Well. It is the First Sunday of Lent. Who would’ve thought it would come so soon. Once again, it is time for reflection about turning our hearts upside-down.
It is a lot of fun to match wits in games. There’s Fish or Uno with your children or grandchildren. (So many excellent opportunities for cheating.) How about a fast hot game of double solitaire on a winter’s night. Think about the mysteries of Bridge! Then there’s that new new, very pleasurable, New York Times “Cross Play” which is a kind of online Scrabble you play with a computer or with another actual person.
But how would you like to match wits with the Devil?? Well, I’m pretty sure we’ll say, “I don’t think so.” But, you know, we do it all the time.
I’m not going to go into who or what the Devil might be. More educated minds than mine have tackled this topic. But I will say this much. There is so much good deeply and consistently inside us. And, at the same time, we are also deeply divided. We can have attitudes in our minds or souls that hold us back, that promote bad choices. We harbor resistance, fear, dislike, and negative points of view and habits. We can be inconsistent in honoring the dignity of 100 percent of the people in this beautiful Creation. Sometimes we do not honor animals. Writ large and amongst the powerful, these attitudes result in the distortions in our collective systems which allow, even celebrate, the disparities in wealth, the tens of thousands dead in Gaza, the estimated two million lost in Russia and Ukraine. You name it. We do these things, not the Devil. But the attitudes that lead us to doing them are in us. This is pretty sobering.
In today’s beautiful Gospel, Jesus does match wits with the Devil. But at the same time Jesus is doing something for us — because I think he always has us in mind. He is directly giving us a catechism lesson on dealing with our divided selves. So, right at beginning of the Gospel, with the Temptation in the Wilderness, the Gospel tries to turn our hearts upside-down.
In the first temptation, the Devil urges a hungry Jesus to turn stones to bread. As a simple onlooker, I want to say, “Yeah! Turn the stones to bread! That would be so cool. And you’d get an unending supply of bread.” But why should we want that? It’s because we feel there is never enough. There is not enough money, enough room, enough land, enough time, enough security. enough safety. This story of the bread and stones is about our anxiety over scarcity. It’s an anxiety that enlarges to the point where I want what you have. I will make war. I will kill you and your children. You scare me. You’re in my way.
Jesus never says we should give up eating bread. And he doesn’t tell us to give up money or land or resources and so forth. But he does turn us toward the opposite of anxiety. His path is every word that comes from the mouth of God. What is this Word? It is the repeated placement in our minds of what might change us. The Word is a kind of nourishment that forces us to think about our lives and salvation. It penetrates. It inspires. And merely hearing Isaiah’s great words is a big, big step. “To loose the bonds of injustice. . . to share your bread with the hungry . . . [to] bring the homeless poor into your house . . . when you see the naked, to cover them . . .” (Isaiah 58:6-9a) The Word is enough to make us at least think about turning away from our fears — not all at once, maybe little by little.
In the second temptation, the Devil urges Jesus to throw himself down from the top of the Temple and enjoy the thrill because the angels will rush to help him anyway. But Jesus says that a person should not tempt or test the Lord. What does “tempt the Lord” mean? Most importantly for me, it means not to take God for granted —- to think of his power and love as something we can play with. I am reminded of an old military saying: Don’t ask for permission; just apologize later. Tempting God is like saying I’ll cheat a little (no harm to anyone!), I’ll play huge financial games as in the pre-2008 world, I’ll think only about my new stuff, and so forth because God is going to forgive me for ignoring the widow and the orphan anyway. Tempting God is about the selfish thrill of jumping off the Temple. Jesus has already addressed our selfish anxiety. Now he addresses our selfish egoism.
In the third temptation, we are faced with a really hard choice. The Devil offers us something big and irresistible, something that Adam and Eve in the Genesis story were offered — we want to be like God, we want the power and wealth, we want the evaporation of responsibility, we want the self-reliance, the glory. Gee, I guess I’ll worship my dark side in order to get all this. But Jesus’ catechism tells us that, as far as worship goes, we are to worship God alone. What does this mean? It means to turn from self-worship.
I’ve often asked myself what worship is. I think it is attentiveness to God in thought, word, and deed. It is an attentiveness that pushes us mentally and physically so that our restless, divided selves can begin to rest in God. It is for all the hours of our day. It is not limited to church. I would say by way of aside that church worship is a threshold to worship in daily life and vice versa.
Liturgical worship, worship in church, is definitely and traditionally our coming together in our kinship to take part in the liturgy — to sing, to learn through sermons and the spirit, to participate in common prayer and in the Eucharist. God has granted us our apprehension of the beautiful, the inspiration and rapture, the spiritual assembly of Christian kin and our common prayer and joy. It is not that the world outside church is not beautiful. It’s that communal worship occurs in beauty too.
At church, we say good-bye in the post-communion prayer with these beautiful words: And grant us the strength and the courage to love and to serve you with gladness and singleness of heart. Love is the big signal of Christianity, and along with gladness and singleness of heart it is a great cure for restlessness. The prayer tells us to go out and love and serve.
And so I was quite surprised actually to realize that the chapter which starts the Sermon on the Mount comes right after the Third Temptation. (Matthew 5) In his sermon, Jesus says a lot about how to behave in the world and how to change your attitudes and turn your heart upside down. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus compresses a beautiful message about us and God into a few sentences. I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. . . Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5:44-45, 48). This is another statement of the Law of Love: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. (E.g., Matthew 22:34-40; Mark 10:28-34) In these words, Jesus connects love and action, but also attention and receptivity. It is truly the opposite of the anxiety and selfishness laid out in the First and Second Temptations. This statement is advice about how to rest our divided selves, to have gladness and singleness of heart.
Beautiful worship in church and beautiful worship in the world make up one environment. In church, we pay attention and we learn and are inspired. In the world, we do the same thing, but act when we must. We learn about the acting from the worship in church — or from prayer at home or the Bible reading group. For example, we hear the Word. That’s how I got the quote from Isaiah about clothing the naked, housing the homeless, feeding the poor. That’s how I started to think that Jesus must have had this passage from Isaiah in mind when he said that when you clothed another, visited the prisoner, gave someone water, and so on as we all know, you did it to me. (Matthew 25:21-46.) And in the statement in the Sermon on the Mount about the Law of Love, Jesus says “Be like me!” And “Be perfect as God is perfect,” even-handed and loving. Not that I am ever going to be as perfect as God — that is not going to happen. But it is a statement that centers us on singleness of heart and helps our divided selves.
This is all worship. Actually, it sounds pretty much like life. I wanted to close by giving you an inspiring story. It’s an inspiring story about a real person as played in a movie about her. Maybe this doesn’t sound very inspiring, but it seems we stumble on the Gospel all over the place. So, here is a story that is very far from division and self-worship. It is one of the most beautiful descriptions of being like God that I have ever heard of. In the book Dead Man Walking, Sister Helen Prejean tells her story how she came to work even-handedly on two sides — for the men condemned to death and for the survivors of the victims of their terrible crimes. She was very present for these condemned men. In the movie, Susan Sarandon, who plays Sister Helen, says to Patrick Sonnier, who had committed an awful crime, that, when he went to execution, she would be the face of love for him. I say, our faces of love are surely the face of Christ.
Who would have thought the the Temptation in the Wilderness would take us so far? As the Evangelicals say: Thank you, Jesus!
