Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
Lent 2: March 12, 2006
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
I’m an Ella Fitzgerald fan and pride myself on knowing her work and the work of the composers and songwriters whose music she sang.But even I was floored to discover that she sang a song written by Irving Berlin called “Get thee Behind me Satan.”It goes like this:
Get thee behind me, Satan
I want to resist
But the moon is low and I can't say "No"
Get thee behind me
Get thee behind me, Satan
I mustn't be kissed
But the moon is low and I may let go
Get thee behind me
Someone I'm mad about
Is waiting in the night for me
Someone that I mustn't see
Satan, get thee behind me
This song gets at the kind of playful way some of us have come to look at the one the Bible calls “Satan”: as either a kind of boogeyman of ancient days or a way to give a name to life’s little delicious temptations—the piece of chocolate we feel we shouldn’t have, the stolen kiss, or the purchase of yet another unneeded pair of shoes.
The Gospel of Mark takes “the Satan” more seriously. Last Sunday we heard that after his baptism, Jesus was driven out into the desert to be tempted by Satan, and in this week’s reading we hear Jesus using the name of Satan to rebuke Peter for criticizing Jesus’ words about his own future suffering and death. “Get behind me, Satan,” he says, “for you are setting your mind on human things not on divine things.”
Temptation in the desert after his baptism; temptation through the voice of a disciple’s urging him to believe that his life’s work could be accomplished without suffering, without being reborn through dying.
I’ve been asking people all week about their impressions and experiences of temptation. After asking people that question, what I got from many was a kind of perplexed or embarrassed silence. But after the silence, this is some of what I heard from people: my temptation is food; my temptation is sleep; my temptation is power, my temptation is holding open too many options for the future; my temptation is zoning out too much in my life.Finally, someone said temptation is choosing to do something that seems appealing but in reality turns my life to, well, crap. “Temptation,” he said, smiling “is biting the apple, and finding out that it’s rotten at the core.”
The word used for temptation in the book of Mark is all about testing, an encounter or experience in which we are tested to see what we have learned or are learning, an experience in which we have to sift through and confront the potential ways we could get pulled away from who God is calling us to be or to become in a particular situation. For Jesus in the wilderness and in his conversation with Peter, the temptation is to reject the fullness of his vocation, to turn away from the fact that being the beloved one of God means to accept a life of struggle, of inner and outer conflict, a life in which the path to renewal leads through suffering and death.
And who wouldn’t be tempted to reject this? To return to my conversations about people’s temptations: who wouldn’t prefer
- To zone out in front of a television instead of wrestling with the question of what do I really want to do with my time and energy?
- To fill all the empty feeling places in ourselves with food and drink rather than suffering the emptiness that is simply a part of being human
- To secure power instead of suffering the awkwardness and vulnerability of being on an equal footing with others
- To be so enamored of options for the future that I never settle down into one path
Who wouldn’t prefer being in a place where the struggle and the pain and the difficulty in myself and with others seems to cease, where I can have what I believe might feel like peace.
In her chapter on the Benedictine value of stability Joan Chittister tells the story of Abba John, a monastic. Abba John had prayed to God to take his passions away from him so that he might become free from care. After doing this, he went and told one of the elders: “I find myself at peace with the world, without an enemy.”
And the elder said to him, “Then go and beseech God to stir up warfare within you so that you may regain the affliction and humility that you used to have, for it is by warfare that the soul makes progress.So he besought god and when the warfare came, he no longer prayed that it might be taken away, but said, “Lord, give me strength for the fight.”
One of the Eucharistic prefaces that we use during Lent (and you’ll hear it this morning) says “Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who was tempted in every way as we are, yet did not sin.” Another way to say this is that in his life and death Jesus did not do any number of things he could’ve done to insulate himself from the day to day struggles of heart and mind and body and spirit that you and I must suffer in order to live lives that embrace and express our full humanity, especially when under duress, in situations that test us out.
The broken bread and spilled wine of our Eucharist are all about this, about our God’s broken life that sustains us for our trials, our temptations and our struggles.
When Bob and I were in Trenton, New Jersey, at a little place called “The Community of Julian of Norwich” the parish musician who was also a jazz pianist would play a refrain from a Tracy Chapman song over and over again after we received communion. It went like this:
Don’t be tempted by the shiny apple
Don’t you eat of a bitter fruit
Hunger only for a taste of justice
Hunger only for a world of truth
’cause all that you have is your soul
all that you have is your soul.
All that we have is our souls—and these souls are not to be like little hot house plants protected from the trials and temptations of real life in the real world.They are instead to be like plants bearing the rich fruit born of struggle and tribulation.This is the fruit that gives life to the world.
Works Cited or Consulted
“Get Thee Behind Me, Satan” sung by Ella Fitzgerald was written by Irving Berlin in 1936.
Joan Chittister’s Wisdom Distilled from the Daily: Living the Rule of St. Benedict Today, p. 150
Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold’s sermon at St. David’s Episcopal Church, Austin, Texas given on Sunday, February 13, 2005.
Lyrics are from Tracy Chapman’s song “All That You Have is Your Soul”
