It’s Tempting …

Luke 4:1-12; Ruth; Mark 1:12-13

February 24, 2013

It’s tempting to follow up that typically brief Markan reading with a long exposition on the differences between that version of the temptation of Jesus and the much longer, fuller version from Luke that served as our call to worship this morning.

It’s tempting, but I’ll simply say, to begin, let the remarkable difference between the two serve first as a reminder that gospel is not biography, and second as an invitation for your deeper reflection.

It’s tempting to stand up here on the second Sunday of Lent and pretend that just because I’ve spent enough time in the scholarly pursuit of analyzing the gospels to raise some good questions about the text that I also have the answers. It’s tempting, but I think I’ll stick with the questions.

It’s tempting to suggest that we’ve just ordained leaders – deacons and an elder – who bring with them all the answers to all the questions we face as a congregation. It’s tempting, but I’m not about to lay that burden on Toni, Ron and George … unless they want me to!

It’s tempting to pretend that we have all the answers. It’s tempting, but I find more comfort – more genuine, authentic, life-giving comfort in merely trying to do what the poet Rainer Maria Rilke suggested: learn to love the questions themselves.

Still, it’s tempting, especially on a Sunday morning when our young people are providing so much leadership, to imagine that we have answers to all of their questions today, and the ones that are sure to come tomorrow. It’s tempting, but I’ve been a parent long enough to know that I can’t even imagine just what the next question will be much less that I’ll have the answer.

It’s tempting to imagine having that much control over the future that one could anticipate what’s coming next all of the time.

It’s tempting to think that we might have such control because we have enough smarts in school or influence at work or achievement in rank or money in our bank or power from our weapons or beauty in our bodies, but it’s a false hope nonetheless. No amount of achievement, affluence, or appearance no smarts, influence, or power can bring any of us control over that most basic assertion of the season of Lent: we are dust, and to dust we shall return.

It’s tempting to think that we might somehow live outside of that circle, but if the circumstances of your own life haven’t already proved that basic truth – that we all live within the circle of our own mortality – then they will in time no matter how tempting it is to believe otherwise.

Heck, it’s tempting to think that we actually even understand the nature of the things that tempt us. The gospel writers put it in terms of demons and the devil, and we still use such figures to explain the demons that haunt us: drink, drugs, sex, power, money, images, control, busyness – the list just goes on and on.

It’s tempting to think that we can get to the end of that list … and triumph over it through the sheer act of our own will. That is the greatest temptation of them all, and the one about which Jesus has the most to teach us. For when he was tempted he did not respond out of the resources of his own considerable personality and individual giftedness. Instead, he turned to the resources of his faith: the word of God in the sacred scriptures of the people of God, his own steadfast trust in the One who created him and claimed him in the waters of baptism, and the community to which he turns immediately upon leaving the wilderness.

It’s tempting. So much that we encounter along the way is tempting. Jesus clearly understood this because he experienced it. It’s tempting, and when it gets that way Jesus invites us to follow a way of deep wisdom and faithfulness. That way, trod by many before us and filled even now with a great cloud of witnesses, points toward God: toward the heart that beats for love of us all from the center of all that is. For though the journey is fraught with temptation, the way is paved with love. Follow it, in the company of the children of God learning to dwell together faithfully in the questions of our time. Amen.