Scripture: Luke 3:22-23, 4:1-13
09/02/2018
If I’m being completely honest, can I tell you that it is not always easy to be a parent in this world. There are distractions and temptations and issues at school that no one in my generation could have ever even conceived of. Each generation of the young see the world in wildly different ways from that of their elders and can’t begin to understand why we can’t see it way as well. I’m increasingly aware of the perspective my grandmother had, for those in my Wednesday Night Bible study, that’s my “not pure in heart” grandmother, but I am increasingly aware of the perspective that she possessed when she declared one day that she was too old to learn new things and that she was done. And, to a certain extent, she has something of a point. There is almost a mandate for parents to remain at least as technologically advanced as your children so that you can keep up, to know the latest trends that they will want to partake in, eventually, to keep up with which girls or guys they are into because sooner or later, in my case, sooner, you will have to talk to them about girls and guys. Right now, I like Asa. He just sits there and snuggles into my chest. Every now and then he’ll crack an eye open to make sure that he is still being held, but then he drifts back to sleep. I know this moment will not last, and in many ways, I don’t want it to, but there is something nice about those first moments of bonding that take place between a parent and child. In a time before he, like his brothers will be thrust into this brave new world, in which, so much of what is being produced, is being tailored towards their wants and needs to a degree unseen in the history of our culture and, I’m pretty sure, planet. So it is, that in the midst of this, it is also incumbent on parental units to try and maintain some degree of connection to the past through the imparting to children of familial stories, traditions, value and meaning, and, whenever possible, religion. In our house, we have both never shied away from talking to our children about religion, in many ways it is the chief topic of conversation around our dinner table, while also leaving room for the boys to explore the wonders of God’s good world all around them, to discover the spirit that is deep inside of all of us, and to figure out to best live into the siren song of that spirit without too many parameters laid our by their parents. And so, as with most things, we try to meet our children where they are at with their questions and concerns. And let me tell you, my friends, rare is the opportunity that comes to blend one’s religion with the interests of his or her child as that which happened to me a few years back when Jameson asked the question that dwelt deep in his heart, deep in his soul, “dad, tell me about Star Wars.” You see, my eldest son has always been, at least since he was old enough to partake in it, a lover of electronic games in all their various forms. Just this week I was cleaning out my phone of older apps that I didn’t use anymore and realized that he had downloaded and routinely played 65 games that were now taking up precious memory on my device. His entrée into this world of dad’s iPhone came when he started playing the game Angry Birds. Now, if you’ve never heard of this game, and, now, actually series of games, as the storyline goes a gang of mean pigs have stolen the eggs of a number of different kinds of birds and you, the player, must lead your avian team in retrieving said eggs by destroying the defensive ramparts of the previously mentioned pigs and even as I am speaking these words out loud, trust me, I know how absolutely ridiculous I sound. Anyways, not being satisfied with having a singular game of irate birds getting their eggs back from their porcine enemies, the creators Angry Birds have made an entire franchise of these games, which now total 22, and every single one of them is on my phone… Arguably, the biggest break for the creators of these games came when they paired up with George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, and morphed their birds into the main characters from the original three movies. Jameson, knowing nothing about Star Wars and everything about Angry Birds wanted to remedy this lack of knowledge and so came to the purveyor of all information nerd and/or geek related in our house, me, and with this query, I was given an opening to pair my interest in religion with his interest in taking eggs back from pigs through the use of light sabers.
Because, as it turns out, the whole of the plot line of the original three movies, was explicitly religious in nature. In the midst of conceiving the storyline that would become the Star Wars franchise, George Lucas was given a copy of the Joseph Campbell book,The Hero with 1,000 Faces. Campbell was a religious scholar who had studied and written about the mythological traditions of most of the major religions of the world and this book was an attempt to demonstrate the manner in which the founding figures of many of the great religions had shared qualities about their lives and quests for redemption of themselves and the world. So it is that while Star Wars and the person of protagonist, Luke Skywalker, are not expressly Christian in nature, Lucas attempted to draw several shared characteristics and experiences had by the two. Most explicitly is the struggles that Jesus and Skywalker share in their earliest understandings of the Divine nature of their birth and lineage, Jesus, born of the spirit, of the royal house of David, Luke born of a mysterious father with the power to command what Lucas calls “the Force” to do his bidding. This temptation, for Skywalker, comes as he is being tutored by the old and wise Yoda, a John the Baptist type character, who prepares the world for the coming of Skywalker, tries to show his young student, the true power of the force and its ability to bring about great joy and pain into the world. In the universe of Star Wars, these dueling forces are called the Light and the Dark Side. Skywalker, a pure character who rarely wanders from the path of righteousness throughout the entire series, is committed to use the Force only with the Light Side but Yoda knows and expresses the degree to which the Dark Side is always present and always tempting those who can command the Force to use it for their own selfish goals and enrichment. Soon after hearing this, Skywalker goes off by himself for a time and confronts what he believes to be Darth Vader, the chief embodiment of all that is evil within the universe. And after a brief light saber fight in which Skywalker defeats him, he learns that he has only really encountered the dark side of himself, and must now deal with the knowledge that within him are the two forces of light and dark which will tempt him throughout the rest of the movies until he faces the real Vader and must decide if he is willing to risk his life to save the whole of creation from this evil force that is growing stronger by the day. I swear, I could talk about the religious connotations in these movies for the next two hours, but I think you get the picture.
In the scripture passage for this morning, Jesus finds himself in a similar predicament. We begin with Jesus’s baptism and anointing by the Holy Spirit, in which the sky opened up and something like a dove descended onto him and a voice came from everywhere all at once proclaiming Jesus to be with God in a special and unique manner, “You are my own, my beloved. On you my favor rests.” It is this experience of God exploding into his life, as if out of nowhere, that shakes Jesus to his core. And it disturbs him so much so that the very next thing he does is head out into the wilderness and away from everything, his home, his family, his job, for a long time in order to make some sense of what has just happened in his life. And perhaps he was drawing on his Jewish roots and the practice of fasting in order to gain some amount of clarity but it is at that point that the darkness arises in him and demands that he use these new found powers that he possesses to make bread out of stone. Because bread goes to our central need for sustenance, the darkness that arises in him tempts him to address his physical needs by using this new power that he has discovered within himself. I once read of a pastor who fasted for 40 days in the midst of Lent and while I don’t remember all the details, like for instance how he survived without food, I do remember him talking about how, after awhile, that part of your body, the digestive system, just shuts down because there is nothing for it to do. It kind of enters a period of hibernation. But, he noted, your desire for food, for sustenance, that never actually goes away and the longer you go without eating the stronger your desire for food becomes until it begins to occupy your every thought, waking and sleeping. He wrote that the amount of self-control that it took to get to through that period was incredible. He also noted that he was famished and tired all the time. That by the end, simply functioning as a human became a challenging task. Now, as your pastor, I would say a couple things. One, don’t try this. The human body isn’t designed to be deprived in that manner and two, in both the Hebrew and the Greek scriptures, when we hear the number 40 that almost always means an unknown length of time that is long. So its unclear how long Jesus fasted just that he fasted awhile. And at the end, we read that he was hungry, he was tired, he was depleted and so it makes some sense that the first temptation that he would face would be simply surviving. And he responds to the darkness, and he reminds himself that true life is found not in satiating of physical needs, but in the connection that each one of us share with God. It is, ultimately not bread that gives us life, but the spirit of God, indwelling in each of souls. The beacon that brings us back to our true home again and again.
Soon thereafter, we are told that Jesus is tempted a second time by the darkness to use his power to gain worldly acclaim, to rule all the nations of the world. If he will but bend his will to the darkness, to the desire that we all share to accumulate wealth and stuff and authority and power, if Jesus will but acquiesce to that yearning that dwells deep within himself, then he can experience a life of untold pleasure rather than the life of pain the precipice of which he now finds himself on. But again, the light comes shining through the darkness, the light that connects him, and us to God, and turns away the darkness with a new commitment to never worshiping anything but God, to never placing anything, any desire or need or want before God and trusting God to take care of whatever needs we have. “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.”
And yet a third time, the darkness arises in Jesus and demands that he really place this newly discovered connection to God and all of God’s might to the test. And the darkness quotes back to him, the language he had heard, had perceived at his baptism, “If you are really “God’s own” than surely God will send the divine angels to catch you if you cast yourself off this temple before you hit the ground.” This must be the ultimate challenge for Jesus to overcome. To live in such a violent period of time, in which it was nothing for the Romans to quell dissent with crucifixion, with its mighty army, with public spectacle of human torture, this must have rested in the back of Jesus’s mind as he gained clarity about what it was that God was calling him to do. To challenge the status quo of Roman occupation, of religious stagnation, could very well mean a great deal of physical pain. Such a threat of violent retribution continues to keep a great many people around the world from declaring the truth of God’s love, of God’s call for justice, for peace, for overcoming the brokenness of the time. At the beginning of the faith it was believed that if Christians were shown the might of the occupying forces through torture and lions in the colosseum, and armies putting down insurrection, that the message, the truth of the message would be squashed out, that darkness would eventually swallow the light and yet time and again, the light continued to shine. So it was that Jesus faced the same challenge at the beginning of his ministry, to turn away from the physical pain that was surely to follow and live a more normal life. And yet a third time, Jesus dismissed the darkness with a commitment to always trust and never to need to put the power of God, the love of God to the test. And at that moment, the doorway to a normal existence was forever shut.
I suppose every generation, every era, can lay some claim to the difficulties of living a faithful, a more holistic life, but this period in our history seems exceedingly tough. We are called to be Christians, to be followers of Christ in each facet of our lives, and yet, there is the near constant temptation to amass all that we can, to control all that we can, to celebrate the ostentatious and extravagant eve though in the midst of all that we know that there are those around us, in our town, around our world who do not possess even the smallest amount of that which is needed to survive, not to thrive, but merely to survive. And, in the back of our minds, just as in the back of Luke Skywalker’s mind, in the back of Jesus’s mind, is the temptation to trust in our own hands, our own abilities, our own stuff. The temptation to seek ones own needs and desires and passions against the backdrop of everyone else. The temptation to forget our common ancestry in God, our common brotherhood, sisterhood in Jesus, our unification in the Spirit in the hopes that if we forget that God dwells in each of us then we can view the other as less important, less beloved, less human. But, when we look to Jesus, when we follow on the path that he first trod feelings of greed, of selfishness, of desire to satisfy our every whim are rendered powerless. When we look to Jesus, when we follow on the path that he first trod we have eyes to see that it is the power of God that address each one’s basic needs if we, the children of God will just get out of the way. When we look to Jesus, when we follow on the path that he first trod, we see that we are called to better take care of the poor, the dispossessed, the disinherited, the “least of these” in our midst. We are called to live selflessly. To live, not giving into the temptations of unbridled pleasure selfish greed. To live as Jesus, carrying few possessions yet being able to feed a multitude with 5 loaves and two fish.
And when we come to this table, when we approach this holy space, we come knowing and believing that all can be filled with bread that is Christ, have their thirsts quenched with wine of compassion, to be wholly subsumed and held and loved and awashed in the power of God for a brief moment. Believing that no matter how many come into this space, and come to this table desperate for the love of God, the presence of God, that everyone can and will be filled. We don’t worry whether there will be enough for all people because we believe that all people are called here and by being called here they can know and trust that they have a place here. At this table. The place where Jesus gave thanks and broke bread one final time with his closest friends. The place where Jesus gave thanks and shared cup with each one, even the one who would betray him, the place where we will all return one day, in which all the people of God, in which all people, will take their place at the great feast of God, with Jesus as the host and all those who have come before us waiting our arrival. Thanks be to God for the bread and cup and for never, ever leaving us to face our temptations alone and glory be to God in the highest and on earth peace amongst all God’s peoples. Alleluia, amen.
Image is Botticelli's Tentaciones de Cristo (The Temptations of Christ) (1482)