Temptation, FB Style

A sermon by the Rev. Dean Taylor

Lent II, Year B, March 1, 2009

Well, it’s that time of year again. First Sunday in Lent. You’ve given up what you were going to give up, or take on what you were going to take on, and of course, the Girl Scout Cookies come THE NEXT DAY. But it’s the season where we intentionally set up a kind of spiritual laboratory, a spiritual laboratory of the soul, if you will.

The purpose of Lent is to intentionally put yourself in the wilderness, a mini-wilderness of your own making, so that, gradually, we will come to know ourselves better spiritually. It’s not really about self-improvement, though self improvement often comes about as a kind of by-product. No, it’s about coming to know ourselves better spiritually.

Wilderness is any kind of human difficulty—when bad things happen to us, or when we give up something or take on a discipline that is difficult to do. What happens when we enter into the wilderness is that we encounter the human phenomenon of temptation.

Temptation is that inner dialogue, even inner argument, between the parts of your soul, and what we try to learn is how to “discern” the better voices from the worse.

God pushed Jesus into the literal wilderness for forty days, to be tested, to be tempted, and perhaps to know his own soul better. It says that he was “with the wild beasts,” and that the “angels ministered to him.” Fred Craddock wonders whether this is symbolic of the wild beasts within his heart; and, on the other hand, the angels of his heart “ministering” to him in time of need. That is, the better voices from the worse voices.

The nature of temptation is first played out in the Bible in narrative form in Genesis, where Adam and Eve are tempted with the fruit. Of course, that was the narrative of it’s day. We have our own. Can you imagine what narrative form it might have taken, say, in Facebook?

(from www.collegehumor.com)

2.

God’s Face Book Page: “What are you doing right now?”

God is…just sittin’ around being omnipotent.

3 minutes (or 3 trillion years) later. God is….kinda lonesome, maybe thinking about creating a world

God :Created a new group. Light

God: created a new group. Earth

God: created a new group. Garden of Eden

God is….wondering, . What if I made some creatures? Wonder how big and small I can make them?

God and Adam are now friends.

God wrote on Adam’s Wall: “Yo, man, You up for a walk in the cool of the day?”

Adam commented, “Whatever. Tell the truth, kinda lonely myself. These animals don’t really do it for me. How about making up something else more like me, yet different?

God commented. LOL. I’ll see what I can do.

Adam and Eve are in a relationship.

God wrote on Adam’s wall:

Some rules 4 the garden: No shirt, no shoes, no sin, no problem!

But stay away from the apples. Seriously.

Serpent sent Eve a gift---(Apple)

God commented on Eve’s gift. OMG—I mean, OMM (Oh my me) you can’t be serious?

3.

Adam & Eve added application: Shame

Adam & Even left the group Garden of Eden.

It’s complicated between Adam and Eve.

Adam and Eve joined the group Harsh Reality of the Outside world.

You see how it goes. The narrative tries to describe what happens within. We usually think of God “up there,” and perhaps Evil “over there” or even “down there”, with us in the middle.

But really, it’s all in here. Wilderness is the spiritual tool of Lent to unearth these voices within us. Not simply the surface voices of temptation, but all the voices we have within—unhealthy and healthy.

What do they sound like? When you step into the wilderness—that is, when you face hard times—not just the difficulty of a Lenten Discipline, but the hard times that happen to us—a rough patch in a relationship with kids or spouse or parents, a really hard medical scare, your business is going down, your job in danger or gone, your retirement not at all as secure as it was…

When you step into that wilderness, you can count on it: there will be a voice within you that says something like this:

“This is going to be really bad, and you will never get out of it. Things will never be good again. It’s hopeless. In fact, YOU yourself are hopeless.”

For, you see, underneath that unhealthy voice is a deeper, darker voice, that, if it spoke (which sometimes it does), would say, “You know, you’re really worthless when it comes right down to it. You fool people most of the time, but we know, don’t we, that there’s not much there when it comes to you.”

Deep in the basement, the dark cellar of your soul there are all kinds of scary, terrible things bumping around down there—other people would be shocked and appalled, you tell yourself.

4.

We don’t want to go down into that basement. In fact, we don’t even want to think about the fact that it’s there. And yet, that’s what Lent is all about: to confess all that is in the basement, and learn to discern which voices come from down there, and which ones come… from Love. That is the voice of God within you.

That’s what Jesus did in the wilderness. He faced those beasts. Because only then could he see them and even name them for what they were, clear them away (for a while at least) and be ministered to by the Angels. I take that to mean, by the way, one another. We can be angels to one another in deeply profound ways. We don’t know what form of angel Jesus had, but we know that we have one another. And I’ve heard many, many life stories by now to know that, right here, in this very church, angels walk among us.

So Jesus, himself ministered to by angels, was able to face the beasts of the wilderness and somehow clear away the clutter of the wilderness to hear that other voice of his soul, the voice of God, his father, his Abba, saying, “You are my beloved, and I’m so pleased with you.”

“You are loved, cherished, and of infinite value to me. I created you for a purpose, and that purpose is even more than surviving this wilderness. That purpose is to learn how to love in this world: to love, to share, to magnify that love among all of creation.”

Like Jesus, we learn from the wilderness that those other voices are part of who we are. It’s what it means to be human, to have all kinds of paradoxes of character in this crazy creation of God’s called the human soul.

We can’t get rid of that part of who we are. We can’t get rid of those unhealthy voices. But we can, occasionally, learn to name them and tell them to BE QUIET. And then, to cultivate a habit, a habit of listening to the voice of God from within us.

Wall to wall: God to Adam and Eve and descendents: “Be at Peace. You will get through this hard time, as surely as the rainbow is in the sky. Take joy and generosity in my creation. Oh, how I love you so. LOL.” Amen.