Temptation

I had the day off and so I did not preach. Instead I sat in the pews at an 8 am service in Worcester - which is, for me, a real gift. We prayed The Great Litany and the sermon was terrific. (And I was on my way by 9 am!) The reflections offered below are a very lightly edited version of a sermon I preached at St. Francis Church in Holden a dozen years ago for anyone who may be interested. (RMS)

We don’t talk a lot about the devil in the Episcopal Church. And to be honest, I think it’s a little creepy when Christians become more focused on the devil than on God. But if your theology doesn’t include some awareness of evil (and the Evil One) then not only will today’s gospel reading not make very much sense, but at some level the entire Christian gospel doesn’t make much sense either. If all was right with the world and in our own lives and we could just pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, then we wouldn’t need a Savior and the forty-day season of Lent could be replaced with a week-long self-help seminar.

It is our practice on the first Sunday of Lent to begin with The Great Litany, one of the most ancient prayers of the Church. That prayer assumes the devil’s existence. We pray to be delivered from “all evil and wickedness…from sin, from the crafts and assaults of the devil and from everlasting damnation.” (BCP 148) We also pray that it might please God to raise us up when we fall and finally to give us strength to “beat down Satan under our feet.” (BCP 152) 

What does all of this mean?

If you think of the devil as a guy in a red suit who sits on your shoulder to tempt you to do things you aren’t supposed to do (as opposed to the little angel who sits on the opposite shoulder to encourage you to eat your vegetables and get plenty of rest and exercise) then it’s pretty easy to dismiss the devil. In fact such talk starts to sound ridiculous. We need to let go of such images. 

Yet if we aren’t careful we may be left with no language or images to wrestle with some of the hardest existential and theological questions. "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist,” wrote the French poet, Baudelaire.

I’ve quoted before the line from the film Broadcast News as one place to start in finding a way to put a name to this—the scene where  the character played by Albert Brooks turns to Holly Hunter and says:

Come on, no one's going to be taken in by a guy with a long red pointy tail.  [The devil] will be attractive, he'll be nice, and helpful, he'll get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation. He'll never do an evil thing, he'll never deliberately hurt a living thing - he'll just bit by little bit lower our standards where they're important. Just a tiny little bit. Just coax along flash  over substance. Just a tiny little bit.

Another place to turn is to C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters. If you’ve never read it, then I commend it to you this Lent. But be forewarned: it’s not an easy read. Over the years I’ve recommended this book to many people and most of them, when they finally do sit down and read it, experience it as more than a little bit disconcerting But I’ve been hanging around here long enough now so that every now and again someone will say something to me like this: “I read that book like five years ago and hated it; I couldn’t believe you wanted me to read it. But over time I’ve really come to appreciate it and am glad that I read it.”

Part of what that book does is to provide us with a way to think about the devil and the insidious nature of evil that is more serious and Biblical and less cartoonish. And along the way, that can lead us to a deeper understanding about temptation, as more than simply being tempted to do some terrible thing. Sometimes the greatest evils are committed by people who believe they are acting from the purest of motivations. Screwtape is about how the devil can use even good things and our best intentions (including Christian congregations) and twist them into that which hurts and destroys the creatures of God. The point that Lewis is making, I think, is that evil is real and the devil relies on half-truths and naïve motivations to cause the greatest harm.

This raises a very subtle but important point about temptation. Sometimes we are tempted to do things that we know instinctively are wrong. Like many of you I watched Tiger Woods make his public confession on Friday. It’s not up to me to judge whether he was sincere or not, or whether or not his wife ought to forgive him. But taking him at his word, his temptations were in one sense the easiest kind to identify: he said that he was tempted to do what he knew in his heart was wrong. I have little doubt that most of us here today can identify with that kind of temptation—the temptation to act in ways that we know instinctively are wrong. Sometimes, by the grace of God, we are able to resist such temptations and other times we succumb. When that happens we again rely on the grace of God; confessing our sins and asking for forgiveness and trying to make amends to those whom we have hurt.

But what I hope you will notice today with me is that this isn’t the only kind of temptation that people face and in some ways it isn’t the hardest kind either. In today’s gospel reading, we see that the temptations that Jesus faced in the wilderness are quite different: he is not tempted to do things that are so obviously wrong. In fact, none of these things are bad things: feeding the hungry, becoming king of kings and lord of lords, putting his whole trust in God.  The problem here is not in the actions themselves, but in taking shortcuts, in wanting Easter without Lent, in wanting holiness without suffering.

The temptations aren’t about the things the Devil is offering Jesus but about how to get there and on whose terms. What is brilliant about this gospel narrative is that it reminds us that evil isn’t always (or even mostly) black and white. It’s not like an old Western where it’s obvious who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. Very often the devil relies on subtle manipulation of the good and co-opting the truth; lowering our standards and inviting us to take short-cuts. 

So as Luke recalls the story, Jesus is destined for great things. He has just been baptized by John the Baptist at the Jordan River and the voice of God has claimed him as “beloved Son.” On the heels of that holy event, we now see him in the Judean Desert, fasting for forty days to ponder the meaning of his Baptism. The wilderness and his resistance to temptation becomes a pathway to discernment and discovery. Jesus is there to ponder the meaning of his life, his call to serve God, and how best to use his gifts to do the work God has given him to do. He is there to listen for the voice of God among the many competing voices vying for attention:  the voice of his own ego-needs, the voice of the devil, the voices of the various expectations other people have of him. Sorting through all of that requires some awareness of what is of God and what is of the devil, what is holy and what is demonic. Or if that language scares you then try this: discerning between those actions that will bring life and those that will distort reality and lead to death.

It’s important that we not let our images of the devil get in the way of seeing that this is what is happening for Jesus: he is led into the wilderness to be tested. He isn’t being tempted to be something other than messiah: the devil agrees with him that this is his calling. The question Jesus faces is not whether or not he is the messiah but about “what kind of messiah” is he called to be? That isn’t an easy question to answer because within the Jewish tradition there were many different answers to that question. Discernment is about sorting out that truth, about interpreting Scripture and tradition in a new and unique context. It becomes clear early on in Luke’s Gospel where all of this is leading and the temptations that Jesus faces in the Judean wilderness are the same ones he’ll face right up until the very last night of his earthly life; the devil just waits for opportune times to return. Bu as Jesus resists the devil’s temptations he grows stronger and clearer. (I think our experience is similar.)

The temptations that Jesus faces are unique to his own vocation. You and I aren’t going to face those same temptations because we aren’t called to be messiahs. But asking such hard questions is wilderness work that Jesus models for us. And that is, I think, what Lent is for and the reason why the Church devotes roughly 1/10 of the liturgical year (forty out of 365 days) to asking these kinds of questions. We are here once again to consider the meaning of our own Baptism by listening for the voice of God in the wilderness. We do well to notice that sometimes it is not our weaknesses but our strengths that the devil uses against us.

If we find ourselves this Lent in the midst of a time of trial, our temptation may well be to try to find the quickest way out of that place. But what if we can ask a deeper question: “how might this time of trial that we are facing become a pathway toward clarifying who we are and who God is calling us to become?” If we can do that, there are gifts to be received in this holy season. When we do face temptation and times of trial, can we allow them to lead us—as they clearly led Jesus—to spiritual growth and a more discerning spirit and a new sense of resolve and a more mature faith? Is it possible that hidden inside of temptations there are opportunities to gain clarity around what our Baptism requires of us and then begin to live more fully out of that reality, with God’s help?

I think that at least one way to engage in that process more deeply is to immerse ourselves in the study of Holy Scripture, one of the disciplines of Lent that we were invited to on Ash Wednesday. Notice in today’s gospel how well the devil can quote Scripture! That’s a reminder that merely quoting the Bible is not genuine discernment and can even be rather dangerous. Because Scripture is complex and multi-faceted, we can no doubt find a verse in Scripture to justify just about anything we want to do.  But we are called to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest God’s Word—to wrestle with Scripture—which as you know ultimately points beyond itself to Christ. The “Word of God” for Christians is not the words written on the pages of the Bible, but Jesus himself, the Word-made-flesh.

Today’s Old Testament reading and all of the verses that Jesus himself quotes from Scripture to resist the devil come from the Book of Deuteronomy, the fifth and final book of the Torah. That great book is set in the eleventh month of the thirty-ninth year of Israel’s forty-year sojourn through the Sinai Desert. Moses is doing a retrospective on all of the lessons that the people of Israel learned from their forty years wandering around the Sinai Peninsula. The main thesis of that entire book is that the wilderness was a place where Israel learned who God was calling them to become as they left the patterns of slavery behind in Egypt and prepared to live as a people after God’s own heart in the Promised Land. Jesus goes into the Judean wilderness for the same reasons: to wrestle with big questions and to emerge on the other side stronger and wiser and clearer about his purpose. My prayer is that this season of Lent may do the same for us—not only as individuals but as a congregation committed to serving Christ in this time and place.