“Created to Live with God”
by Bruce J. Johnson
Perhaps there are no ‘two places’ more different in our minds, if not our hearts, than the places mentioned in today’s lessons, Garden of Eden and the wilderness. Both play a prominent role in today’s scripture. The former is a place of security and peace, where Adam and Eve had, I suppose, just about everything they needed, except what was necessary. The latter is a place of testing and pain, where Jesus had nothing, except what was necessary. The one conjures images of what paradise must be like, a place filled with life. The other raises images of a bleak and barren landscape, a dry and desolate place where mere survival was a challenge. In most of our minds, the Garden of Eden is also a metaphor for intimacy with God and the wilderness, a metaphor for isolation and a sense of estrangement. Yet, as different as they both are, they do share one common feature. Both become places of testing. Adam and Eve, although they had everything that God thought that they needed, they wanted what they didn’t have, namely, to be like God, possessing the knowledge of good and evil. The presence of that tree in the Garden tested them, a test they failed, the result being their expulsion from the Garden, as they knew it.
Jesus, on the other hand, had nothing to speak of but was offered everything by the Devil, if only He would succumb to the temptation to prove that he was the Son of God. Did you notice that two of the temptations started out with the seduction of: “If you are the Son of God?” This was a test he passed, the result being the confirmation of his baptism which had occurred just prior to being led out into the wilderness by the Spirit where he would confirm for himself an unshakable sense of his identity and mission and the purpose for which he was created--- AND THAT’S THE KEY TO ALL OF LIFE—TO HAVE A SENSE OF WHO YOU ARE AND TO WHOM YOU BELONG AND WHY YOU ARE HERE!
I love that line that goes as follows:
“Vocation is not a voice ‘out there’ calling me to become but it is a voice ‘in here’ calling me to fulfill.”
(Rev. Beth Quick)
Indeed, baptism is all about the affirmation of who we are as children of God who belong to God, who were created to live with God as an ever present loving reality, but it is the journey of life with its periods of paradise and wilderness that really put it and us to the test. In other words, on this the occasion of Kaleb’s baptism, we come to worship affirming certain truths, spiritually listening to the voice that proclaims Kaleb as another beloved son, but it will be life and the relationships in his life that will test the voice within, that will confirm, test and hopefully expand his experience OF and grow his trust IN those truths about his being so beloved.
Pause
My God, she had the nation going for a day or two, didn’t she?----- that woman who concocted the story about seeing a baby being tossed from a moving car—unwanted, discarded and unloved. In the end, we have learned that it was her baby and the story was made up because she wanted to keep her pregnancy a secret from her family and others! The nation was horrified at first, and now just saddened but there is also amazing news—The Broward County sheriff’s department has been flooded with calls offering everything from teddy bears to college funds to outright adoption. She is wanted. She does belong and she is loved!
The late Henri J.M. Nouwen wrote a neat Baptism/Lenten mediation that applies here:
“Yes, there is that voice, the voice that speaks
from above and from within and that whispers softly or declares loudly ”You
are my Beloved, on you my favor rests." It certainly is not easy to
hear that voice in a world filled with voices that shout: "You are
no good, you are ugly; you are worthless, you are despicable, you are nobody -
unless you can demonstrate the opposite."
These negative voices are so loud and so persistent that it is easy to believe them. That's the great trap. It is the trap of self-rejection. Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity or power, but self-rejection. Success, popularity and power can, indeed, be a great temptation, but their seductive power often comes from the way they are part of the much larger temptation to self-rejection. When we have come to believe in the voices that call us worthless and unlovable, then success, popularity and power are easily perceived as attractive solutions."
You know, this year when I read today’s lesson about the temptations of Jesus, especially the part about his fasting for 40 days and 40 nights and being so ‘FAMISHED,’ I thought of something that was written for the most recent issue of our United Church News. Although the piece was written about pastors, it sure applies to us all because it deals with all the destructive habits and life style choices in our lives which we do and make to meet what is called the greatest ‘hunger’ of all--- “Heart Hunger.”[1] You know, I think that the devil is a liar and pretty crafty in his seductions but he didn’t know jack about Jesus. When the heart is not hungry, no other hunger—not food or drink or sex or power or popularity or acceptance--- nothing can get the best of us!
I tend to think that this period of Lent, a season of 40 days and 40 nights was for Jesus a time of reflection and prayer for the purpose of filling the heart, confirming his beloved status in God’s love and using that love to resist the temptation to prove it. And Lent is our time too--- a time to reflect not only on Jesus’ time in the wilderness and what he came to know for sure in his life but ours as well. 40 days to remember what it is like to live only by the grace of God when all our comforts are stripped away. 40 days to remember what it is like when we rely on God to supply our needs, rather than making it up for ourselves. 40 days to hang our hearts and minds out there in the spiritual air of the light and love of God. Entering the wilderness, as Jesus did, is to find out who we are without the support of the numbing anesthesia and creature comforts of the world. It is to discover what life is like with no comfort in it but the presence of God.
And that sometimes takes the discipline and toughness of our tests in the wilderness. I recently read an excerpt from one of Jan Karon’s novels: At Home in Mitford. Karon is the author of the best selling series of novels: The Mitford Years. A couple of years ago I was given her Christmas book The Mitford Snowmen. Well, in this particular novel we read the following exchange that takes place between Tim, an Episcopal priest and his new neighbor, Cynthia, a conversation about the testing of faith in life.
When he returned, she was
sitting on the study sofa, pouring over a book of lectures by Oswald Chambers
and appearing oddly at home among the humble of worn needlepoint pillows.
She looked up, quoting the
Scottish teacher who happened to be one of his favorite writers. “Faith by its
very nature must be tried,” he says. “Do YOU agree?”
He sat down in his wing chair,
suddenly feeling more at home with his company. ‘Absolutely!”
“I’ve never been one for
physical exercise,” she said, “but what God does with our faith must be
something like workouts. He sees to it that our faith gets pushed and pulled,
stretched and pounded, taken to its limits so that its limits can expand.”
He liked that—taken to its
limits so that its limits can expand. Yes!
“If it doesn’t get exercised,”
she said thoughtfully, “it becomes like a weak muscle that fails us when we
need it.”
He felt himself smiling
foolishly, though his question was serious. “Would you agree that we must be
willing to thank God for every trial of our faith, no matter how severe, for
the greater strength it produces?”
“I’m perfectly willing to say
it, but I’m continually unable to do it.”
“There’s the rub.”
(Pulpit Resource, Vol. 30, No.1, p.32)
That is the rub, isn’t it? Yet, that is what not just Lent but the whole journey of faith is all about, namely, the exercising of our faith to make it strong, the testing of our faith to make it unshakable, to understand that the time in the wilderness is a time to get pushed and pulled, stretched and pounded, taken to the limits so that the limits can expand—especially any limit we might have on our understanding and acceptance of who we are as God’s children, holy and beloved.
Paul, I think, showed good solid sense of it when he said to the Romans:
“Therefore since we are justified by faith, we have peace
with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through who we have obtained access to the grace in which we stand: and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we boast ( how about substituting the phrase, “thank God”) for our suffering because suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope and hope never disappoints us because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”
Romans 35: 1-5
The English poet, Philip Larkin, once said:
“In everyone there sleeps a sense of the life lived according to love.”
It is during this season Lent that we are meant to become awake and alive not only to the sense but the purpose of a life lived according to this love that has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.
Amen
.