1 Lent B February 22, 2015
Gen. 9:8-17 Ps. 25:1-9
1 Peter 3:18-22 Mark 1:9-13
You
have gotten used to me when I preach being the "father of all
digressions," and you often are thinking before your sermon nap,
"surely he digresses." I digress usually as way of building a temporary
context within which we might find current and relevant insights from the biblical
writings which in their face value presentations are often distant and
inaccessible to our modern patterns of life and thought. The modern Enlighten and Modern science has
taught us to divide up all knowledge and life experience into disciplines,
"ologies", and many other compartments. Religious faith and Sunday Church stuff has
unwittingly been relegated to the equivalence of a most important sub-category
of art and entertainment. And so when
we do our religious faith, we detach from our scientific mind and enter a
Disneyesque sort of kingdom of Magical Realism.
The stuff of the Bible does not comport with our scientific lives and
our commonsensical lives which we live outside of the Disneyesque Magic Realism
of the Sunday Eucharist. And so here we
are again in the magic kingdom on this First Sunday in the Magical season of
Lent.
In my digression, I would want to set up the
possibilities of coming to some insights about the forty days of the Temptation
of Jesus by Satan in the wilderness. The
Gospel account of the temptation of Jesus is the one of the inspirations for how the season of Lent has come to be understood and practiced.
Could I get us all to agree that we are
limited to having just human experiences?
So by necessity we are anthropocentric, that is we can only understand
and see things from a human centered way.
Even if we think we have special empathy with animals or with God, we
still have but varieties of human empathy.
Could I also get us to agree that what defines humanity in Western
culture is what we call personhood? So
here is a new word, personocentric. We
most often treat everything in personal terms.
Since we regard God to be greater than humanity, we assume God is also
superlative personhood. To deny God's
personhood would be to say that God is less than what we regard to be a the
most important aspect of humanity.
We as personocentric human beings, assume God
is also a person in the superlative sense.
But there something else about human behavior. We use a figure of speech called synecdoche
when we let something partial stand in as representing a whole. A person makes little people out of all of
the parts of his or her being. I say my
"toe hurts" as though my toe were a little independent person within
myself. Or my heart aches or my heart feels
sad. We say that our body talks and in
our speech we give personal identity to interior parts like soul, spirit, mind,ego,
superego, id, heart and gut. We as
personocentric beings cannot help but bestow personhood on all sorts of
fragments of ourselves.
We cannot help but confer personhood on almost
everything and we also have inherited the tradition of personalizing the shadow
and counter being of God, also known as Satan, the serpent, Beelzebul, Lucifer
and the Devil. If God is Holy
Personhood, God's deprived counter-part is the personalize force who has come
to be known as the devil and he has his fallen angels and demonic personal messengers.
The spiritual and faith tradition in which we
live teaches us that we are involved in this great cosmic battle between the
Holy and Special Personhood of God and the deprived personhood of the divine
counter-part, the devil.
To live is to be in this cosmic epic
adventure. How do we martial our
internal forces when our minds and our interior lives become the proverbial
"devil’s playground?" We have
in literature the figure Faust and Mephistopheles who are figures who became
"evil" geniuses because they supposedly sold their souls to the devil
for the kind of public recognition which they wanted.
The temptation of Jesus presents to us Jesus
as the hero of the interior life who re-enters the Garden of Eden long after
human eviction and it has become the wild and dangerous wilderness. The serpent is presented under the guise the
devil, the accuser and like a crooked prosecuting attorney.
The devil and accuser attains personal
identity in the same way all of our interior energies and forces do and the
devil like a ventriloquist is borrowing of the voices of the worst tormentors in the memories of our
lives. Everyone who suggested that we
could not do something or that we were not valued, not good enough, not
beautiful enough or didn't have the perfect body is able to come to be the devil's interior
accusing voice. The personal
voices of our inward accusers can be many to which we are particularly vulnerable in times of crises. The devil
as an interior voice is the voice of the trickster appears to Jesus as the once serpent in
the Garden of Eden. The
trickster's voice within us tries to throw off our timing; tries to get us to do
good things at the wrong time and for the wrong number of times even to make us
addicts. The voices are tailored to our
own history and so we are vulnerable.
The voices invite us to misuse religion and even misinterpret the Bible. The satanic voice told Jesus that he could
jump from a high place because the Psalmist wrote some poetry about angels
catching someone in a fall. The voices
tried to get Jesus to replace his interpretation of gravity with a poetic safety
net of angels. The voices told
Jesus to sell his brilliant soul and his talents and gifts to become the ruler
of the world. We have megalomaniac
voices which falsely inflate our egos. We
can have paranoid voices and all sorts of voices within us. We have voices that tempt us to worry obsessively
about what someone else might be thinking about us.
The story of Jesus meeting the great accuser
is a story about there being a hero of the soul who is the model for us to
become heroes when we take up the task of mediating our interior lives into
thinking, emotions, choices, speaking and actions in our lives. To grow mature in our lives is to learn to be
the conductor of the orchestra of voices within us, some of which can at times
seem to push us to things that are not good or healthy for us. Jesus spoke words of rebuke to the voice of
the devil who confronted him. Jesus
asserted himself as the author and playwright of the voices within his
life. He silenced the voices of the
accuser with the authority of a conductor cutting off a cacophonous section of
the orchestra.
It is good for us to know that there is a
hero of the interior; someone who has faced the inner voices, those fragments
of personalities. Jesus brought them into rebuke and order, and who
can now be known in us as the Higher Power of the Risen Christ to do the same.
The Risen Christ in our lives stands as the
invitation for us to come to this same soundness of mind. I am not suggesting that we are called to be
such solitary heroes as Jesus seemed to be.
I would suggest that young people or people in times of crisis seek out
those who help them to rebuke the accusing and destructive voices of the
interior and let the angelic voices of positive affirmation come to prominence. This is why counseling and spiritual
direction is a good personal habit.
Inner voices can be seductive and misleading and this why one should
seek help from a seasoned friend of souls to help one advance in the goal of
becoming the free conductor and author of one's own life.
It is now Lent. It is a time to become better conductors of the
all of the voices of the fragments of personalities which arise within our
interior world. I present to you, Jesus
Christ, as the one who was honest about the great shadows voices which arise
from within, but as one who attained a self-understanding and an understanding
of God as his Father. Jesus as God's beloved Son exercised the authority to conduct his own interior
life.
My prayer for each of us is that we would
seek the authority of Christ in the conducting of all of the elements of our
interior lives so that we may during this season of Lent make further progress in
the art of living. As we become skillful
conductors of all of the personified inner voices of our lives, we can know
hope and joy, and also give that hope and joy to others. We are called to be successful resisters of
temptations of the satanic voices just like Jesus, and in learning to do so, we are to help others do the same. Amen.
