After appropriately droll congratulations, several
other friends jumped in with their own pronouncements:
“I am not going to smoke cigars,” said one woman.
“I will not eat liver and onions,” said someone else.
“I will refrain from driving a Ferrari,” I offered.
“My husband will not dust this Lent,” said another
woman.
Of course, all this electronic silliness had a point. My
friend was underscoring how we can use Lent to avoid something that we’d never
do anyway while sounding all righteous at the same time. Or how we can
trivialize spiritual discipline into a kind of reverse-new years resolutions
(with equally deep and last results).
I was thinking about that as I re-read Jesus’
temptations in the wilderness. I mean I can honestly say that I can safely
resist the temptation to turn a rock into raisin bread, I wouldn’t even dream
of troubling an angel to act as a parachute, and I certainly know that I can
easily turn aside the temptation to run the universe my way.
Well… mostly!
Both the silliness on Facebook and the Gospel lesson tells
us two things about the Christian life that become very clear if you make even
a partial stab at a Lenten discipline.
First, it is tempting to turn Lenten disciplines into
a show of piety designed to impress our friends and, maybe lull ourselves into
thinking that we really don’t need to change anything substantial about
ourselves.
Second, we forget that the real spiritual damage comes
not from doing something radically out of character but from when we do the
things that come very easy to us—only at a time and a place and in way that
distorts us.
Look at the temptations that Jesus faced:
He is tempted to turn stone into bread. Well, Jesus
fed a crowd of 5000 and another of 4000… couldn’t he do this in a heartbeat?
And certainly Jesus ate all the time… in fact, some of the super-religious in
his day chided him for eating too much and with the “wrong” people (in their
estimation), to boot! The temptation was not that he was being asked to do
something Jesus couldn’t do, but rather to do it at the wrong time and for the
wrong reason.
The devil tempts Jesus to throw himself off the temple
roof so that angels could rescue him and then bear him up for all to see. But
instead, he waits to slowly walk among everyday people in his ministry, healing
and teaching, to walk the road to Calvary and die on the cross—where he would
finally defeat death. The temptation was to cut that short and avoid the cross
altogether.
Jesus is also tempted to take on earthly power, again
avoiding the cross, when instead, in God’s time, he will assume his place as
King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
Notice that all of these temptations have the effect
of eliminating the cross and resurrection. Not taking away the need but
bypassing it altogether. So while these temptations might have served Jesus in
the short-term, but it also would have stopped God’s redeeming work dead in its
tracks.
Something else stands out in the temptations: they are
not merely personal. Jesus engages the powers of this world--the underbelly of
human existence, that in the Gospel is the devil. Bishop Neil Alexander, former
Bishop of Atlanta and Dean Emeritus of the School of Theology of the University
of the South, once said that “the powers of this world are the great resistant
forces, largely uncontrollable, that hold people hostage, captive to the
institutions and systems that carry us along, the forces that drive the spirit
of the age promising life but leading to death. The powers of this world seek
to render us powerless, before the immensity of the world's
problems.”
These are the powers that say, "No one really
wants war, but the bodies keep piling up” and "No one really wants
homelessness, but we can't seem to do anything about it” and "No child
needs to die of hunger anywhere, but especially in the wealthiest nation on
earth, and yet they do." In short, these are the powers of fatalism and
cynicism that say, "What can you do, you can’t fight city hall!"
At the same time, the powers of this world love
domination and violence. The principalities and powers of this world see cruelty
as the tool and power as the point and relentlessly seek to have their own way
regardless of the costs, even to the point of death. It is these powers that
Jesus confronts and resists in the wilderness. The evil one and his servants do
everything they can to distract Jesus—and us! —from his, and our, mission and
purpose. And the struggle won’t end there! These are the powers that will
eventually hunt him down, arrest him, flog him, publicly humiliate and then
crucify him.
But before all that, let’s look more closely at the
temptations that Jesus faced.
It’s true. These divine-sized temptations may never
come our way, but what does come our way are the same temptations that on a
smaller scale. Every time we are tempted to use our gifts, our abilities, and
our opportunities frivolously, impulsively, and selfishly to instead fritter
them away in the service of self rather than for God’s glory, is to distract
ourselves from learning and doing the work of Jesus.
The temptation to cut short what God cultivates in us
will always come at a time and in a form that appears to be most convenient,
and most attractive to us. It might even appear to be the shrewd, powerful
thing to do. How many people aspire to power and wealth and fame, even if that
circle ends up being rather small, at the cost of true friendship, healthy
relationships, and collaborative service?
I wish that holiness of life was something we could
just do. You know, I wish we could
just snap our fingers, buy a packaged system, or just re-boot ourselves. It
would be great if we all came with a big red reset button. But reorienting
ourselves takes a lifetime and that’s okay because God wastes nothing. There
are tried and true processes and tools, but none of it is magic. The amazing
thing is God uses all the temptations we’ve turned aside and the ones
we’ve given into, all the prayers we’ve said and the prayers we’ve neglected,
all the opportunities to serve we’ve taken and the times we’ve run away,
as the raw material to shape us into the people God made us to be.
On another Facebook discussion about Lent, a more
serious question came up: “what are you giving up and what are you taking on
this Lent?”
I remember hearing a Benedictine monk from the
Episcopal Holy Cross Monastery talk about this. He said that he neither gave up
nor took on anything during Lent. He used Lent to try to do what he was
supposed to be doing all along. He said that he had come to see that Lent is
about spiritual self-correction and challenged us to do one exceptional deed
each day during the season and tell no
one about it.
Now there’s a radical idea: Using Lent as the
time to do what we are supposed to be doing all the time! Instead of taking
away something we might not miss all that much anyway, how about using the time
we’ve set aside in Lent—this 40-day tithe of our year—to do a just little more
of what we are supposed to be doing anyway!
Here is the website for St. Chad's, Tampa, Florida
Learn more about the Diocese of Southwest Florida here
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