Temptations: Invitations to Grace The Rev. Donald L. Hamer
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Lent 1 – Year A – March 9, 2014
Temptations: An Invitation to Grace
Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7 Matthew 4:1-11
One of the great quandaries of the time before Lent is deciding what to do for some type of Lenten “practice.” Some people feel like they need to give something up, some people eschew that practice in favor of something more classically “spiritual” and others choose to follow some combination of the two. The point of these practices, of course, is not to serve as ends in themselves, but to lead us into a deeper awareness of our own sinfulness – a deeper awareness of those aspects of our lives that draw us away from God – and out of that awareness, a longing for the deeper presence of God in our lives. And I’d like to encourage us to think of all of these practices as “prayer.”
I find that self-denial in the practice of giving up something is actually useful in helping to focus my other spiritual practices. And I will confess that as I consider before Lent what to give up, there is a more than coincidental focus on possibilities that involve food; and here I am not talking about raw carrots and kale. You see, I like there to be a secondary benefit, which almost always has to do with my constant desire to keep my weight down. So, mindful of this morning’s lessons from Genesis and the Gospel of Matthew, this year I have decided to give up the thing that presents the greatest temptation to me in terms of bad things to eat.
Cake. Those wonderful Italian rum cakes we get from Modern Pastry Shop whenever a staff member or office volunteer has a birthday. Bert Landman’s world-famous carrot cake. The Jamaican birthday cake we had last week for D.B.’s birthday – no, that was before Lent. There is something absolutely seductive to me about something that has a soft, cakey texture and is smothered with some type of sugary frosting. It doesn’t matter whether I’m hungry or not, whether I’m on a diet or not. I don’t even need to see it – I only need to know it’s there. It doesn’t matter if someone hides it in the kitchen instead of the staff refrigerator, or in a closet up on the second floor. If I simply know that it’s there -- that delectable, soft on the palate, sweet on the tongue wonderfulness – I will track it down and find it. And eat it.
Now, the relatively silly inner turmoil that I confront when it comes to cake is pretty benign when you compare it to the life-changing consequences resulting from the choices that Adam and Eve made in the Garden of Eden. And let’s be clear: Temptations and acting upon them can and do change millions of lives, perhaps the most obvious example being in the context of addictions and addictive behavior. The story of Adam and Eve is in many ways the story of our human condition – what it means and what it looks like to live a finite, human life in the infinite grace of the One who created us. In fact the story begins with a statement of our human task and what its limits are: We are to till the Garden and keep it. We are called to serve as caretakers of God’s creation, a creation that we receive not as owners but only in trust.
And within that task, God gives us broad freedom in how to do that – there really aren’t a lot of rules or instructions that God provides. The freedom is wide, but it is not infinite. There is one thing we must not do, and if we do that one thing, we will die. But when the serpent gets Eve alone, he is able to subtly twist God’s words in a way that seem to make this one restriction arbitrary and capriciousness. What’s the matter, after all, with trying the fruit of this tree just once? And in Eve’s seemingly harmless dialogue with the serpent, the serpent strikes: You will not die, he says. God has forbidden the tree because God knows that eating from it will make you like God. . . And we know things go downhill from there for Adam and Eve.
In his classic work The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis tells the story of a Christian man – who is referred to only as “The Patient.” It is England during the second world war. The book is written as a collection of letters written by a senior devil, Screwtape, to a junior devil, Wormwood. Wormwood’s task as a junior devil is to be a companion to the patient and to perfect the art of temptation, with the ultimate goal being that at his death, the patient will not fall into the clutches of The Enemy, who, of course, is God, and will instead presumably wind up with Wormwood and Screwtape and their father in Hell. One of the points of this short book is to demonstrate the subtleties and nuances by which our human nature can with so little effort convert even the goodness that God has given us into occasions of evil that can be the first baby steps toward lives that turn us away from God.
In the 9th letter, Screwtape observes that it is the “dry” or “dull” or “trough” periods of human life that provide the most fertile opportunities for all sensual temptations. Screwtape writes, “You are much more likely to make your man a sound drunkard by pressing drink on him as a painkiller when he is dull and weary than by encouraging him to use it as a means of merriment among his friends when he is happy.” And then he adds:
Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours. He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden. Hence we always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its Maker, and least pleasurable. An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula. It is more certain; and it’s better style. To get the man’s soul and give him nothingin return – that is what really gladdens Our Father’s heart. And the troughs are the time for beginning the process. (pp. 41-42).
And that’s the devilish thing about temptation, isn’t it? It is a part of our nature that takes all of the good things that God has provided us and turns them to destructive – often self-destructive – purposes. It turns the joyful task of tilling and keeping a beautiful garden, with our every human need met, seem like a bore. It makes the gift of virtually unlimited freedom seem like a prison cell when only one thing is restricted from our grasp. We can relate, I think, to the situation of Adam and Eve.
The situation of Jesus, on the other hand, may seem a little remote to us. None of us, I am willing to venture, have been totally deprived of food for forty days and then offered bread, and many of us have never really known the experience of being hungry and literally knowing where our next meal is coming from. We can learn from those in our midst who have known that situation. And I am also willing to guess that most of us have ever been threatened with being thrown off the Brooklyn Bridge in New York or the Prudential Building in Boston or some similar place. And I know that none of us – no matter our station in life – has even been offered power to rule the world. But each of us understand the temptations of Screwtape and Wormwood: materialism, thinking either too much or too little of ourselves, envy of others, a lack of thankfulness for the good things we have been given, selfishness, a failure to reconcile ourselves to the goodness of God and the creation which we have inherited, to name only a few. We can suffer temptation in relation to matters that are not sensual. In the words of my divinity school friend and colleague, Maryetta Anschutz:
Temptation comes to us in moments when we look at others and feel insecure about not having enough. Temptation comes in judgments we make about strangers or friends who make choices we do not understand. Temptation rules us, making us able to look away from those in need and to live our lives unaffected by poverty, hunger and disease. Temptation rages in moments when we allow our temper to define our lives or when addiction to wealth, power, and influence over others, vanity, or an inordinate need for control defines who we are. Temptation wins when we engage in the justification of little lies, or [so-called] “small” sins, [laughing at a joke at the expense of others].... a criticism of a spouse or a partner or a friend when he or she is not around. Temptation wins when we get so caught up in the trappings of life that we lose sight of life itself. These are the faceless moments of evil that, while mundane, lurk in the recesses of our lives and our souls.
Lenten penitence engages the dark places in our lives that we may come face to face with them, name them, understand them, and seek forgiveness for them. It is not about guilt. It is about freedom from the control that our fears and insecurities have over us all, about the amendment of life and new beginnings.
As we begin this Lent, let us enter with this spirit. Recalling Jesus’ admonition on Ash Wednesday, keep our motivations pure that they and not desire for glory may lead us. If it helps you to give something up, then do so. But let’s be sure that Lent become more than giving up cake. Whatever practice it is you are choosing to assist you in overcoming the temptations of life during this season, I pray that they will draw you more deeply into relationship with your Creator, who is the one who leads us into freedom and new life in the resurrected Christ. Amen.