Poolesville Presbyterian Church
03.08.15; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Luke 4:1-13
LISTEN TO AUDIO HERE:
“Lead us not into temptation,” goes the next little snippet of prayer, which is a funny thing, considering the society in which we live.
Because our culture is all about temptation. It is the driving force underlying so much of our economic system. Temptation is what we live and breathe. Temptation forms and shapes so many of our interactions, so much of what we see and who we are. We have a hard enough time keeping ourselves focused, even in the absence of countless inputs stirring our hungers. Getting us to want things...advertising and marketing...is an almost 200 billion dollar industry in the United States alone. The ad industry, with its heady blend of sex and power and hunger and fear, all blended up and mixed together, are all a huge part of who we are.
But temptation? As a thing, it goes deeper than that, deeper than the shallow manipulations of marketing and advertising.
It’s hard, and I feel it, that temptation, whenever I try to make a positive shift in my existence. When I made the commitment to get myself healthy again a couple of years back, it seemed basic enough. Just eat less and exercise more. So simple. So easy. But the patterns of us, the routines that we establish through years of writing and re-writing and doing and re-doing? They aren’t so easily undone.
When we try to shift them, to move down a new path, to set old ways aside? Those old ways fight back.
Hunger and fear, sex and power and pleasure? All of these things play and shimmer across our consciousness in a hundred different ways.
For the last several years, I’ve tried to keep on track, to eat healthily, but as I sat in Starbucks, it teases me with things that sound delicious. “Sip a sweet escape,” the sign whispers at me, with pictures of some sweet creamy caramel caffeinated concoction. Oh, the delicious alliteration. Oh, the temptation, as rich as the smell of Cinnabon that they pump into the mall whenever I have the ill fortune to go there, the siren song of scent, calling us to crash onto the caloric rocks. Or there’s the pizza, whose carbs and cheese are rendered magically healthy by the addition of vegetables.
I try to write, try to live into my gifts so that I’m being creative, or just live into that simple satisfaction of getting things done. But there’s Facebook with so many of the people I know sharing their lives and whatever silly thing might have distracted the world today. There’s Twitter, with those neat little lists I’ve created that show me the things in the world I most enjoy. And I click, and I like, and you comment, and suddenly an hour has passed, and you’ve gotten precisely nothing done besides reading a comment thread or watching videos or taking stupid little quizzes.
I try to stay on the path I’ve set for myself this Lenten season, not just of prayer, but of setting aside pointless pleasures, those habits that are simply habits, neither mortal sins nor meaningful. For me, for years, that means marking the season with an absence of alcohol. For me, it’s not and has never been addiction, not a pathology with which I struggle mightily and desperately. It’s just those beers, a couple of them, or a glass or three of wine, which warm my evenings. A pattern, nothing more. Just a habit, a simple thing.
But even in that, I feel it those first few weeks, like an itch in a phantom limb. I want to pop open that IPA as I make dinner. When I sit down for a family dinner, I want the taste of that nice merlot--oaky, with a tones of elderberry and...mmm, what is that flavor...a hint of warm outgassing esthers from the green vinyl front seat of a brand new 1972 Dodge Polara. Mmmm. I feel myself wanting that flavor, even though I’ve committed to mark the time with that change in myself. That hunger is there, that taste in my mind, challenging me to be something other than the person I’ve committed myself to being.
And that--small as it is--represents the essence of temptation, the heart of why it is such a dark part of us. It is that thing that draws us towards the thing we want the very most in this moment, towards the thing we want the most right now. It is our heart’s desire. It’s what we want.
That wanting has nothing to do with who we are as a person. It does not mirror our aspirations for ourselves. It does not reflect healthy relationships with others. When we strive towards building ourselves up as a person, we are “integrating” ourselves, which is just a fancy way of saying that we have integrity. We have set that self before us that we strive towards, and we are committed to moving towards it. Temptation? That can test and temper us, sure. But it can also be what disintegrates us, breaking us apart, leaving us a squiggly, aimless mess of hunger and anger and soul-emptiness.
There is no subtler, more powerful curse to place on an enemy than this: may you get everything your heart desires.
So we ask God, in this most basic of prayers: Don’t lead us there. Don’t place temptation before us. Wait, what? God’s doing this? God is the one we’re asking to not connect us with temptation? Huh. This is odd. It gets odder.
Here, we get word from Luke, the story that begins our Lenten season, of how Jesus wanders out into the desert to be tempted. This is doubly odd, because, well, generally we don’t think of a desert wasteland as the kind of place that is filled with temptation. For that we’d typically think of Vegas, or New Orleans, or some seedy back alley in Bangkok. But the desert? As a place to check yourself for temptation? It seems strange.
And yet it is the desert where Jesus seeks temptation, actively looks for it. He is called to it, to test whether he is who he says he is, or whether he will fall short. Human beings do not need outside influences to test them. For that, he only needs to be in connection with himself.
Jesus was most surely aware that the test of our commitment lies not in the external pressures and choices that surround us. The most profound test rests in ourselves, in our fundamental nature as persons. If you carry with yourself hungers, they’ll be with you just as completely in the desert as they are in Coldstone Creamery. If you carry with yourself the desire for power, it will ride you just as strongly when you’re in solitude as it will when you interact with others.
Those parts of us that we do not want to rule us, that are set against the best self we know we have the capacity to be? They are with us everywhere. Jesus, in that place where everything else was swept aside, was tested, and sought that testing out.
But wait...isn’t that a good thing? I mean, seriously. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do, to seek out those places that test us to be sure that we’re actually the people we claim to be? Isn’t that kind of the whole reason behind this season of Lent? A time of testing, when we press ourselves to prove our commitment?
Yet in this prayer, we are acknowledging that those times when we test and challenge our faith are hard on us. All of us can bear up under it for a while, but to be blunt? Those times of testing are not something we generally seek out. Jesus certainly did in the desert, but that wasn’t his hardest test. His hardest test came later, not the test that comes at the beginning of this season but the test that comes at the end of it.
And when he was in the garden of Gethesemane, alone and realizing what was to come, he was perfectly within his rights to not be eagerly looking forward to it. To ask, as he taught us to pray, that he not be led into that time of trial.
Sometimes, of course, we have to go there.
But it is perfectly fine, perfectly within our right, to ask, simply: insofar as it can be so, can you not test me more than I can bear right now? Can you not lay out my fears and angers and hungers before me?
And as we know those things, and as we ask, we remember not to do it ourselves.
Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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