The First Sunday in Lent, February 25, 2007
St. Paul Lutheran Church, Albuquerque
Pastor Harold Nilsson
Luke 4:1-13 (Revised Common Lectionary, Series C)
It can happen in many places. But it’s special here in New Mexico. I’m thinking of being out in the desert. On a clear night. Away from the city lights. Perhaps at Ghost Ranch, beyond Abiquiu. You look up at the sky. And you marvel at the number of stars you can see with your naked eye. The sight is overwhelming. You learn a truth about the immensity of the universe unconstrained by competing urban lights. There is more than meets the city eye. Much more. There is a relationship, a synchronicity between wilderness and clarity. In the desert, what is true, or at least what is essential, often is easier to discern. Maybe that’s why Thoreau said “we need the tonic of the wilderness.”
That’s not to say that wilderness is friendly. The desert can be profoundly beautiful, but it’s indifferent to our survival. Kathleen Norris said in Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, where she writes about the sparse territory of the western Dakotas, “The Plains are not forgiving. Anything that is shallow—the easy optimism of a homesteader; the false hope that denies geography, climate, history; the tree whose roots don’t reach ground water – will dry up and blow away.”1 Surviving in the wilderness requires focusing on what is necessary and ignoring what doesn’t matter. It takes skill, patience, insight, and support.
In December 1935 the pilot and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was on a mail flight between Paris and Saigon when he crashed in the Libyan desert west of the Nile. He survived only because he had acquired the virtues of attentiveness and indifference. Over a period of three days he walked 124 miles without water through desert sands. He stumbled at last, half-dead, into the path of a remote Bedouin caravan. He had been told that no one could survive more than nineteen hours in the desert without water. What saved him were two things. First, he meticulously observed his surroundings. He noticed an unusual northeast wind, full of moisture, retarding the dehydration of his body and bringing a light dew he could collect on parachute silk. Second, he stubbornly ignored the panic, pain and despair that preyed on his mind. He learned to ignore everything unrelated to his main task of staying alive. Truth kept him. After this Saint-Exupéry never held romantic ideas about desert spirituality.2
Wilderness lies, of course, not only beyond the city. Wilderness may be any place of emptiness and solitude, sometimes with the added factor of fear. Think a soldier on patrol in Baghdad. Wilderness is before us, and within us. As some of us heard our bishop say the other day, if you are human, you have experienced wilderness.
Jesus, filled with the Spirit, was led by this Spirit into the wilderness. Luke is less malevolent than Mark, who claims that the Spirit drove him there. The Spirit lures Jesus into the desert west of the Jordan, perhaps to ponder what recently he had heard at his baptism: You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well-pleased. Did he wonder, “Is it so? What does that mean? Where will it take me?” Many have found fasting sharpens the mind. During those forty days Jesus no doubt separated in his mind the essentials of his identity from those things that would not matter. It was a time to probe deeply about his true vocation. And to pray. I imagine Jesus sleeping under the stars or in the caves that dot the dry bluffs above the Jordan Valley. But likely even his night hours were more devoted to prayer than sleep.
As a Jewish man steeped in the Jewish story since his childhood, he would recall the wilderness time that shaped his ancestors. Those forty years when the escapees from Egypt learned (with great difficulty) to distinguish the essential from the non-essential, truth from lie. That although as slaves in Egypt they had enjoyed luxury in their diet: fish, cucumbers, leeks, onions, garlic and pomegranates; manna was enough to sustain life. That they were afraid of giants in the land to which they were going, but God was with them, and that presence was enough. That they broke faith with God in the wilderness and gave in to the seduction of golden calves, but God did not break faith with them. These wilderness accounts of the Torah, these character-shaping stories, these destiny stories must have filled Jesus’ mind even as his famished body cried out for food.
Then exposed and vulnerable, he was tempted. Were these face to face to face confrontations with the devil in the space of a few minutes or hours? Or were these whisperings Jesus heard in his ear repeatedly at the end of long and tiring days? Were these voices that spoke in his heart, told to us here in capsule form? I wonder, you see, if Jesus moved past being tempted any more easily than we do. I am inclined to believe that these were not blatant offers from the devil, rather subtle seductions that came in consequence of Jesus’ fierce commitment to God.
“If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” You must be hungry after forty days; take care of yourself. This has a Libertarian ring to it. Why rely on someone else. Be self-sufficient. Be confident. Trust your identity. You can do it! Jesus quotes Deuteronomy to the devil: “One does not live by bread alone.” Luke doesn’t give us the rest of the sentence: “but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.” (Later of course Jesus would feed thousands with miraculous bread. But that’s another story.)
“Worship me,” said the devil, “and I’ll give you the world. It’s all mine.” (Most days it is very hard not to believe that the world is in the thrall of evil. Voices cry from every corner, I can change the world; join me and we will win the war over terror.) Wasn’t it Jesus’ vocation, to secure the world for God? Wasn’t it his mission to defeat evil? The devil’s lie was subtle. God created the world good. The world still belongs to God. Seductive invitations to give up that truth abound: Do whatever we can to combat evil, even if we have to make compromises in doing so. Jesus’ days in the wilderness had sharpened his memory. He parries the seductive voice by again quoting Deuteronomy: “Worship the Lord your God and serve only him.”
On the pinnacle of the temple the devil shows that he, too, can quote scripture. Doesn’t God promise to protect you if you jump from here? Won’t God’s angels bear you up? (That’s in Psalm 91.) How often do you think it if not say it? If God really loves me, or answers prayer, or has any power, my illness (situation, poverty, fill in the blank) will be overcome. Doubt is so seductive. Our desire for signs, answers, evidence so insatiable.
Jesus recalls another time from Israel’s forty years in the wilderness, a time when they complained about having no water. Only if Moses would produce water they would believe that God really meant them well. They got their water, but the place where it happened was permanently named “Test” and “Quarrel.” Jesus answers the devil once more from Deuteronomy: “Do not put the Lord your God to the test [as you did on that occasion].”
The temptation of Jesus shows that there is a fine line, often a wavy or blurry line between the truth and a lie, between the good use and the abuse of power. Jesus was tempted to consider that the way of God was unrealistic, fragile and vulnerable to defeat. Sharpened by his wilderness fasting and sustained by the Spirit, he recognized the fine line, resisted seduction, and recommitted himself to God. And so he can help us ward off temptations, as the letter to the Hebrews says.
Not only does Jesus’ experience assure us of his help, it illuminates the seductions and the really hard work we face in discerning the truth and living faithfully. We’re all addressed by voices that mean us ill. Some are easy to spot, and we can shut them off as easily as hitting the mute button on the remote. But many more of those voices are reasonable and inviting. Were we to listen to them, however, we would compromise our baptismal identity as God’s beloved children.
We should really think of ourselves here in the church as a desert community, a wilderness people moving on the road to truth. We come together to discern the voices that want seduce us. We help each other focus on what is necessary and ignore what is non-essential. We come together to help each other be faithful when we can’t do it alone. In this vein, Bishop Bjornberg shared some insights this past week at the governmental ministry gathering in Santa Fe. “The community of faith,” he suggested “critiques the status quo. We beg God to come and change the way it is. The body of Christ practices memory in a world of amnesia. It practices generosity in a world of scarcity. It practices obedience in a world of self-indulgence. It lives by hope in a world of despair. It practices reconciliation in a world bent on revenge.”
Underlying the temptation story is the care, the constancy, the unyielding support and grace and love of God. It sustained Jesus through difficult times, and it will sustain us.
Reflecting on his experiences in the North African desert, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote about Bedouins who were keenly aware that the desert never gave them any excess. Water especially was precious. They would walk for days on end to find a tiny spring. French pilots took three of the Bedouins on a trip to France. They weren’t impressed by the Eiffel Tower or locomotives. But when they were taken to a huge waterfall in the French Alps, they had no way of comprehending such lavishness. They stood in silence. “The flow of a single second would have resuscitated whole caravans that, mad with thirst, had pressed on into the eternity of salt lakes and mirages. Here God was manifesting himself: it would not do to turn one’s back on [God].” They refused to leave. They told their guide that to honor God they would have to wait for the end. Knowing that the water couldn’t last much longer, they waited for the moment “when God would grow weary of His madness.” The guide’s words seemed absurd to them, “this water has been running here for a thousand years!”3
Such is the lavish “madness” and unending support of God for all who are tempted.
1 Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1993, Page 38
2 The account of Saint-Exupéry’s survival is told by Belden Lane in The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, pages 186-187
3 Recounted in Belden Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, pages 203-204