Matthew 4:1-11
Lent 1 - Year A
Want to know your heart's desire? Pay attention to your temptations. Does it have something to do with your carnality (no, not limited to sexuality)? How about your ego needs? Might it have something to do with a need for eternity?
A temptation is seldom as straight-forward and identifiable as such. It covers itself in the guise of a shortcut that will advance the desire without being seen. Who's going to know if Jesus has a bite of bread out in the wilderness. He is just not popular enough at this point to have paparazzi hounding him. Won't it get him through and give him the strength to battle the big temptations? This is such a small thing.
The medium has been the message all along. Seldom has power lost power by skimping on spectacle. If we are going to grab people's hearts, we better get their heads turning in our direction. Show votes, but no coffins. Accuse Sponge Bob Squarepants or Tinky Winky, but not economic systems that widen the gap between rich and poor.
In our area, the demographics of the most frequent family style includes this description: "Fewer than the national average indicated that they would rather be left on their own without interference from a leader." If I can get my head around that awkward syntax I think it might mean that more folks here desire guidance from a leader who will tell them what to think, feel, and do. Issues of authority abound and if someone can only get group-think to get a leg up in a culture’s fable of independence, freedom, and liberty, it is game-set-match. Leader worship is very powerful and hard to turn down.
Where do you think your vulnerability to temptation rests? The strength of temptation is to take your self-assessment into account and move through another avenue. So, it is always time to evaluate what our desires are and to involve the community in that evaluation. This is tough because investigating our vulnerability to temptation is very embarrassing to folks who worked so hard to achieve the knowledge of good and evil. We should know this stuff, and that very stance is our downfall.
Let's be gentle, but straight-forward, with one another about these matters. (Everyone, that is, but the current writer, who greatly avoids such revelation - hope you're doing better.)
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A Pastor Henry asks:
"Thy word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against God." The victory I seek is available, if I am willing to spend time in the Word. That is a problem. All of the pressures to do things take my time and keep me from know what the Word says. So I may yeild before I realized the true consequences of my actions. Having bread at hand may keep me from relying on Him for my daily bread. I may be tempted to try a publilicity stunt without ever praying and asking for guidence in the matter. (After all I had a dead line to meet if I were going to get in in the paper.) Do we really belive that the scriptures can be our guide? Isn't that a bid old fashion? Does God work like that today? Doesn't He expect me trust my urges to lead me right? Where did all those thoughts come from if they did not come from Him? You mean that Satan is at work using the same avenunes that God does?
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Wesley White responded:
Ah, sweet time, there's just so little of it. There is a wonderful little fable, Momo, by Michael Ende that treats the pressures of time in a marvelous way. It turns out that saving time simply puts us in a greater pressure cooker to save more and more time and pay less and less attention to whatever "victory" is about. Read Momo and see what she thinks victory is.
Of course temptations mimic good ends. If the best ends are G*D's then the best temptations come extremely close to these so it seems we are on a helpful path when we aren't. Pilgrim's Progress is another imaginative way to come at this. It is probably good to get Lent off on the right foot by clarifying how common sense good can turn out not to be so good for anyone. You can use almost any political decision in recent memory (no matter how far back recent seems to you) to look at the stated intentions and the reality of the unrecognized and, perhaps, unintended consequences. A practical Lenten discipline is to ask what the temptation is present in any current political decision-making.
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2005/february2005.html
The old story of temptation in a garden ended with us moving into what we experienced as wilderness (an image from the exile written backward). GOD still with us, but in the wilderness. Our mythology is that we shall return to the garden (homeland). That seems to be what we have set as our goal - a place of indolence where all is cared for, an idealized place of static perfection.
One way of looking at the creation story is not from the perspective of chapters 1 and 2 with creation, but chapter 3 with temptation. This is the purpose of Eden: both to offer a choice and encourage us to think there is still a choice available in a situation quite out of our control. Even though it appears to be Act 2, it is where the action is. So far we have not yet come to the end of Act 3 to see if this is comedy or tragedy.
Where the rubber meets the road, where our specialness, our belovedness comes alive is in the midst of choice -- a key ingredient of temptation.
One of the differences between the Genesis story and the Matthew story is the acceptance of responsibility or accountability. This comes in the sense of G*D's presence that we are afraid of betraying and so hiding who we are becomes the cause of the day or G*D's presence we trust enough to boldly go ahead and risk the nakedness of death and failure. It is this choice that still stands in front of us as we deal with the temptations of being beloved, either by birth or adoption. There are no automatic passes for either our active or passive choices.
Here Jesus is willing to live with the limitations of life that run up against the boundaries of lack of resources, having an end, and is always short on power (read information/knowledge). Temptations urge us to take a shortcut to some desirable end, to bypass the means to an end and jump directly there.
As we deal with the hangings on of outmoded theologies that try to jump to some predetermined end without taking into account our current experiences or wisdom or thinking or knowledge may we work the long hard way through the presence of GOD here in our current wilderness, our current opportunity to choose new life, without giving in to shortcuts or blame.
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2005/february2005.html
A tree of knowledge certainly sounds helpful, particularly if it aids one in distinguishing good from evil - even if such distinguishing is as fine as the difference between a white and black thread at the rising and setting of the sun.
Such a tree presupposes that there is good and evil to be distinguished. If created by G*D was good and evil only latent until a eye was opened or did it exist already? If so how important is the whisper of its existence? Does it take some ability to distinguish good from evil to desire to better distinguish?
There is some sense in which stepping between good and evil leads us into confusion.
It is from this very tree that Jesus seems to have also eaten. He is able to distinguish helpful applications of the scriptures (accumulated wisdom of our experiences with G*D) from unhelpful applications. It is not that scripture is automatically helpful. Knowing when to apply which is important.
There is some sense in which stepping between good and evil leads us to clarity.
Thank you "Adam" for joining "Eve" in engaging wisdom.
Thank you Jesus for building on wisdom and clarifying the need for larger contexts regarding "tests" or experiences of life.
= = = = = = =
I am a type of one who has gone before
and a type of one who will follow
I am a free gift borne by a past
and a free gift invested in a future
of all the options available - I arrived
and now more options are openedwrestling still with good and evil
my appetites struggle to be met
my desire for immortality leaps into the fray
my controlling power claims first place
and on other days they all face
poverty, chastity, obedience
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2007_02_01_archive.html
Angels abhor a vacuum. The moment a tempter leaves, angels arrive to return twice that which was lost (80 days and nights and a burnishing of one's title to Belovedness).
That is less a story about temptation than a reprise of a Spirit of Job's G*D leading Jesus into harms way (read, into power).
Would you rather face a slow accretion of hunger and tired for a proverbial 40 days and equivalent number of nights (Jesus) or a series of events that quickly, seemingly simultaneously, come out of the blue (Job)?
Remember, your response will say something about the combination of your personality type, past experiences, and remaining hopes.
Play with the archetypes of temptation all you want, but do not ignore the set-up.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2008_02_01_archive.html
Temptations are always larger when in a compromised situation. Being famished stresses every decision. It heightens small decisions into large ones. Mirages seem more and more real.
There is a similar conflation of time and place and possibility in moments between awake and sleep or sleep and awake when connections between stones and bread are apparent. An appropriate role of the whole of scripture is the same as for tradition, present experience and reason. All four can help clarify again bread from stone.
This same sort of process happens as we see the trees bend and feel the wind and beg the trees to stand still so the wind will stop. Cause and effect can get as confused as anything. We can even begin to make up all manner of details pulled from hither, thither and yon. Remember how all manner of attempts are made in dreams to get us out of danger (and stepping off a high place is a danger)? Again, our engagement with the whole of scripture, tradition, experience, and reason can clarify decisions so we don't rely on the miraculous but can appreciate it should it come unbidden, rather than calculatedly.
Fantasies of wealth while in a famished condition are to be expected. Again and again, we need to be pulled back to reality and actually invest that dollar we are tempted to spend on a lottery ticket into someone else's life or our own. It would actually be helpful to do both in ways of sharing the little we have with others in the building of a new community. There is strength in solidarity of the famished. This is particularly true regarding collective bargaining. Here is worship - building community, not getting rich at another's expense.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2011/03/matthew-41-11.html
strict daddy v. beauty
temptation to power
ancient as the hills
new as Wisconsin gov. walker
one does not live by bread alone
but every extra hefty profit
squeezed from every pebble
with bazillionaire patrons
every risk for them will lift you up
and excuse every behavior
and so the world's riches
tempt and tempt and tempt
worship Mammon and serve only him
crafty is employed
to bolster temptation
to gain one's own certainty
knowledge is out, data is in
every spin good for me
is good enough for everyone
knowledge thus construed
keeps one from knowledge
of one's own nakedness
a confession beyond words
rises up as a last resort
and it satisfies beautifully
power's temptation
only delays beauty
thus seen, thus chosen against
just as power exercised dominion in death
so beautiful graceful received abundance
leads onward to a paradise of community
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2011/03/strict-daddy-v-beauty.html
“Then.” Quite the way to begin a passage for our consideration.
Then? Does what follows come as an automatic result of being filled with belovedness? As surely as day follows night, temptation is hot on the trail of assurance.
Temptation doesn’t even wait for the arrival of some tempter, some Satan. The very decision to fast itself was a temptation. Somehow the assurance of belovedness is self-tested. How can I be sure that what I just experienced is true? Aha! I’ll fast to have assurance confirmed.
Then comes the official three-fold temptation. If, if, if. Temptations need the cover of hypotheticals. They grow in its grayness.
Now the nasty question. Does passing a test grant one any more assurance of belovedness than failing them? If belovedness is imputed, no. If belovedness is a given, a gift, no. If belovedness is conditional, it is still no.
Belovedness is as gravity. Live in it. Believe it or not, it still is with you.
It is not necessary to pass a test to claim your belovedness.