Tempted

Tempted

Luke 4:1-13

Last week, we stood together and looked at this “mountaintop moment” for Jesus.  He heard his calling and responded.  He left what he loved behind and headed to the River Jordan to see John.  He did his “trademark” thing—he went last, waiting until everyone else was baptized to be baptized himself.  He put himself in John’s hands and was baptized in that chilly water, which, interestingly, for Luke is not the culminating moment.  Instead, it is only post-baptism, when Jesus prays, that the fireworks start. Jesus prays, the Spirit descends on him like a dove, and a voice speaks:  “You are my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”  

To feel the force of this moment, we have to hear how Luke shapes it.  In Luke, the voice is clearly speaking to Jesus:  You are my Son, the Beloved.” This is a conversation between Jesus and God. This is not the case in the other Gospels.  In the other versions of this story, the voice seems directed to the crowd or maybe even to the authorities:  “This is my Son, the Beloved.”  In those Gospels, the baptism has a public meaning as the first and perhaps most powerful declaration of who Jesus is.  In Luke, the meaning is personal.  It’s between God and Jesus as an act of confirmation and validation:  “You were right to come.  The calling you heard was me.  Yes, there’s work to be done but know, from the start, that no matter how hard this gets, you are loved.”

Though we may be reluctant to use the language, I think we all have moments when we rise to our callings.  We’re young and try a new sport or try out for the play or decide that we’re going to audition for the choir.  We feel the pull of college and gradually come to the sense of which college has our name on it.  We see the issues of the day and run into the one that we’re meant to take on.”  We meet someone and this crazy thought rises, “This is the person that I’m going to marry.”  There are so many “leaps of faith” in life.

Of course, sometimes we think we have a calling and it turns out that we are wrong.  If my life-long friends were here they would tell you how many girlfriends I thought might be “the one” before I met “the one.”  I was sure that I was going to go to the University of Iowa to study Japanese and East Asian Studies until I went to Saint Olaf College and studied English and Philosophy.  I thought I was making a brief stop at the Union Church of Lake Bluff to be a Christian Education Director to figure out what my next “real calling” would be.  We’re wrong way more often about our callings than we are right, at least if we are willing to take some risks.

This is why it is such a powerful thing when we take that risk and go all in and realize that we have done exactly what we need to do.  We can feel it in our bones.  We might even get some message from the people around us:  “Gosh, you are exactly who we’ve been waiting for!” Things just feel right.  You feel at peace inside.  You feel like your choice has been validated.

Then, if we don’t smooth things over with nostalgia, if we really take a long look at what actually happened next, almost always that feeling of validation gives way to the realities of what’s at hand.  Almost always, doing something new is challenging.  We get disoriented.  We know the first step but what in the world comes next?  Nothing about this new world is familiar or comforting.  It feels like the ground beneath your feet is shaking.  It dawns on you that responding to your calling is almost always easier than living out that calling.  

Things get real…real fast.  Having fallen in love with the feeling of falling in love, your next job is to figure out what in the world it means to actually love someone—warts and all—and to allow them to see you and love you—warts and all.  Your new sport or new place in the band or the choir requires you to work hard and deal with the quirks of your teammates or bandmates or choir members.  New is exciting but new is almost never easy.  The doubts start to whisper: “Is this really worth it? Is this really a calling at all?”

So, in our text for this morning, Jesus is in a familiar place.  Jesus was led by the Spirit to the river to be baptized.  He was filled with the Spirit.  The Spirit will empower him to do God’s work, to rise to whatever challenges are ahead.  However, I believe that Jesus was entirely unprepared for what was next.  The Spirit drives him, not toward those in need, not toward a synagogue to preach or a public space to heal the sick.  No, the Spirit leads him into the middle of nowhere where he is entirely alone and there is no bread or water to be found.  Every external thing—every person, every familiar place, every beloved task—every, everything—has been stripped away from Jesus.  And, as our text begins, he’s been there for “forty days,” (“forty” being, as I’ve said before, the Biblical shorthand for “a long time.”) 

Here’s what I want you to think about.  Think about the last time you were at the doctor’s office for a physical.  You arrived all ready to go, feeling good about “reporting in” and taking care of yourself.  You sit and wait until your name is called, scrolling on your phone, distracting yourself.  When they call you, you march behind the nurse down the hall.  She leads you to the dreaded scale.  You empty your pockets, take off your shoes, reassure yourself that you’ve worn your most lightweight clothing, and you step on the scale.  You step off, grab your stuff in a pile and shuffle awkwardly down the hall in your socks until you’re led into a room.  There’s a paper gown on a fake leather—bed?bench?table?  You’re told to take off your clothes, put on the gown—backwards—and then sit on the crinkly paper that rests on top of whatever the bench like thing is.  Then, you sit there and wait, trying not to crinkle the paper.

As you sit there, you have every negative thought possible.  If you have high blood pressure, you start to worry about your blood pressure which…raises your blood pressure. You catch your reflection in the mirror and think, “This gown really is not working for me.” You look at the bad doctor’s office art with an intensity that you could never muster in the world’s finest art museum because you’ll do anything to not be stuck in that place at that moment.  Then, there’s a knock on the door and the world speeds up again.

Here’s the truth:  we can be doing exactly what we were called to do, we can be right where we are supposed to be, and things can get very hard, very fast.  We can feel lonely and disoriented and discouraged.  We can forget how great things felt only a moment before and suddenly feel stuck.  We can feel empty inside and a little afraid.   We can get overwhelmed.  Feeling all of those things is totally normal and hugely challenging, all at the same time.

When we feel alone and lonely and empty and stuck, temptations rise.  We get tempted to give in to our despair and give up on our calling.  We get tempted to just want to go back to the way thing used to be or to go back to the place where we used to know how to be who we used to be. We get tempted to do anything to fill the empty space inside of us.  We get tempted to altogether forget the possibilities that made us rise to our calling. We get lost instead in the very darkest parts of ourselves.

This is what happens to Jesus.  People get all hung up on “the tempter” but miss the real point…which is that for all of us and for Jesus, too, when things get hard, temptations rise.  For Jesus, those temptations make sense.  “You poor man…you’re starving.  Do whatever it takes to feed yourself!  Turn the stones into bread!” Or… “You poor man, you risked everything but now you can see how vulnerable you are.  Shouldn’t you have some sort of guarantee that nothing bad will happen to you?” Or… “You poor man, if this is your calling, shouldn’t you have all the power you could ever need?  Who could fault the man for wanting a full belly or a guaranteed outcome or a super power or two?

Jesus proceeds to do something which most of us really struggle to do.  He doesn’t give in to temptation.  Again, though,, I suspect his struggle was very real.  What allows him to resist temptation is his ability, even when he is starving, even when he is so completely alone, to make his choices based not on his own wants and needs but on his faith.  We all know that we’ve wavered from that faithful path each in our own ways.  When things get hard, we give into our worst instincts. We miss the mark. This is why Jesus would teach us to pray, “Lead us not into temptation,” because our resistance to our worst selves is temporary at best.

Here’s what’s important for us to carry with us.  Almost as soon as Jesus did the right thing and was baptized and was filled with the Spirit, things got brutally difficult.  All of us have wondered to ourselves and asked in a prayer or two, “God, if I’m doing the right thing here, why is this so hard?” The answer is, “This is what it takes to do the right thing.  There are pains worth suffering.  There are sacrifices that are worth making.  There are temptations that are worth facing.” Being a friend, being married, being a parent, being part of a church, being part of a community, being a responsible citizen—all of those things are profoundly meaningful.  They also will challenge you to the core.  That’s just the way it is.

The other hard won truth is that wrestling with what is difficult clarifies things.  In the days that followed Jesus’ time in the wilderness, he would almost never have a moment alone to himself.  I like to think that when the temptation rose to think, “God, I just want some time to myself,” maybe he remembered how lonely time to himself could be.  I like to think that when he wondered where his next meal was coming from on yet another day on the road, he chuckled to himself and thought, “I remember when I was so much hungrier.  If I have to, I can skip a meal.”

Radical as is might sound, learning to live without or even just learning to live with less is a liberating thing.  Learning to face temptation and resist it is empowering.  It’s good to get clear on what matters.  May the Spirit empower us all in our wilderness days.