“The First Temptation of Christianity”

Luke 4:1-13

A sermon preached by the Rev. Douglas M. Donley

February 29, 2004

University Baptist Church

Minneapolis, MN

 

            This past Summer, our Nicaragua mission team visited Peace House outside of Leon.  There we met an octogenarian Maryknoll nun name Joan.  She showed us a huge labyrinth outside of her house.  She introduced us to this ancient circular prayer walk as a tool for spiritual reflection and healing.  A labyrinth is a pre-Christian spiritual tool of healing and self-reflection.  There is only one path in and out, much like life.  There are three aspects to the experience of walking a labyrinth, purging, revelation and reconnecting.  People use differing words for those steps, but the thought is the same.  Walking in a circle is a form of healing and looking at the world and at ourselves from different angles. While venturing in to the center of the labyrinth, we are to prayerfully reflect upon the barriers that we have in our lives.  We might think of our temptations, our difficulties, our confusion, our fears, our anger, our distractions.  Once we arrive at the center, we are encouraged to wait there for as long as we need to in order to feel the presence of God and any directions we might mystically experience.  Then as we retrace our steps back out of the labyrinth, we are to concentrate on reconnecting with the world and perhaps even recommitting ourselves to a new way of life.  I encourage you to take some time this week to walk the labyrinth. You may find out something new about yourself. 

            The title of this sermon is the First Temptation of Christianity.  That temptation is the temptation to control belief, to impart orthodoxy.  Our task during Lent is to figure out what we believe for ourselves, often with fear and trembling.

            I can’t think about the first temptation of Christianity without thinking about the movie I went to see in 1988, The Last Temptation of Christ. The outside of the theater was just what I had imagined it would be from the news reports.  It was complete with placards, Bibles, people calling me a sinner and a heretic all of it in a foaming hate-fueled need to guard Jesus Christ from people like me who might want to learn a bit about his humanity.  It prepared me for attending Soulforce events and being around Fred Phelps and his ilk.  How weak our faith must be if we cannot sustain or tolerate questions or controversy.  For all the controversy it generated, it wasn’t even that great a movie.

            This week, I joined 14 other leaders from the Interfaith Campus Coalition to see the gut-wrenching and gore-fest called the Passion of the Christ.  There were no protesters outside this movie, but as one of our colleagues was going to the coffee shop where we all met to process our reactions to the movie, he was handed a chic-tract from someone on the street.  He chose not to take the tract since he had already read the book.  The person muttered how he was going to burn in hell because of it.  Think about this.  You’ll burn in hell if you watch one movie and burn in hell if you don’t take a psuedo-gospel tract after exiting another movie.  What does this say about our search fro truth?  What does it say about the way we are tempted these days?

            Today’s scripture says that Jesus was tempted three times by the devil in the wilderness.  Anyone of us who has felt left alone and abandoned, anyone who has been truly hungry, anyone who has been lured by the desire for power, anyone who has had their faith challenged knows what it’s like to be tempted in the wilderness.  But how do we know how to answer that temptation?

            We are all subject to temptation all the time.  Perhaps that is why us Baptists make sure that during our worship services we say, “lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil…”

            The devil, as the Luke’s gospel calls him, is the total of evil taking on a human form.  And evil can be tempting.  In Luke, there are three encounters with the devil in the wilderness.  Jesus’ first temptation was for food.  The Devil said to him, “If you are the son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.”

            Jesus was alone, cold and hungry in the wilderness.  The epistle to the Hebrews tells us that he was tempted in every way that we are.

            How he must have struggled with the thought of satisfying his own needs—that if he stared at those stones long enough, they actually looked like loaves of bread.  He must have thought about turning those stones into bread.  Yet in the delirium of hunger, somehow, he was able to say to the temptation, the words of his ancestors recorded in the book of Deuteronomy when they were traversing in the wilderness for forty years:

            “One cannot live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”

            The devil came to Jesus a second time and showed Jesus all the kingdoms of the world and the devil said to him, “To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please.  If you, then will worship me, it will all be yours.”

            The devil, evil, says Luke, has control and authority over all the kingdoms and governments of the world.  How could we not have known this one with all of the wars and economic strangleholds that we heap upon each other—A world where 90% of the population cannot make a choice about the shoes that they wear because their poverty is so great.  And Jesus was given authority over the nations if he would just worship the devil, if he would just worship evil and greed and warfare and hate, he could really succeed in this world, maybe even make something of himself.  Nice guys finish last, you know…But Jesus said, “It is written, ‘worship the Lord your God and serve only God.’”

            By this time the devil must have been pretty frustrated with Jesus.  Most of us would have probably caved in by now.  But Jesus held his ground.  You see, Jesus was not only in the wilderness talking to the devil.  He was in there talking to God.  Jesus was in the desert perhaps to be tempted, but also to come closer to God.  The closer we are to God, the farther away we are from temptations.

            The season of Lent is a season in which we are encouraged to walk closer with God.  It is a time when we set some time aside to pray.  It is a time when we ask to be led away from our temptations.

            We use 40 days (save Sundays) prior to Easter to remind us of the 40 days which Jesus spent in the wilderness being tempted by the devil.  Lent is the time which we focus our lives on the journey which will lead us inevitably, if we are faithful, to the cross.  Resurrection only happens after the cross.

            Jesus encountered the devil a third time in the wilderness.  By this time the devil had learned how to argue with Jesus.  The devil started using scripture and started quoting scripture at Jesus.

            We all know people who use scripture as weapons.  They can take a verse totally out of context and use it to support any position they want to.  That is how slavery was justified by the church.  That is how women have been left out of leadership positions in church and government.  That is how homosexuals are treated these days with the same kind of proof-texting which is laced with thinly-veiled hatred and has at its own root evil.

            I must say that when I saw the Last Temptation of Christ, partly out of curiosity generated by all of the hate-filled religious bigotry and closed-mindedness of the religious right in wanting to censor it.  I have a habit of doing things that others do not like but to me is being faithful.  It’s a temptation.

            The devil took Jesus and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple in Jerusalem and said, “If you are the son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written “God will command the angels concerning you, to protect you’ and ‘on their hands, they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’”

            But Jesus answered the devil’s proof-texting saying: “It is said, ‘do not put the Lord your God to the test’”.  And when the devil had finished these tests, the devil departed from Jesus for a more opportune time.

            Just because Jesus made it through the wilderness doesn’t mean he was through with his temptations.  Temptations lasted all his life.  Temptations will last all of our lives, too.  What we need to do us make the most of the clarity of mind we get from the wilderness and to seek out the truth that comes from God.  This often means taking the difficult path in this life.           

            How are we tempted these days?  Temptations are the life-blood of evil.

            We are tempted by the American dream of getting more and more and not giving back anything.  We are tempted to judge others if they cannot succeed in the world or by the world’s standards.  Jesus said, judge not that you might be judged.  But it’s tempting isn’t it?  We are tempted not to confront the reality of life which is starting us right in the face.  We are tempted to ignore problems rather than deal with them head on.

            You see, with temptation comes the denial of another reality and if we can believe the temptation enough, we can convince ourselves of lies.  Thus the truth that we shall know and which shall set us free becomes mired in a cloudy gray muck which borders on impossible to decipher.

            When we pray, “Lead us not into temptation…” we never say it without also saying, “Deliver us from evil.”

            The challenge for us it to realize that they’re is a higher power who can and will lead us out of our temptations and deliver us from evil if we call on God to do so.

            And isn’t that what we are doing during Lent?  I encourage you to look for God in the intersection of your life, your story, the scriptures and our own faith walk.  Through it all, may we experience a new kind of knowledge, one that will grant us to ability to resist the temptation of evil.  And at the end of the journey, may we see God, ourselves and our community with new eyes.