The local sheriff was looking for a deputy, and one of the local boys, who was not the sharpest tool in the shed, was called in for an interview. "Okay," began the sheriff, "What is 1 and 1?" "Eleven," came the reply. The sheriff thought to himself, "That's not what I meant, but he's not wrong."
Then the sheriff asked, "What two days of the week start with the letter 'T'?" "Today & tomorrow," replied the applicant. The sheriff was again surprised by the answer, one that he had never thought of himself.
"Now, listen carefully,” said the Sheriff. “Who killed Abraham Lincoln?" The job seeker seemed a little surprised, then thought really hard for a minute and finally admitted, "I don't know." The sheriff replied, "Well, why don't you go home and work on that one for a while?" The applicant left and wandered over to his pals who were waiting to hear the results of the interview. He greeted them with a cheery smile, "The job is mine! The interview went great! First day on the job and I'm already working on a murder case!"
First day on the job – and Jesus is sent out into the wilderness where dangers abound; there are no distractions . . . Just you and nature and God. Imagine you are all alone and you have no weapon, no food, maybe some water flows in a stream nearby, but no one to help you for forty days. I don’t know about you, but I think it would be the end of me. The vultures would be circling; the wild dogs would be moving in; and if I was still alive after a week, I wonder if I could fight off a lion attack.
Have you ever fasted? Have you ever fasted that long? The most I’ve gone is 24 hours. I knew a guy in seminary who fasted for 40 days to protest the lack of affordable housing in downtown New Haven. There was a community of believers who prayed and otherwise supported him. He had some fruit juice five or six times a day and that was it. He started out at 300 pounds and would get down to about a hundred. Now that is giving up something for Lent.
Have you given up anything for Lent? Is that a part of your tradition? Jesus gives up everything during this time. The only thing he can do out there is pray and fast. Towards the end I imagine that he is helpless and vulnerable. In this weakened state, Scripture says, he is confronted by Satan with three temptations, which form the foundation for all other temptations. Not only are they fundamental for Jesus, but they are important lessons for us as well. Let's look at the three temptations and unpack them a little bit. 1. Turn this Stone into Bread, 2. Serve the Wrong Master, and 3. Putting God to a test. Let’s ask ourselves how they relate to us today:
Tempt - 1. Turn this Stone into Bread. If you were starving, of course, you would want food. So would you go straight to Burger King and get a happy meal, or . . . . . do you go to the grocery store, buy some nice ground chuck, tomatoes, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions and sesame seed buns and make the burgers yourself. Or do you get the black bean veggie burgers? And they would be better at home. Of course it’s hard to make the fries at home because most of us don’t have 375 degree grease to fry them in; and then super size it. But, the first temptation is about more than just food. Right now, if you could turn a stone into any substance, what would it be? Food, money, gold? What do you desire more than anything else? We can have it because we can buy it.
Satan, the personification of evil, tried to undermine Christ's confidence that God would provide for every need. Jesus quotes the verse from Deuteronomy that says, “Man does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” Even though he is hungry, he knew that his hunger for food was only temporary, and that the current pain in his stomach was of less import than the deeper spiritual hunger that is fed by God’s word. Why is this important? Fasting teaches patience, fasting increases one’s faith that God will provide, putting off our own desires for a little while to live on principle; fasting and prayer teaches us perseverance and steadiness in difficult situations.
Tempt - 2. Serve the Wrong Master: Here Scriptures are saying that we are serving evil by wanting power and authority over other people, places and things. This could take many forms, quest for approval and admiration of others, working to be the most popular pastor . . . in essence, Playing God . . . means putting our own interests, our desires and desired outcomes first. We are sometimes tempted to put ourselves above God, and this is idolatry, violating the first commandment, "You shall have no other gods before Me" (Exodus 20:3). “Get behind me Satan,” Jesus said to the devil in the wilderness. “Get behind me Satan” Jesus says to Peter when Peter raised his sword, trying to stop the passion and the march to the cross. Peter was only trying to help, but it was his own unhelpful version. Jesus said to him, and says to us: “If anyone would come after me, let them deny themselves, pick up the cross and follow me.”
The opposite of this denial of oneself is someone who calculates their popularity, seeks the approval of others, worships the praise and adulation of others. If you do this, you are a narcissist. You can see some pretty sick scenarios in the newspapers today in the extreme narcissistic lifestyle of Yazeed Essa, the doctor who is on trial for murdering his wife with cyanide pills and leaving the country. Plain Dealer reporter Leila Atassi defines narcissist as a person who requires excessive admiration, harbors a sense of entitlement and holds a preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty or ideal love. People like Essa think they can literally get away with murder to get what they want, in this case, dumping a wife to get a mistress. Other examples of extreme narcissism are Anthony Sowell and the woman charged with murder in the death of a 2-year-old girl. The antidote to this self centeredness is following God’s commandments or at least working a 12 step program.
“Seek ye first the kingdom of God and everything you need will be given to you.” Fasting teaches you to focus on God’s primary purpose, which is to cultivate our faith. Fasting and centering prayer teaches humility and grace, helps us humble ourselves, take advantage of the quiet time, and in that quiet, God speaks to us.
Tempt - 3. Testing God by threatening to jump on the Rocks: Do you trust God to protect you? Do you believe you are secure in this world? If you believe that you are immortal, untouchable, then you should be able to jump off the Veterans Memorial Bridge and the angels will carry you safely to the ground. This is the Temptation to test to see if God will help you, to call the angels to hold you up, so you will feel free to take enormous risks. This belief in your own immortality may cause you to feel above the laws of nature and civil human discourse. But Jesus always brought it back to God and God’s community and commandments. God wants to connect to our souls.
Jesus was tempted by Satan, and was in fact tempted in all the ways that we are tempted today. Yet He did not sin. He took the risk to come down to earth and try on being human. Jesus, our perfect high priest, can sympathize with us. He knows how it felt to be tempted. But he takes the moral high ground. He shows us a better way.
I believe we live in times that demand that we take the risks to promote God’s moral standards; this may mean taking an unpopular position; for example, protesting war; or in Cleveland, it is not easy supporting Dr. Sanders and the CMSD school closing plan. Passions are running high in many of these meetings and disagreements are carried on from week to week because people cannot work for compromise. Why is it so unpopular to compromise these days? But God wants us to compromise, to be more compassionate, and to work out the details of our common lives together. We cannot do that without a deeper relationship with Jesus.
Walking with Jesus into the wilderness is an invitation to come face to face with misery. It involves traveling the wilderness route of the Trail of Tears, heading through a deep forest wilderness on the Underground Railroad, and limping through the scorching wilderness of the Sonora Desert. What we give up on this journey ought to give us the space to rely on God and God’s intention for our common life.
Fasting and praying teaches us to be more pure in heart, all the baggage is let go, and we see more clearly the path God is choosing for us. Jesus teaches us that the pure in heart see God. Gordon Cosby, the founding co-pastor of the Church of the Savior in Washington DC, tells us, Jesus calls us to further connect to other people in the ways he connected.
To connect deeply is to relax, to give in to, to receive from, to trust, to let our burdens down, to be cared for, to be nourished by, and to nourish. To connect is to believe that the universe is friendly. So, even with what I know about the powers of temptation, the prince of darkness and the subtle demonic activities of our time, as it expresses itself through people, I am going to connect as Jesus did, and let people – my kind and not my kind – be the instruments of God’s love and presence flowing into me. And I’m going to flow into them.
