The Rev. Ann R. Lougee February 10, 2008 Wilderness Encounter Matthew 4:1-11 Every metropolitan area now has its "traffic watch" with helicopters hovering over freeways and major thoroughfares, advising motorists by radio about tie-ups, accidents, and slowdowns. One such radio traffic announcer reported that the inbound lanes of one freeway were jammed for miles because an overturned semi had spilled its load of cherry tomatoes and green peppers, making the roadway a sea of relish. The reporter then advised motorists against trying to use surface streets to bypass the area, as they too were clogged to a standstill. He next suggested taking two other freeways to bypass the congestion, but after further checking found that they were also tied up. With an exasperated sigh, he said on the air, "Folks, you might as well stay home, or turn around and go home." It's good to have alternate routes and bypasses. Wise planners always try to have a contingency plan ready in case of interruption or obstacle to Plan A. There are certain decisions in life, however, for which there are no options, when our only response has to be either yes or no. In his wilderness time, Jesus had to choose; he had to say "yes" or "no." He said "no" three times, but each "no" was a magnificent "yes." His "no" to temptation was his "yes" of faith, his "yes" to vocation, his "yes" to God's promise and claim. He made his radical choice and made a ministry of encouraging others to make theirs too. There is a personal wilderness for each of us, a lonesome valley which we, like Jesus, must walk by ourselves because no one else can walk it for us. Our yes-or-no encounters force us to examine and admit what we hold to be absolute. Confrontation with Jesus forces us to be rigorous in examining what are the "musts" of our lives. Those who have had homes destroyed by fire learn what is actually important to them and what they value most. Those who have spent time lying in the intensive care unit of a hospital know what it's like to ask themselves in the silent darkness of early morning where all the hurrying and demanding and striving and spending has brought them. So here at the beginning of another season of Lent, the story of Jesus in the wilderness invites us to "Forty days to cleanse the system and open the eyes to what's really important, to what remains when our external comforts are gone…to remember what it is like to live by the grace of God alone and not by what we can supply ourselves." There is something about a desert wilderness that can suck the ego right out of you. It is so big, so quiet, so empty that you cannot help noticing how small and perishable you are. You remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return, and that makes you reflect on your life. You may even wish you had something to distract you from that fact, or at least someone to talk to about it. Anyone but the devil, that is. But that's how the gospel writer chose to depict the time of self-examination that Jesus was undergoing: as a struggle with the devil. This lonely struggle of Jesus in the desert wilderness follows after the incident down at the river when Jesus was baptized and the sky opened up, and the Spirit descended, and the voice of God pronounced him God's Beloved Son. Apparently Jesus was so affected by that experience that he felt "driven" by a need to be alone and figure out what it meant, what God was calling him to be and to do. That's one way of reading that "the Spirit" drove him into the desert where he may even have wondered if he had imagined the whole thing. The way Matthew tells the story, Jesus now experienced not only hunger, and perhaps doubt, but also the temptation to relieve his suffering by turning stones into bread and by testing God and by grabbing power and glory even if it cost him his loyalty to the one true God whose Child he was. Matthew characterizes this temptation as the devil, who subtly suggested that Jesus deserved better than God was giving him. Today, his followers too may hear a "devilish voice in our heads [that] says things like, 'If you are a child of God, shouldn't things be going a little smoother for you? If you are really a Christian, I mean – shouldn't you be happier, healthier, richer, safer?" In her sermon on the temptation of Jesus in the desert, Barbara Brown Taylor gives a wonderful description of how Lent came to be (after all, it's not in the Bible). She explains that many years after Jesus' death, when he had not returned as quickly as some had expected, church folks "decided there was no contradiction between being comfortable and being Christian, and before long it was hard to pick them out from among the population at large. They no longer distinguished themselves by their bold love for one another. They did not get arrested for championing the poor. They blended in. They avoided extremes. They decided to be nice instead of holy, and God moaned out loud" (Home by Another Way). Eventually, the church dug deep into its faith story, recalling the time (always with the number forty involved) that Jacob, Moses, Elijah, and Jesus each spent in the desert, wandering and suffering, longing and learning: hungry. "So," Taylor writes, "the church announced a season of Lent…an invitation to a springtime of the soul." Then as now, folks had their "pacifiers," as Taylor calls them, all the things and behaviors that we use to keep ourselves from feeling what it means to be human, since that means sometimes being in pain or afraid. Our pacifiers can convince us that we don't really need God. Taylor says, in fact, that just about all of us struggle with an addiction, that is, a dependence on "anything we use to fill the empty place inside of us that rightfully belongs to God alone." But that emptiness, that hollowness we sometimes feel is not a sign of something gone wrong, she suggests. It is the holy of holies inside of us, the uncluttered room of the Lord our God. Nothing on earth can fill it, but that does not stop us from trying," to our detriment. (Home by Another Way). Of course, in the gospels' feeding stories Jesus does bring forth bread for the hungry, but even there he makes clear that it is God's word that feeds even more richly than food. When Jesus does claim the power that is his, it's exercised on behalf of others, to feed the hungry, heal the sick, and give glory to God. And as he exercises that power, it begins to dawn on those who are watching that the words of that heavenly voice at the river were true. He is, indeed, a beloved son of God. So we can see this testing to be about Jesus' faithfulness to who he is and what God is calling him to do: not to ask for special privileges or place or relief, but to enter fully into this human condition of want and need and pain. The temptations attack him in those places where humans think they do best: daily bread, sacred spaces, devotion to God. Like Israel, Jesus is tempted in ways that symbolize all of the possibilities for doubt, misdirection, faithless choices, and unholy distractions from which God's people are ever at risk. Like those earlier Christians who settled into a comfortable faith, we're tempted today to turn away from the suffering of the world, tempted to build our own defenses against doubt and risk, tempted to concentrate not only on our own needs but also our wants, before thinking of others. In doing so, we forget, or betray, who we are, too, and fall prey to the tempter. The first temptation for Jesus is making the nature of his work too small – satisfying hunger – and the recipients of his work too few – only one, himself. Jesus is instead called by God to a ministry of great size…a sweeping ministry, encompassing the whole of humanity; but the tempter places before him another idea – make it narrow" The church also experiences this form of temptation whenever it risks losing sight of the breadth of its calling to serve not itself but the world, or when we measure the effectiveness of the church according to how quickly it responds to our personal ideas and needs, our demand to be fed…Jesus is hungry, very hungry, but he will not allow the devil to make the gospel too small. During Lent, we need to spend some time in those empty places within us that belong to God alone, listening to a gospel larger than we had ever considered, and opening ourselves for what is yet to come. Faced with the example of Jesus, we may realize how insufficient it is when we try to get by with an "almost" or "maybe" or "later" in answering God's call.