1 Lent A March 5, 2017
Gen 2:4b-9,15-17,25-3:7 Ps.51:1-13
Rom.5:12 -21 Matt. 4:1-11
Rather than to take all of these images literally, we can appreciate their psychological truth as shadow forces within the human subconscious which can come to concrete expression within our lives whenever we lie or misuse power in our lives. During the season of Lent we are asked to apprise our human agency. Whose agent are we? Are we God's agents? Or are we agents of the inner forces which are expressed in lies and the abuse of power? And if we want to be God's agents how can we accomplish this? And how can we understand why we come to do what we do?
In the biblical epic, if Adam and Eve failed in their moral test because they were tricked by the higher powers of the serpent to disobey, is this story descriptive of the fact that all human beings fail and fall to similar trickery? How is that we come to let wrong desire become the power to make us agents to do and say wrong things? And where can we go to find heroic help for our moral agency dilemma? How can we come to celebrate the fact that God inspires us to do good things rather than bemoan that fact that the interior shadow Satan tricks our desires toward acting out in bad things?
The first Sunday in Lent begins with the temptations of Jesus in the wilderness by Satan. The wilderness is symbolic of paradise lost; there is no longer a perfect garden. The weeds and the wild have taken over and they are not in natural harmony with humanity and human culture. Jesus was driven by the higher power of the Spirit to fast and to be alone. The Spirit wanted him to go into the ruined garden of the human unconscious and face the shadow forces which cause human beings to become agents of evil and bad will. The shadow force is known to Jesus and to all as a lying accuser, Satan. And we might look at the account of the temptation to gain some insights to help us in our hopes of being agents of God for good in our world.
I would submit to you that the dynamics of temptation is mainly about being tricked into mistimed deeds in our lives. If creation is good and everything is potentially good, what can make things bad? Our mistimed interactions with the good things in life.
Food is good. Recognition is good. Death is natural and death can be inevitably good. What is that can make food bad? Recognition bad? And death wrong? Mistiming of how, when and how many times we do things is what makes something good or bad.
The insights from the account of the temptation of Jesus show us the tricks that Satan, the inward and Shadow accuser of Jesus, used to try get Jesus off God's time schedule and into another time schedule in the performance of the deeds of his lives.
Food is good for us just as all things necessary for the reasonable maintenance of our physical lives are. But the mistiming of our use of good things can result in destructive stewardship for our lives and for other people in our world. Jesus was under the obedience of God his Father to undertake a fast. He was taking a rest from food perhaps for the very purpose of becoming aware of his inner life as a battleground where he needed to go and win a battle that patriarch Adam and matriarch Eve lost. Bread is human processed food. John the Baptist ate locust and honey in the wilderness as his abject reliance upon nature's provision and not on human provision. Perhaps Jesus was fasting for forty days from human processed food including bread. "Jesus, you are God's special one. If you are greater than Moses who interceded to get Israel some heavenly manna, why don't you just outperform Moses and command these stones to become bread to feed you." How did Jesus respond? He essentially said, "My food and provision are on God's schedule and not yours because everyone should live by the word of God and not by mistiming to do things at the wrong time with the wrong frequency."
Another way that Satan tried to get Jesus to mistime deeds of his life was get him to interpret the Bible in a way that contradicted the laws of nature. What happens if anyone jumps from a tall place? The laws of gravity become evident. The Psalm is a book of poetry and in it is written that God's care is so real for us that God's angels will catch us if we fall. We can get tricked into doing wrong things when we take things so literally. One of the worst tricks in life concerns our deaths and the death of other people. We know that Jesus really died; he died at the hands of the Roman soldiers. But the net that caught Jesus was God's resurrection life. Satan tried to get Jesus to end his life before it was time. "Go ahead Jesus, jump and you will defy gravity when the angels catch you." Jesus believed in gravity and so should we.
The last temptation is about mistiming about fame, power and recognition is our lives. In the Gospels it is recorded that the opponents of Jesus thought that he had made a pact with the devil. The only way in which he could do his mighty works was because he had sold out to Satan. This is a theme in literature such as in Goethe's Faust. Faust made a bargain with the evil one to attain glory but to do so he had to sell his soul to the evil one. In Star Wars, there is the metaphor of people who have gone over to the dark side and the Evil Empire was an expression of that dark side. In human history, we have the example of the mystery of evil expressed on grand scale: Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot whose crusades of mass murder expressed an evil of the worst kind. What happens in Empires when power becomes absolute and when lying on behalf of power becomes normal? Satan promised Jesus the highest position in the world if he would go over to the dark side and use his power and skills for the mystery of evil. But Jesus knew the first commandment; worship the One God who created everything, even the possibility of evil. The fame of Jesus would not be mistimed because of Satan. The fame of Jesus came after his resurrection when his Risen Life spread by the Holy Spirit in the lives of people who are members of the good and kind kingdom of God.
Today there is the temptation to go to the dark side of the powers of the kingdoms of this world. Fame, wealth and power are intoxicating drugs in our world today. People will cheat and lie and even kill to attain fame, wealth and power. Many people get tempted to go over to the dark side today. When people are able to do this on a grand scale, lots of people get harmed.
Today, we pray again the Lord's Prayer. We ask for God's kingdom to intersect with our lives. We need to submit to the timing of God's kingdom in this world. We ask not be to led into temptation. We ask not to be tempted to mistime the deeds and words of our lives.
Today, by the words of Jesus the altar bread will become for us again the presence of Christ. And we will endeavor to live our lives by the presence of the Risen Christ in us as the Eternal word of God. How will we know the presence of the Risen Christ in our lives? We will know it as we come to sense God's time for the events and circumstances of our lives. We will come into the esteem, fame, recognition and glory of our lives in God's times and ways without having to compromise with the dark side of the shadow of evil. And we pray to arrive at the time of our death not a minute too late or too early, in God's good time.
The witness of Jesus is that he encountered the evil one; he encountered the dark side and he won because he was committed to be on God's time schedule for the providence of his life.
Lent is a season for us to assess the temptations regarding the mistiming of lives. How can we know God's timing in our lives? Are we finding peace, joy, the reality of being loved, forgiven? Are we bringing people together or creating division? The results of God's timing being known in our lives are known by the evidence of the fruits of God's Spirit.
The mystery of evil is out there and in us too. It is tricky. Power, fame and wealth can be made to appear to be godly and attractive. And we must resist and find God's kingdom of love, peace, joy, self-control, gentleness, goodness, faith and justice.
May God reveal to us the tricks of the shadow of evil in our world and in our lives and may we have the strength of the Risen Christ to resist evil and to spread Christ's peaceful kingdom in our world. Amen.
Gen 2:4b-9,15-17,25-3:7 Ps.51:1-13
Rom.
Rather than to take all of these images literally, we can appreciate their psychological truth as shadow forces within the human subconscious which can come to concrete expression within our lives whenever we lie or misuse power in our lives. During the season of Lent we are asked to apprise our human agency. Whose agent are we? Are we God's agents? Or are we agents of the inner forces which are expressed in lies and the abuse of power? And if we want to be God's agents how can we accomplish this? And how can we understand why we come to do what we do?
In the biblical epic, if Adam and Eve failed in their moral test because they were tricked by the higher powers of the serpent to disobey, is this story descriptive of the fact that all human beings fail and fall to similar trickery? How is that we come to let wrong desire become the power to make us agents to do and say wrong things? And where can we go to find heroic help for our moral agency dilemma? How can we come to celebrate the fact that God inspires us to do good things rather than bemoan that fact that the interior shadow Satan tricks our desires toward acting out in bad things?
The first Sunday in Lent begins with the temptations of Jesus in the wilderness by Satan. The wilderness is symbolic of paradise lost; there is no longer a perfect garden. The weeds and the wild have taken over and they are not in natural harmony with humanity and human culture. Jesus was driven by the higher power of the Spirit to fast and to be alone. The Spirit wanted him to go into the ruined garden of the human unconscious and face the shadow forces which cause human beings to become agents of evil and bad will. The shadow force is known to Jesus and to all as a lying accuser, Satan. And we might look at the account of the temptation to gain some insights to help us in our hopes of being agents of God for good in our world.
I would submit to you that the dynamics of temptation is mainly about being tricked into mistimed deeds in our lives. If creation is good and everything is potentially good, what can make things bad? Our mistimed interactions with the good things in life.
Food is good. Recognition is good. Death is natural and death can be inevitably good. What is that can make food bad? Recognition bad? And death wrong? Mistiming of how, when and how many times we do things is what makes something good or bad.
The insights from the account of the temptation of Jesus show us the tricks that Satan, the inward and Shadow accuser of Jesus, used to try get Jesus off God's time schedule and into another time schedule in the performance of the deeds of his lives.
Food is good for us just as all things necessary for the reasonable maintenance of our physical lives are. But the mistiming of our use of good things can result in destructive stewardship for our lives and for other people in our world. Jesus was under the obedience of God his Father to undertake a fast. He was taking a rest from food perhaps for the very purpose of becoming aware of his inner life as a battleground where he needed to go and win a battle that patriarch Adam and matriarch Eve lost. Bread is human processed food. John the Baptist ate locust and honey in the wilderness as his abject reliance upon nature's provision and not on human provision. Perhaps Jesus was fasting for forty days from human processed food including bread. "Jesus, you are God's special one. If you are greater than Moses who interceded to get Israel some heavenly manna, why don't you just outperform Moses and command these stones to become bread to feed you." How did Jesus respond? He essentially said, "My food and provision are on God's schedule and not yours because everyone should live by the word of God and not by mistiming to do things at the wrong time with the wrong frequency."
Another way that Satan tried to get Jesus to mistime deeds of his life was get him to interpret the Bible in a way that contradicted the laws of nature. What happens if anyone jumps from a tall place? The laws of gravity become evident. The Psalm is a book of poetry and in it is written that God's care is so real for us that God's angels will catch us if we fall. We can get tricked into doing wrong things when we take things so literally. One of the worst tricks in life concerns our deaths and the death of other people. We know that Jesus really died; he died at the hands of the Roman soldiers. But the net that caught Jesus was God's resurrection life. Satan tried to get Jesus to end his life before it was time. "Go ahead Jesus, jump and you will defy gravity when the angels catch you." Jesus believed in gravity and so should we.
The last temptation is about mistiming about fame, power and recognition is our lives. In the Gospels it is recorded that the opponents of Jesus thought that he had made a pact with the devil. The only way in which he could do his mighty works was because he had sold out to Satan. This is a theme in literature such as in Goethe's Faust. Faust made a bargain with the evil one to attain glory but to do so he had to sell his soul to the evil one. In Star Wars, there is the metaphor of people who have gone over to the dark side and the Evil Empire was an expression of that dark side. In human history, we have the example of the mystery of evil expressed on grand scale: Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot whose crusades of mass murder expressed an evil of the worst kind. What happens in Empires when power becomes absolute and when lying on behalf of power becomes normal? Satan promised Jesus the highest position in the world if he would go over to the dark side and use his power and skills for the mystery of evil. But Jesus knew the first commandment; worship the One God who created everything, even the possibility of evil. The fame of Jesus would not be mistimed because of Satan. The fame of Jesus came after his resurrection when his Risen Life spread by the Holy Spirit in the lives of people who are members of the good and kind kingdom of God.
Today there is the temptation to go to the dark side of the powers of the kingdoms of this world. Fame, wealth and power are intoxicating drugs in our world today. People will cheat and lie and even kill to attain fame, wealth and power. Many people get tempted to go over to the dark side today. When people are able to do this on a grand scale, lots of people get harmed.
Today, we pray again the Lord's Prayer. We ask for God's kingdom to intersect with our lives. We need to submit to the timing of God's kingdom in this world. We ask not be to led into temptation. We ask not to be tempted to mistime the deeds and words of our lives.
Today, by the words of Jesus the altar bread will become for us again the presence of Christ. And we will endeavor to live our lives by the presence of the Risen Christ in us as the Eternal word of God. How will we know the presence of the Risen Christ in our lives? We will know it as we come to sense God's time for the events and circumstances of our lives. We will come into the esteem, fame, recognition and glory of our lives in God's times and ways without having to compromise with the dark side of the shadow of evil. And we pray to arrive at the time of our death not a minute too late or too early, in God's good time.
The witness of Jesus is that he encountered the evil one; he encountered the dark side and he won because he was committed to be on God's time schedule for the providence of his life.
Lent is a season for us to assess the temptations regarding the mistiming of lives. How can we know God's timing in our lives? Are we finding peace, joy, the reality of being loved, forgiven? Are we bringing people together or creating division? The results of God's timing being known in our lives are known by the evidence of the fruits of God's Spirit.
The mystery of evil is out there and in us too. It is tricky. Power, fame and wealth can be made to appear to be godly and attractive. And we must resist and find God's kingdom of love, peace, joy, self-control, gentleness, goodness, faith and justice.
May God reveal to us the tricks of the shadow of evil in our world and in our lives and may we have the strength of the Risen Christ to resist evil and to spread Christ's peaceful kingdom in our world. Amen.
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