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Sermon for Sunday, February 21, 2010


“The Wilderness Journey”

Luke 4:1-13

Can you remember the last time temptation pinned you up against the wall and dug its claws into your throat? Pretty visual statement isn’t it?  It certainly takes temptation out of the trivial and slams us right into our face. It is more than passing up a chocolate covered donut this morning. It is the kind of temptation that is real, heart wrenching, so serious that to fall to it would be a disaster in your life. And if that temptation comes at just the right or the wrong moment, we are all the more vulnerable. I almost passed on this passage because I didn’t want to trivialize the temptation issue. Perhaps you have heard the prayer, “Lord thank you so much for being with me today. I have not gossiped, nor have I spoken a cross word. My thoughts have been on you and I am thinking of the people in my life with love in my heart. I have not been angry, sarcastic or impatient. Now, please help me as I get out of bed this morning.” Trivial. To say, “don’t be tempted, don’t smoke, drink or chew or hang around with those who do…” trivializes the issue. 

For me, temptation is some thing, some one, some decision that carries me farther away from God and the farther away from God I get, the farther away I am from who I was created to be. And yet to be tempted is to live. Sometimes mildly. Sometimes with gut wrenching severity.

For a Christian temptation is a booby trap in life’s journey.

Only two of the four gospels give the longer version of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. John doesn’t mention it. Mark is short and to the point: “And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan and he was with the wild beasts and the angels waited on him.” I suppose that is all Mark thought we needed to know.

If you remember more than that, you are remembering what Matthew and Luke shared. They are the ones who go into detail about who said what to whom.  If one doesn’t get anything else out of this encounter, they will know that Satan knows the scriptures pretty well.  But knowing and doing are two different things. Satan knew the Bible verses, but Jesus knew how to do what the Bible says which is how he survived his exam in the wilderness. Jesus turned Satan down at every corner, no to the bread, no to the kingdoms, no to the angels.  By the end of this time in the wilderness Satan had reached the end of his rope and he left Jesus, but how significant it is when Luke says “departed from him until an opportune time.” File that away. Evil does not give up on you and me. It is never over. We shall deal with temptation every day of our lives until that day we are called to leave this planet. The truth is that Jesus isn’t the only one who has the devil whispering in his ear.

Well, you’ve heard a million sermons on temptation and have probably sung the old hymn “yield not to temptation for yielding is sin.”  Most of you can do the dialogue between Jesus and the devil so I am going to skip that part today if for no other reason we won’t be put to the same test as Jesus.  Our tests won’t be as intense because Satan can turn our heads with an all you can eat buffet or a tax refund or a free milk shake from Chic Filet.

So where do we go with this passage if I don’t talk about the temptation between Jesus and the devil? Barbara Brown Taylor turned my head in a different direction about this passage when she suggests that we may need to look more closely at the wilderness. In our own individual ways we have all been there or maybe are there. The wilderness may not look like a deserted scary place in the woods. It may look like a hospital waiting room or a motel room or a lost job.

It may even look like the conversation I had with someone this past week who is searching beyond searching wanting a word from the Father and not able to hear Him. The wilderness comes in so many shapes and sizes that the only way you can some time tell that you are there is when you look for those things that you normally count on to save your life and they are not there.

The fact of the matter is that sooner or later we will find ourselves in some wilderness taking the exam given by the devil and it is there we really discover who we really are and what life is really about.

That may sound like bad news, but I think it could be good news. Why? Because even if we do not want to head into the wilderness and yet end up there and then try to get out as quickly as possible, it is in the wilderness that we can also find it to be spirit filled, life changing. I have known too many people who have gone into the wilderness and as painful and as brutal as it may be, they found God.

When Jesus was taking his exam with the devil, the Spirit was there and Luke says he was filled with that Spirit. What did that forty day journey in the wilderness do to Jesus? It freed him…freed him from all attempts to distract him from his true purpose. After forty days in the wilderness, Jesus managed his appetites, and also learned to trust the Spirit that brought him there in the first place. As you read the scriptures you will notice that following this wilderness journey, Jesus launched his ministry. What happened in the wilderness gave to him the kind of clarity and grit he could not have found anywhere else.

We are in the season of Lent. Still pretty new to most Baptists.  It comes from an English word meaning “spring.” --- not just the time of year when the daffodils bloom (and I cannot wait til that happens), but also the blooming of the human soul.  From Ash Wednesday to Easer Sunday, Christians are invited to do without some things they are perfectly capable of having --- like rich food and drinks and to take on…a crucial part of the season, to take on some things they are capable of avoiding --- such as a moral inventory or a lunch date with someone they are mad at.  And for many that becomes the wilderness journey.

You see, this season is more than giving up soft drinks or taking on daily exercise. It is growing the soul. It is choosing to live on less, not more; practicing subtraction in stead of addition, not because your life is bad, but because you want to make sure it is real life.

I read of someone who gave up using their cell phone during Lent. Can you imagine that? What would life be like without a cell phone for forty days?  I’ve heard them ring in worship and watch people text during worship. What a blow to the system! Other folks give up TV, eating, shopping, ____. Of course none of that is very impressive to people who have spent their entire lives trying to figure our the next meal, but we are in a culture of plenty so giving up a cell phone or some other thing that Barbara Taylor calls anesthesia can be big. And it is pretty impressive in our culture to give up some appliance, habit or substance we use to keep ourselves feeling what life might really feel like.

You do know that almost everyone uses something as a pacifier to deal with the wilderness and keep it at arm’s length. It might be a murder mystery, Facebook, NCIS, shopping.  They may not necessarily be bad, but they are distractions when one is too tired, too sad, too scared to enter into the wilderness.

What we have is forty days for finding out what life is like without pacifiers, anesthesia, whatever you might call it, Once you turn off the cell phone, silence can be loud. Once the TV is off, a night can get really long. After a while when you are in the wilderness, you can begin to think, to feel, to connect with the Spirit who will be with you in your spiritual poverty. In the wilderness you can begin to sense what is wrong with your life and what you may need to do about it. And you can also begin to realize that you can make it without your pacifier.

And you really can make it. Too often we have convinced ourselves that we cannot live without ____, but it is almost never true. In the wilderness journey good things, God things can be discovered.

I do not what your wilderness exam is like. Only you can do that, because you are the only one who knows what devils have your number and what kind of bribes they use to get you to pick up and respond. What I do know is that a voluntary trip to the wilderness this Lenten season is a great way to practice getting free of those devils in your life. It becomes the place where you lose your appetite for those things that cannot save you, but also because it is where you learn to trust the Spirit that led you there who will lead you out to worship and serve the Lord.

 

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800 Thompson Street
Ashland, VA 23005

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