St. Aidan’s Episcopal Church
First Sunday In Lent
Gene:15-17, 3:1-7
Romans 5: 12-19
Psalm 32
Matthew 4:1-11
Tempted to Forget
As I continue to study, to explore and develop my own faith journey, I rely often on my most admired theologians, psychologists or profound thinkers to ensure I am keeping on the path of reality and not wandering off into the wilderness of my own making, getting lost in my own perceptions of where and who I am. The question comes up for all of us, as it did during this last week, when some of us attended one of our three Ash Wednesday services, just as it did for Jesus. We asked ourselves the question that Jesus began pondering about himself and he is still working his way through that and asking us to continue doing the same and pondering about ourselves. Who am I? What is it that I must do? What is my path?
Of the many writers I continue to read and turn to, Fritz Kunkel, a German, born at the turn of the century, is one. Kunkel explored ways to integrate psychology, sociology and religious theology into a single, unified theory of how we live, move and have our being. The seed of his thinking was begun in him on the battlefield of WWI. As he lay badly wounded, he tried to make sense of it all, and he began thinking about the connection of all that is beautiful in the world, all the beauty of life and the living, even in the midst of battle. The words of Jesus came to him, the words we heard just last week, “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” After the war, he began to study the early Christian communities, and their vitality and passion. And, out of that study he began to develop what he called the “We” theory. He had an idea that we each carry within us a creative center that is expressed by more than one person. To put it another way, we all have a “we” experience that is shared through our connectedness with another person.
There are many “we’s” we participate in as we go through life. Some may be a small, but long-lived connection with one other person throughout many years of marriage. Others might come from very short-lived but memorable experiences felt with a vast number of other people. Remember the rock concerts you went to when you were a teenager, or a sports events when your team won, or when you were on a team that persevered and celebrated accomplishment, or where we all were when the Twin Towers fell down. You feel a larger life moving through you, sa hared experience that has left a lifelong memory within you and a transformative mark on you, that is not yours alone.
There is an obstacle to this “we” state of being. Kunkel called it “ego-centricity.” For Kunkel, the ego is made up of the self-images we carry around with us. Our self-portraits, if you will, many learned early in life from the world and environments we grew up in, and we become identified with these self-images and they can take on a life of their own. They have their own desires, impulses, and they begin to form a kind of shell around us which serve to cut us off from our acquired, deeper sense of life, this creative wellspring, our “we” ness.
Kunkel’s work is significant to this week’s Gospel for the First Sunday of Lent and as a continuation of the questions we explored on Ash Wednesday, as Jesus contemplates his identity formed by his shared “we” with God and the Holy Spirit.
According to the opening chapters of Matthew, Jesus has already realized his relationship to and with God. God is the Father. Now, he is faced with the question of what it means to be the “Son of God.” He has experienced an overwhelming degree of creative and miraculous power, welled up from his relationship with God and the “we” experience of that relationship, as well as the relationship with that he understands as the Holy Spirit, has brought him to a place of contemplation and sorting out.
He knows himself to be the one John the Baptist called as he who will “baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire.” What kind of baptism is that? What is the Kingdom of Heaven he is supposed to bring? How will he do that?
Theses are the questions he has to understand and the decisions he is called to make when he understands the answers. They are the questions and decisions born of his experience in communion with his Father and no-one else. Not Matthew, Mark, Luke or John nor any other of his disciples, nor any of us are privy to that particular “we” experience that Jesus has. Jesus has let us know just enough to help us in our own formation of faithful trust in God’s guidance. Perhaps Jesus had already made a decision about how much we were to know about his own inner challenges. Perhaps he, too, was contemplating what it was the “voice” in the cloud had announced him to be, the “Son of God.” Perhaps by his not telling us everything about his secret life within, he is telling us to explore ourselves in the same way, in order that we, too, can begin to discover who we truly are, what our own truth is and how to define our own relationship to God.
The first verse of today’s Gospel is loaded with something all mankind is familiar. “Then Jesus was led into the desert by the Spirit to be tempted by the devil.” (4:1) Now Jesus is calling us and sets an example of just what this desert life we call Lent, really is.
As Jesus went into the wilderness to contemplate his new role, his initiation into his call, he leaves behind the life he knows, and all the crowds who expect a new leader to solve all their problems, and he finds himself alone, looking into the face an unknown and uncertain future. There is no family, no friends, no John the Baptist, no books, no synagogue, no priests no recognizable return path. He is alone and without help. He has grown beyond them all and what has been done, has been done. It is all in the past.
So here he is now, stepping into the edge of the wilderness, and being immediately set upon by the devil. The only defense he has against the forces of temptation that beset him is the collective “we” of all his past experience.
He is alone with who he is and how he has been formed by all that shared experience, and now he must really learn and understand the truth about who he is to become. It is the same for us.
Knowing what we know from history, to experience this walk into the desert with Jesus seems simple on the surface. But it is a deeply complex and complicated time, filled with battling emotions, regrets, hopes, dreams and expectations. The more we go through this alone, and the deeper our intention to listen to ourselves and to God, the more we become aware of the conflicts within ourselves and their power to sway our lives, and to fool us about who we are, and in which direction we are supposed to be moving.
Fritz Kunkel said “the future is fighting to overcome the past. The wilderness outside corresponds to the wilderness within” He called it, “the battlefield of the soul.”
For Jesus the temptations by the devil were what helped define who he was. When he sent the devil packing, one wonders what the devil learned about who Jesus was. Certainly more than he understood when he first tempted Jesus. When the angels came immediately after the devil left to wait on Jesus, what did they have to tell him. The Greek word for “angel” is “messenger.” What messages did they have for Jesus? How was Jesus transformed by all these experiences, and what might have happened in his ministry if he had not bothered to take time to enter in to the wilderness and the temptations to be found there, in the first place?
Of all the mystery that surrounds the life of Jesus, surely this must be among the most mysterious.
No wonder Lent is such a deeply profound an important time for all of us. What is our “we” experience? What is your “we” experience of people, communities, groups and nations that has found you and is with you as you work through your own wilderness temptations. In another way of looking at it, what is your observation of what happens when you, and your “we” experience within, don’t go through such a testing time? What is the difference when you do or you don’t?
What about all of us, here at St. Aidan’s? What can we learn by allowing ourselves to be led by the Holy Spirit, into the wilderness, taking our “we” experience with us? How do we want to define ourselves and how well are we accomplishing that dream? What are our strengths, and how are we going to use them going forward? What are our weaknesses, and how are we to find the courage to face them, call them out for what they are, and turn them into strengths?
What are our temptations and what does it mean for us to resist them? What does it cost us if we don’t?
How about you? How do you fit into this narrative as you walk with Jesus into the desert filled with temptations with your name on them? You alone know what they are. You, alone, have to face the devil in the details. What will you learn there, and when will the angels know to wait upon you after you have defeated the devil? Maybe they will have answers to all the new questions that will arise for you as you move deeper into the wilderness.
Maybe this year, you will not work so hard to avoid the wilderness as you might have in the past. You won’t allow yourself to steer clear of being tested. Perhaps it is time for you to ask yourself how, in your wildest imagination, your life might be transformed, re-defined or even re-invented if you have the courage, the fortitude and the depth of desire to enter into such wilderness testing. For what do you long? What is it that you hunger for? What wilderness power awaits there to tempt you away from realizing the price you must pay for that longing and that hunger? What waits there to tempt you away from what God desires for you? What would the devil suggest to you that might be more worthy of your worship than God?
1 Fritz Kunkel, Creation Continues: A Psychological Interpretation of the Gospel of Matthew (Word Incorporated, 1973). Pp 50-55
In his famous book, Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis said, “A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is….. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.”
Maybe Jesus knew he would be tempted when he entered the wilderness, and he wanted to test his stamina and resistance to be tempted to change his direction.
2 Matthew 10:39
Our biggest temptation is to want to forget that we are capable of being tempted and to forget going into the wilderness at all.
But if you have the courage to follow Jesus there, taking with you only your “we” experiences that have made you who you are, maybe the temptations you face there will lead you to the answers you seek about the truth of who you are and where you are called to go next.
God will be listening for your answer and when you find it, will send God’s heavenly angels to wait upon you and guide you along the way.
End
Written to the Glory of God
E. J. R. Culver+
March 1, 2020