♦ February 14, 2016 ♦
Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent
Church of St. Paul and the Redeemer, Chicago
I spent some time in the desert last weekend. I was the guest preacher at the Episcopal cathedral in Phoenix, a city that by rights shouldn’t exist where it does but persists in claiming it deserves to. On a splendid winter morning, some good friends introduced me to the Desert Botanical Garden, perhaps the only such park in the country, and if not that, certainly the largest and the most beautifully maintained. There are few things more noble to behold than a giant Saguaro cactus silhouetted against the open desert sky. The Saguaro is a true survivor species, both dangerously fragile and immensely tenacious. It has evolved to survive in the cruelest desert temperatures, its roots shallow but widespread, its main trunk absorbing and retaining sometimes more than a ton of water, at the same time providing a sheltered home to desert woodpeckers who peck their way into the cactus’ cool embrace.
That part of the desert was beautiful. But remember, this was Phoenix, which means there’s also Scottsdale, the Southwest shopper’s suburban paradise. While I was wandering through the winding pathways of the cactus garden, a few miles away in Scottsdale more than 250,000 wellheeled and suitably dressed spectators had gathered in the desert heat to watch the Phoenix Open. There is nothing more unsettling than to encounter the well-manicured and undulating green of a professional golf course sprouting fully grown in the midst of the desert waste. Traveling through Scottsdale, it’s hard to resist the uncharitable thought that the water that’s been diverted to maintain the eighteenth hole for the amusement of the 1% might have been put to much better use elsewhere. Flint comes to mind. Is it just me, or do I detect an unintended irony in the official title given to last weekend’s tournament? It was called the Waste Management Phoenix Open. You can’t make these things up.
But I digress. What I am saying is, deserts are seldom simply deserts. Religious people of a certain sentimental persuasion tend to idealize deserts, especially in Lent. We too easily make mistake the desert for a metaphor. It is an inner place to which we can remove ourselves from the world, become more adept at religion perhaps, see things more clearly, take better control of our spiritual lives, fast and diet our way to a better tomorrow.
But that’s not how Luke presents the desert this morning, and that’s not what drew Jesus to it. To be sure, deserts can be places of great beauty and safe refuge, but they can also be treacherous—and I am not just talking about rattlesnakes. As we know all too well from our recent history, deserts can be hotbeds of human destructiveness, theaters of torture, places of trial that take the measure of our collective moral being and all too often find it wanting, exposed in all our weakness and folly.
Let’s be clear. Once he was safely baptized, Jesus didn’t enter the desert in order to seek the Spirit. Just the opposite. It was the Spirit that forced him into the desert, drove him there not in spite of his baptism but as a result of it. The Spirit drove Jesus into the desert because that’s what baptism does—it forces our hand. The Spirit drove Jesus into the desert—what better place to withstand the world’s temptations, to be seen and tested as our own divine Saguaro, both fragile and tenacious?
Luke’s Gospel, unlike the other three, presents Jesus with three desert temptations. But really, I think for us, they really come down to just two: the temptation to despair, and the temptation to control. These two temptations might seem like opposites, but in fact they function well together. How many of us have not felt at some time in our lives, maybe even now, in some way abandoned by God, left in the wilderness with no compass, no map, as if God has simply left the building. And in the face of such abandonment, how many of us have not felt the need to regain control, to master our own destinies, to seize the initiative in a hostile world and take control where we can and when we can? I suspect that need to control what cannot be controlled—the resort to verbal, emotional and even physical violence to reassert control—is what now haunts our political culture, and poisons our public life.
And for those of us who think of ourselves as religious, or even just spiritual people, that need to control is the shadow side of this Lenten observance, the shadow side of many of our religious practices: if only we can say the right things, pray the right way, read the right texts, reject the appropriate heresies, only then can we overcome the doubts that haunt us, overcome the world’s contention—and maybe our own—that all this might be just nonsense, that non-sense is what the cosmos is all about, and that life is just an aimless drift, a wandering in a trackless desert.
This drive to control in the face of despair underlies the three temptations that Luke’s Satan offers to Christ in the desert.
- Turn those stones into bread: Take control of your Messianic destiny, and leave this human frailty behind.
- Enter into your glory: Worship me, seize your lordly inheritance, and devil take the hindmost. God has nothing to do with what you have coming to you, because, when push comes to shove, God is really just Satan in disguise, and you deserve everything you get.
- Throw yourself down from the parapet: Let your desperation force God to play God’s saving hand.
What Satan preaches in this Gospel is an ethic of control: spirituality as a means of controlling the future, martyrdom as a means of controlling God.
Where Satan goes astray, and what this Gospel proclaims, is that even in the desert, faithfulness is not about control. It has nothing to do with personal perfection, or following the proper rules, or testing whether God is really on our side when push comes to shove.
Faithfulness in the desert, as Jesus practices faithfulness, is not about control. Faithfulness is about bearing witness. Bearing witness—standing firm against the destructive powers of this world, acting with both passion and compassion toward others so that God’s saving grace may be seen and felt in the world. Bearing such witness is a risky business. Perhaps there is no more ominous sentence in the Gospel than the one that ends this reading: “When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.”
It is no different for us. In this Lenten season, all sorts and conditions of people seem intent on bearing witness to wanton falsehoods: to a savage individualism, a ruthless xenophobia, and racist rhetoric masquerading as Christian truth. Savage individualism, ruthless xenophobia, violent racism, all in the name of a so-called Christian nation that neither is nor was: this is what our desert looks like, it is into this desert that the Spirit has driven us.
This is the great paradox of the Christian life. In this Lenten season, we don’t enter the desert to stay there. We don’t go there to prove anything. We don’t go there because we want to go there. We go there because we have to go there, because that is where the Spirit is driving us. And we don’t necessarily emerge from the desert as more spiritual persons, whatever that means. But in Christ’s name we leave the desert as witnesses to God’s enduring care for the world as it is, acting in charity toward our neighbors, seeking the kind of justice that restores and reconciles, in solidarity with the weak and the oppressed, the exile and the refugee, even those who do not look like us or speak like us or eat like us or pray like us.
There was a time when these things could go without saying in this country.
These times are different.
Into what desert is the Spirit driving you?