jeff Wright