1 Lent A March 9, 2014
Gen 2:4b-9,15-17,25-3:7
Ps.51:1-13
Rom. 5:12 -21 Matt. 4:1-11
It is hard in our lives not to take things personal.
As human persons, we cannot help but filter everything through our
personhood. And even when we try to do
some non-personal imaginations of not being a person like trying to do dog
whispering, we still do it as a human person.
You would think that non-human and
non-personal or extra-human or extra-personal things would escape being
personalized for us but it is hard to avoid experiencing anything without
projecting some personal presence engaging us in many ways.
When seemingly random or coincidental things
happen to us in nature or in happenstance events, even then we still
personalize the events. We lose someone
or something, we take it very personal.
We get in an accident and we take it personal. So we take negative events in a very personal
way. It like we impute a motive of some
personal force against us in making our lives bad or inconvenient. On the other hand, we also personalize the
positive occurrences as well. No parking
places at all and suddenly we drive up and someone pulls out and we can
park. We take it as a personal blessing
or personal providence. We see a rainbow
and think that it happened just for and because of me as a personal sign of the
forces of climate and weather wearing the face of God’s blessing for me.
Children personalize all sorts of forces;
boogie men and monsters and angels are found in the shadow and light of their
bedrooms.
Adulthood and modern science provide us with
practices of critical thinking to distinguish between the personal and
non-personal. We learn about
non-personal and impartial forces of nature which happen and occur towards us
at all time. Science teaches us to
discipline our simplistic childhood personalizing response to all that happens
to us. “Silly you, it is not God or the
devil, it is the play of freedom in a string of impartial events. Bah humbug.”
As impersonal as science makes causality, all
of the events of our lives still get filtered through our personality and so we
cannot escape the mode of personalizing in how we assign meaning to the events
of our lives. The most poignant events
of causality are when another person hurts us or blesses us. It is poignant because we can see or feel the
effect directly.
It is hard for us to escape our personalizing
tendencies for the larger cosmic issues of the world, like morality itself.
How does the moral make up of humanity get
framed in the creation story of Adam and Eve?
In part, the moral moment involves a form of “the devil made me do
it.” Why did you eat the forbidden fruit
Eve? Well, the serpent tricked me.
A good portion of the experience of evil and badness in life
comes from taking bad things very personally.
And if the devil didn’t make me do it or make it happen to me, there is
the mystery of events that are experienced as personal failure or personal
misfortune and they happen because there is some great foe or trickster who is
tripping me up or who is evident in the arrangement of the events which happen
in my life.
The serpent, the devil, Lucifer, Beelzebub
and Satan are the various names for the personification of the superior
Trickster who seems at many times in our lives to be in the ascendant. You perhaps remember the words of the Rolling
Stones’ song, “Sympathy for the Devil?” “Pleased
to meet you. Hope you guessed my name, But
what's puzzling you, Is the nature of my game.”
It is almost like in all religious cosmology there is a shadow person
and shadow force to deal with. Persons
in this cosmic drama are caught in the great drama between the two great
personal forces as they become evident in the whether we perceive events and
actions as good and beneficial or as evil and malevolent.
The great drama as recorded in the Bible
characterizes our human and personal situations as having lost to the Serpent or
that extra-human personality who has tricked us and the events of this world to
result in bad performance in human behavior and as the clash of the systems of
nature which cause human and personal conveniences.
Harmony is but the ancient and forgotten time
of the garden of Eden. Harmony is the
forgotten time of the nine months of gestation of the proto-child within the
womb of mother.
We’ve been tricked out of paradise by forces
greater than us and as persons we cannot help at times as interpreting those
forces as being seeming personal assaults upon our progress if not upon the
convenience of our life.
Who will confront the great shadow figure of
the world? Who will confront the great
trickster and not get tricked? And how will
the hero who does this fare in the world of the great trickster?
We arrive at the temptation of Jesus in the
wilderness during the event of his solitude, isolation and fast. Jesus confronts the great trickster. The wiles of the trickster involve getting
Jesus to do some good things in ways that make them bad because of mistiming. All things in life are good; they are bad
because of mistiming and the clashes which occur because of the mistiming. Food, fame and literal interpretations are
good in themselves but they can be mistimed and from the mistiming caused by
wrong motives good things can be experienced as evil and bad.
Food stands for our physical needs; how bad
is the mistiming in the provision of the physical needs for all of the people in
our world? Hunger, lack of housing, lack
of health care, lack of employment comes from the incredible disaster in the
timing of provision and there are plenty of roadblocks in the natural world but
some very big human willfulness issues which do not provide an adequate meeting
of the needs of people in our world. "Okay, Jesus, be a divine magician turn stones into bread and into housing
and health care for all. Make it
happen." We do not live by divine magic;
we live by the words of God which orders our lives in acts of love and charity
and done in freedom with everything else.
We cannot magically just wish for ideal conditions; we have to learn how
to time good things to happen toward the well-being of as many people as
possible.
Fame and glory, that is what we need for
esteem. Megalomanical narcissism is the
great temptation. I will sell my soul to
the devil for great fame and power. Give
me fame and lots of it and I will feel good about myself through that external
affirmation coming towards me. But Jesus
said to the devil “You are not God and esteem and enjoyment come through the perpetual
worship of God, the great One and in all of that worship energy going towards
God there are wonderful collateral experiences of personal esteem and the
enjoyment of the many good things that God has given to us.
In the last temptation, Satan encourages
Jesus to be very literal. “Throw
yourself off the temple because the Psalmist wrote in your Bible that the
angels will catch you.” The obeying of
God means we know when to be literal and when not to be literal. We are called to learn how to read and interpret
the events of our lives and the words of influences which have been given to us
in our various human traditions. So we
need to know the difference between language that would end up in personal
injury and language that is figurative in encouraging us to trust God in the
emergency of falling from the high places or crises of life. If life is often a seeming “free fall” we
need to know those metaphorical angels who will break our fall.
We begin Lent with our hero Jesus going
against the Trickster and winning. And
the winning of Jesus gives us great wisdom about the goodness of life but more
importantly about how we time the words and deeds of our lives and how we read
correctly the events of our lives so that we offer good motives and well-time
responses to what befalls us.
Yes, we do take the weal and woes of our
lives as very personal, since the events are filtered through personhood, which
we regard to be the highest designation of humanity.
And if we regard our own humanity as
personal, we cannot avoid allowing that which is greater than us at the very
least does include a superior personhood.
Today, let us be aware of the great Trickster
personality whom we often confront in the bafflement of our life events; but
let us look to one greater than the Trickster who can give us the wisdom of a
more perfect timing in how we read and interact with the people and events of
our lives.
I wish all of us holy and propitious timing
in our lives this Lenten Season. And may
Jesus give us wisdom to deal successfully with the Trickster more than just a
few times. Amen.
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