Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
The First Sunday of Lent, 2007
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
Luke 4:1-13
Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread." Jesus answered him, "It is written, 'One does not live by bread alone.'" Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, "To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours." Jesus answered him, "It is written,
'Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.'" Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, 'He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you, 'and 'On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.'" Jesus answered him, "It is said, 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'" When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.
I don’t like being tested. Most people I know don’t like being tested either. Here I’m both talking about the paper and pencil variety of testing—taking an exam or writing an essay in which I’m supposed to demonstrate what I know to someone who knows more than I do and I’m talking about waking up one day and finding ourselves in situations that test or try us at deeply personal or professional levels. I don’t like being tested.
And this is for obvious reasons. It’s frightening to be in a situation where we might give the wrong answer or fail or we might have to face that we’re unprepared for what will be asked of us. And it’s exhausting to be in situations that ask us to keep functioning in the face of some situation or some person who is pushing our buttons, who is testing us in ways that make us most uncomfortable.
And so as I hear in our gospel that it is none other than “the Spirit” who leads Jesus after his baptism into the desert where he will be tried and tested by the devil, I get a little mad, really, and, yes, I get a little intrigued. Some friend, that Spirit, leading Jesus fresh from his baptism into hostile territory. Some friend. With friends like these, who needs enemies?
And yet, and yet, if I can let myself be open to it (and I don’t want to) this is a story about the holy one, the fully human one, and, I believe, the necessity for him to go into enemy territory, to face the one who would push his most powerful buttons in order to lay claim to the kind of person he was meant to be, the kind of stance he was meant to have in his life. This is a story about the inevitability of certain kinds of trials with the enemy in order to be who we are meant to be.
And so let’s look at some of what might have been Jesus’ buttons, the ones the devil, the ultimate “button pusher,” went after.
The first button the devil tries to push in Jesus is a desire to save the world by meeting the world’s physical needs, in this case, feeding the hungry. This must have been a powerful button for a compassionate person who was himself hungry at the time. This impulse is about focusing his energy on filling up himself and others rather than living a life and offering others a life that was sustained by something beyond just meeting physical needs.
The second button the devil tries to push in Jesus is a desire for real, political power. This will to power the Bible sees as one of the most destructive buttons that can be pushed not just in Jesus alone but in any of us. Taking power, power that can be lorded over others rather than used in service of others is what this second button is all about.
And, finally, the third button the devil tries to push in Jesus is a desire to be invulnerable. He takes him up to the top of the temple and tells him to throw himself down so that God will demonstrate his protection of Jesus. This, of course, is a very powerful button, one that in refusing to react to, insures his path to top of another place, the cross.
But these are not meant to present or describe all the possible “buttons” in the world that are pushed or activated in the trials and testing that we undergo.
Yesterday in our quiet morning, we explored the voices of women poets grounded in mostly Christian faith traditions. Based on their work and on the work of Valerie Saivin, a women theologian who wrote an important essay on feminist theology in 1960, I spoke a bit about impulses that can get activated in us and can lead us into lives which we fail to live into the full image of Christ, the fully human being. What’s at stake here is failure to be the kind of human beings we are meant to be and failure to offer the world what we are meant to offer it.
One of the most important insights of the morning was that the will to power, that is the assertion of self all over the place as an impulse or a destructive button that gets pushed in us, is only one half of the story. Some of us, in fact, carry a different button—an impulse that is all about “caving,” never venturing out, never getting it together, never focusing our attention or claiming our voice.
For some of us, then, it is not that our devil shows us all the kingdoms of the world and promises us that these will be ours if we worship him. It is rather that our devil shows us a room with a comfy chair by the fire and the promise of tea and gossip with our friends.
Regardless though, of whether the will to power is your button or your button has more to do more with not really showing up in the world, the picture that our gospel paints is that you and I in God are not just the sum of all our buttons. Our full humanity, our freedom in God, in fact, has something to do with learning to resist those buttons when we can and instead learning to wait on God in our lives, waiting on the word of God in our lives.
For “The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart." The word of God is very near you.
Waiting on the word of God will not be a passive waiting. It will be a waiting that is receptive enough to hear the word of God calling us beloved in the same way Jesus heard it at his baptism. It will be a waiting that will hear the word of God calling us to honor the image of Christ within us and the image of Christ in others. It will be a waiting that comes to rely on the presence of God as a way of living rather than relying on what is in our bellies or what status we have in the eyes of the world. It is a waiting that will inevitably lead to a sending.
One of the poets we read yesterday was Denise Levertov. In this poem that I’d like to end with she describes the presence of something or someone who comes both to honor her and to send her.
By Denise Levertov
A certain day became a presence to me;
there it was, confronting me—a sky, air, light:
a being. And before it started to descend
from the height of noon, it leaned over
and struck my shoulder as if with
the flat of a sword, granting me
honor and a task. The day's blow
rang out, metallic—or it was I, a bell awakened,
and what I heard was my whole self
saying and singing what it knew: I can.
Works Cited or Consulted
Valerie Saiving, "The Human Situation: A Feminine View," in Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, edited by Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979).
Denise Levertov’s Breathing the Water (New York, NY: New Directions Publishing Corp., 1987).
