“If you are the Son of God…”
“If you bow down and worship me…”
“If you are the Son of God…”
Three temptations. At their core they
challenge identity – Jesus’ sense of
self, his self-understanding, his acceptance of who God proclaimed him to be at
his baptism. And they challenge allegiance
– who or what is most important to him.
Put succinctly, the temptations raise two basic questions: Who are you?
and Whose are you?
In his book The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis reminds us the devil
is, if nothing else, an opportunist, but it would be a mistake to think this
wilderness event is a kind of drive-by temptation; a quick attack and
retreat. The text tells us the Spirit
“led” Jesus into the wilderness, “where for forty days he was tempted by the
devil.” The verb form used here for to
tempt is a present, passive participle, which means the action is ongoing,
continuous. Jesus is being tempted in
wilderness throughout the forty days. At
the same time he is being led by the Spirit; the form of to lead is passive,
imperfect which also implies continual, ongoing action.
So as Jesus is being tempted he is being led and as he is being led he is
being tempted. He experiences both
simultaneously, as we do. As we are
living into who we are we are being tempted to be someone we are not. And as we are staying true to whose we are,
we are being tempted to belong to something or someone else.
The
Presbyterian minister and popular writer Frederick Buechner makes this
observation:
After being baptized by John in the river Jordan, Jesus went off alone
into the wilderness where he spent forty days asking himself the question what
it meant to be Jesus. During Lent,
Christians are supposed to ask one way or another what it means to be
themselves.
So who are you? It seems like a
simple, straightforward question, doesn’t it.
You can answer in any number of different ways. You can tell me you name, where you are from,
and what you do in life. You can tell me
about your parents, siblings, spouse, children, and extended family. You can show me your driver’s license and
give me your Social Security number. All
of these things tell me something about who you are, but they are not what I am
asking for. Who are you – the ‘you’
uniquely created by God to be. Just as
no two snowflakes are the same, neither are any two human beings. There is only one you.
Who are you?
What energizes you?
What drains you?
When do you feel most alive?
When do you feel most loved?
What do you do that gives you deep satisfaction?
If you could do anything – anything at all – with
the rest of your day, what would you do?
What was the greatest risk you took in life that
led to the deepest payoff?
When do you feel useful?
What experiences cultivated in you a sense of
self-worth?
When and how do you experience authentic communion
with God?
How is your life oriented around the reality of
God?
These, and questions like these, have answers, but typically not at the
ready. We have to sit with them over
time – perhaps forty days – in order for an authentic response to emerge. It is from what emerges you can begin to
answer the question of identity – who am I?
I am looking forward to our Wednesday evenings in Lent as we use a
resource called “Growing a Rule of Life”, which was created by the Society of
St. John the Evangelist, an Episcopal monastic community in Boston. Typically, most of us are not looking for any
more rules to follow than we already have, but monastics use the word rule
in a different way. For them a rule of
life is “a plan, discerned over time, to cultivate practices that lead to
flourishing of body, mind, and soul.”
I suspect every person here unknowingly follows some kind of a rule of
life. I suspect you have an established
routine you follow over the course of the day.
You get up, make a cup of coffee, and check the internet while eating a
piece of chocolate. You clean up, dress
up, and get off to work in much the same way Monday through Friday. Work has its own established routines, even
if there is little about the day you control.
You come home at night, settle down, and settle in in a way that has its
own established patterns.
These patterns (called practices in the monastic tradition) have
a way of shaping who and whose we are.
They emerge over time and develop out of our specific context. For most of us, our practices have come into
being unintentionally, not as a result of thoughtful discernment to aid who we
want to be. As a result, the ongoing
experience of being tempted looks like drifting along through life in the same
old way, never knowing who we are and doing little to live into whose we are.
I have said before how much I appreciated the gift of the conference I
attended in November where we were given the time, space, and guidance to
discover ourselves again. I identified
many things I already knew about myself and landed on a couple of new
insights.
Here is something I already knew: I am not one for large, social
gatherings. Crowded parties with voices
all around me, people standing shoulder to shoulder, moving from one
conversation to another, is not my thing.
However, I really enjoy small, intimate gatherings with family and
friends. I recognized that, other than
evening meetings at the church, I live largely alone so I set a goal to
cultivate intimacy in my life. Who am
I? I am a person who prefers intimacy to
crowds. I committed to four practices to
live into this aspect of who I am:
Once a week I make a lunch appointment with a clergy
colleague, even if I have to drive several hours for it to happen.
I invite 5-7 people to my house on Friday evenings
from 5:00-7:00 PM.
I set out but have yet to join or create a clergy
group for mutual exploration and support.
I adopted a dog.
These practices form a part of my new rule of life. They support who I am. I will want to revisit my rule from time to
time to see how I am doing with it. Have
I drifted away from it and, in the process, lost something of who I am? Are there new practices I can cultivate to
lead to a greater flourishing of my body, mind, and soul?
“Jesus went off alone into the wilderness where he spent forty days
asking himself the question what it meant to be Jesus. During Lent, Christians are supposed to ask
one way or another what it means to be themselves.” Someone once said if you can’t answer the
question “who are you?” the world will give you an answer. The single most difficult, ongoing temptation
we face is to define who we are in ways others or the world wants us to be, as
opposed to being who God created us to be.
I was given several tasks to complete prior to going to the conference I
attended last fall. One was to work
through a booklet titled Becoming Ourselves Again. Let me conclude this sermon with the first
two sentences in it:
When we get in touch with what truly matters to us, we discover what
makes us most alive.
When we find that which rests at our core and gives us life, we
rediscover the value God intended in us and for us.
I invite
you into the wilderness of Lent to search yourself as Jesus searched himself –
to learn who you are and to learn whose you are.
