Advent Lutheran Church

"Jesus' Temptation - and Ours (Lent 1)"

            Grace and peace to you from God the Creator and the Lord Jesus.  Amen.

            It would make things so much easier if the devil would just wear a nametag.  Really, if he simply walked up to us and said, “Good morning, I’m here to ruin your life.  Can we talk?”  Most of us, on most days, would have the resources within us to say, “No!”  But the sinister quality of temptation is that it never presents itself to us as bad for us.

            Experts in the field of biology that deals with fungi tell us that the ‘Amanita phalloides’ is the most beautiful of all mushrooms.  It has a smooth, cream-colored cap; is perfectly shaped; and it also reportedly tastes delicious.  The only problem with the ‘Amanita phalloides’ is that it is highly poisonous: there is no known antidote for its toxin, and it has proven to be fatal in 70 percent of those who have eaten it.  And yet people continue to harvest it in the wild and, unawares, consume it – because it looks so good.

            The tree in the middle of the Garden of Eden looked so good.  This story of Adam and Eve and the Garden is one of the best-known stories in the Bible.  It shows up in literature, in music, in art; and it is used to illustrate original sin, our disobedience to God, our separation from God, and the beginning of the reason for Jesus the Savior.  But it is also extremely compelling as an illustration of what it means simply to be human.

            God sets the stage for creation by forming the first man.  He then plants a garden for the man and places him in it, so that it might be his home and his livelihood.  Then he creates the animals of the field, the birds of the air, the cattle.  And then, when he has all of that creating experience under his belt, he sets about creating his crowning achievement, his masterpiece: God creates woman!  (There’s a certain demographic of our population that really likes that interpretation of the creation story, so there you go.)

            Often, when things are going well and someone asks us, “How are you?”, we respond, “Ah, life is good!”  For Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, life was good, in the purest sense.  They were literally in paradise.  They knew no need, no want; their lives were lives of peace and abundance and purpose.

            And yet, in the midst of this paradise, Adam and Eve are incomplete, insufficient unto themselves.  They have not generated all that they enjoy.  What they experience comes to them from outside of themselves, from God, a source that they do not and cannot control.  By themselves, Adam and Eve are limited.  It is this limitation, this incompleteness, that the serpent spots and then exploits, and he does it by calling into question God’s trustworthiness.

“Eve, God has not told you everything.  More is available to you, and that ‘more’ can be yours.  When it is, then you will have wholeness, then you will be complete, then you will be self-sufficient.  And it is all within your reach!”

When the serpent names what they do not have, he highlights it; they focus on it; and it becomes the driving force of their lives. 

Blaise Pascal was a French philosopher in the 17^th Century, and he wrote about the human condition.  One of the things he wrote about was the idea that each of us has within ourselves a God-shaped hole, but he didn’t see that hole as a liability or a negative; in fact, he saw it as the means by which we and God maintained our relationship with one another.  Centuries earlier, Saint Augustine, a bishop of the Church, made much the same observation when he wrote about a kind of restlessness that churns within each of us.  He turned it into a prayer: “Our hearts are restless, O God, until they find their rest in you.”  It is only in God that we find completeness.

I have a colleague in Pennsylvania, a pastor, who said that after a worship service one Sunday morning he was standing at the door, shaking hands with his parishioners, when a woman came up and took his hand in both of hers and, with a look of desperation, said, “Craig, I want you to pray for me.  The partners in my law firm are voting this week on whether I will get to be a partner in the firm, and I want you to pray that I make partner.”

My colleague said, “Sure, I’ll do that.”  But later on, as he reflected on that exchange, he said, “What I should have said was, ‘Let’s have a cup of coffee this week.’  Because it’s my job,” he said, “to find out why she’s so desperate to be a partner in her law firm.  Is it because it’s a cool job and she’d be really good at it and get a lot of satisfaction out of it?  In which case, great.  But I know this woman fairly well, and I know that what she’s looking for is an identity; and the identity of a partner in a law firm isn’t going to be any more satisfying for her than any of the several identities that she’s already tried.  And it’s my job as her pastor to make sure that her identity is in Christ.”

At the heart of the temptation of Jesus is the suggestion that Jesus can and should establish his identity apart from God.  Did you notice how the first two temptations start?  They start with that little word “if.”  “If you are the Son of God, … .”  The serpent encourages doubt, mistrust in Jesus’ connection with God.

“Jesus, God hasn’t told you to turn stones into bread, but wouldn’t it be good to know that you actually can?

“God hasn’t told you to jump from the highest point of the temple here in Jerusalem, but he’s told you in Scripture that he’ll make sure you don’t get injured; wouldn’t it be good to actually know that he’ll show up when you really need him?

“In fact, Jesus, why don’t you just shift your allegiance from him to me?  It would be so easy, and the payoff would be so huge!”

All of these temptations have at their core one temptation: for Jesus to be complete on his own.  But Jesus’ response – actually, he turns these temptations into a positive – is to even more strongly emphasize his relationship with God and to confirm his dependence on this One whose voice he has just heard in his baptism: “This is my Son, the Beloved.”  Jesus knows who he is by remembering who he belongs to.

Jesus’ story, coupled with the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, teach us an essential truth: part of what it means to be human is to realize that we are not complete in and of ourselves, that we lack wholeness; and that that’s the way it’s supposed to be.  It is to realize that we carry within us a kind of emptiness that we will always be restless to fill.  And that restlessness opens us up and makes us vulnerable to temptation.

Adam and Eve experienced that restlessness, and they decided that the forbidden fruit was just the right shape and size to fill their emptiness.  And when they ate of that fruit they quickly discovered that the emptiness was still there.  The question for us on this first Sunday in the season of Lent is this: what are the things that present themselves to us as being just the right shape and size to fill the lack of wholeness that we experience in our lives?  New career, new car, new house, new spouse?  These things might promise to make us less lonely, more secure; but they simply can’t deliver.

Some research in the fields of advertising and consumer spending can shed some light here.  Historically, we consumers have spent our money primarily on products to make our lives more physically efficient, products that responded to our desire to “do life bigger, better, faster.”  So we poured out our money on a variety of conveniences from electric washing machines to Velcro to humanoid robotics.  The goal was physical efficiency.

More recently, there has been a shift – a broadening, really – in our spending patterns, and it’s connected directly to the recession.  People who track these trends tell us that we’ve moved from what they call “thoughtless consumption” to “calculated consumption”: we’re saving more and spending less; and what we’re spending money on has shifted from stuff to experiences.  We’ve shifted our priority from physical efficiency to emotional efficiency.  Researchers report that spending our money on experiences produces longer-lasting satisfaction than spending it on things.

In 2008, at the height of the recession, Wal Mart realized that its customers were “cocooning”: they were spending more evenings at home, having family dinners, organizing game nights.  So Wal Mart responded by regrouping the items in their stores.  Now, you could turn your den into a grand theater; you could turn your backyard into a little piece of the Rockies.  They weren’t selling barbecue grills and board games anymore; now they were selling experiences.

And at the heart of those experiences – what made them valuable and meaningful and gave us happiness and a sense of well-being – was not so much the activities themselves but the relationships that we enjoyed with the people who joined us in those activities.  It’s about relationship, about our connection with others.

That very human observation points us toward a divine truth: our complete wholeness is to be found only in union with the One who has created us.  Temptations call to us and promise what they can’t deliver, and they can’t deliver because we are by nature and design incomplete, created by God with a God-shaped hole that can be filled only by God in heaven. 

This side of eternity, that hole is filled by grace.

We all are aware of the terrible devastation that Japan has suffered because of the earthquake and tsunami of last week.  It will be some time before the true extent of that tragedy becomes known, both in terms of human life lost and physical destruction.  A friend of mine has been watching the media reports coming from Japan, and she is very troubled by what she is seeing.  She wonders if this is a sign of what some people call “the end times.”  The book of Revelation speaks about what those days will be like, the turmoil and destruction; and Jesus himself speaks about the mass chaos that will accompany his second coming at the end of time.  My friend wonders if we’re there now.  It’s enough to make her want to pull the covers up over her head.

But if we pull back a couple of steps and use a wide-angle lens on history, we realize that we have always been living in the end times.  There has never been a period in history when some event of catastrophic proportion hasn’t been happening somewhere on the planet.  Yes, these are days of preparation for the return of Christ – we have always been living in those days.  And indeed it can make us fearful; in fact, the great temptation in times like these is to be swept up into the grip of what Jesus tasted as he hung on the cross and cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” – the temptation to despair.

And yet it is exactly at those times, when we most vividly experience our lack of self-sufficiency, our lack of wholeness, when Jesus comes to us.  He stands beside us to be our strength when we have no strength, to be our courage when we have no courage; he comes to be grace for us.

My prayer for each of us is that we will discover that grace for ourselves this week, and in that grace find the strength to turn away from anything that would turn us away from God.  Amen.