March 9, 2014
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Lent begins in the wilderness. For us city folks to be in the wilderness would be disorientating. There would be no familiar Transamerica building to tell us where we are or that Bush takes you quickly toward the Bay and Pine does the same toward the Pacific. But when we are disoriented, there would also be an opportunity to be reoriented. Reorienting our lives towards the truth of our lives and the truth about God.
Matthew presents Jesus to us as the Messiah, one who is fully human and fully divine. As Jesus begins his ministry, he begins in a very human way, being offered tempting alternatives by Satan. These satanic alternatives were disorienting.
Led by the Spirit, Jesus goes into the wilderness with his hair still wet from his baptism. After fasting for 40 days and 40 nights and being famished like the Israelites were in the wilderness for forty years, the tempter said, “Since you are the Son of God, command these stones to become bread.” Jesus quotes from Deuteronomy 8:3 and 9:9-11 and said, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” And like Moses, Jesus receives God’s sustaining word having not eaten for 40 days and 40 nights.
Then the tempter takes Jesus to the pinnacle of the holy temple and tempted him by baiting him that if you are the “Son of God,” throw yourself down. The tempter cleverly quotes Psalm 91:11-12, undermining Jesus’ convictions, reassuring him that even if he jumps off, God will send his angels “so that you will not dash your foot against the stone.” Jesus, however, does not assent. Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 6:16, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”
Finally the tempter takes Jesus to “a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor.” The tempter offers this to Jesus if he would fall down and worship him. But Jesus immediately rejects the offer knowing that this would separate him from God. Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 6:13, “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.”
Weary and battered by the tempter’s three enticements, Matthew said, “suddenly angels came and waited on him.” Jesus triumphs over Satan and we hear the fulfillment of the promise in Psalm 91:11-12, “On their (angels) hands they will bear you up.”
Each of us, if we are honest, must admit to the reality of sinful temptations. And we can see that the alternatives that Satan offered to Jesus were not necessarily bad things but could even be beneficial.
Feeding the hungry with bread is a good thing. And yet we all know these “good things” can, in our hands, can be sinfully perverted. To be human is to be tempted. Being a kind and generous ruler of kingdoms could be a good thing in light of all the other ruthless and unmerciful leaders in the world. But such powers can be sinfully perverted.
And yet Jesus resists temptation, overcoming Satan’s alternatives. Jesus is not only human, but also divine in his resistance to sin. The passage today implies that in Jesus, we also may to some degree, overcome temptations that are put in our way.
Temptation is Not a Sin
Peter Marshall who wrote, A Man Called Peter in the 1950s said, “It’s no sin to be tempted. It isn’t the fact of having temptations that should cause us shame, but what we do with them. Temptation is an opportunity to conquer. When we eventually reach the goal to which we are all striving, God will look us over—not for diplomas, but for scars.”
Sometimes, we think that if we were smarter and accumulating more diplomas, we might be less tempted to the ways of sin. Whatever our IQ might be, temptation is part and parcel of the human condition. It’s as common as fog in San Francisco, drought in California, and no parking in Chinatown. So we turn on our headlights in the fog, ration water and park at the Golden Gateway Garage!
If temptation is every part of our human existence, then might it be a good thing? When we recite the Lord’s Prayer, “and lead us not into temptation” would suggest that it’s not but what happened in the account of Jesus’ temptations makes us wonder.
In fact, could Jesus have accomplished what he did without this time of struggle in the wilderness? Could he had done the will of God without first confronting the tempter within? As Matthew tells the story, the whole point of the temptations of Jesus experienced in the wilderness was to drive a wedge between Jesus and God. That Jesus did not yield to that temptation means that he stopped that wedge from being driven. And the writer of Hebrews linked Jesus’ temptation with his ministry: “Because (Jesus) himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested” (Hebrews 2:18).
The Greek word translated as “tempted” in the account of Jesus in the wilderness is peirazo, which carries the idea of testing and scrutinizing and even of disciplining. Being tempted can lead us to becoming more oriented to God’s ways.
Notice too, that the text says that Jesus was “led up by the Spirit” to be tempted. This implies that temptation can have a positive role. It can lead us to an understanding of our core being and help us to assess our limits. It can show us the strength or lack of our commitments and values.
There’s a difference between being tempted and yielding to temptation. While we pray that we are not led into temptation, temptation comes to us all the time. It is more accurately to say, when we are tempted, help us to not fail the test. And furthermore, if we were to eliminate all temptation, we would also close one of the roads that lead us to deepening our personal and spiritual development.
Choosing the Forks in the Road
William Willimon made a visit to his state penitentiary and said to the chaplain about how sad it was that so many people suffered from poor self-esteem and a negative self-image to the point where they thought of themselves as criminals, and turned to a life of crime.
“There was a time when I might have believed in that explanation for criminal behavior,” said the chaplain. “But after my years here, I have decided that most of the guys who end up here are not suffering from a poor self-image, or low self-esteem. They are here for the opposite reason. Most of these guys don’t think too little of themselves, but rather too much. They all think they are brilliant. The rules are made for people of lesser intelligence to follow. They’ve all succumbed to the temptation to think that they, and they alone, have figured out how to get around the system. And that is why they are here.”
Can it be that our root problem is not thinking too little of ourselves, but rather too much?
That certainly seems to be the attitude of scripture. Look at all the stories at the beginning of the Bible. Adam and Eve want to know as much as God, they want to live forever, so they eat the forbidden fruit. And then Cain resents God’s blessing upon his brother Abel and kills him thinking that he knows more than God does. Then there is that tower with its top reaching up into the heavens, whereby we shall “be like God,” and on and on the stories go, suggesting that our desire to “be like God” is what brings us to grief. Remember the tempter tempted Jesus to choose to practice magic, call on God for special protection and take control of the kingdoms of this world? And instead Jesus chose the fork in the road to be with God.
If temptation is a road, it’s one with forks in it. The nature of temptation is that these forks force us to make decisions: Will we follow the leading of the Spirit or the opportunity of the devil? Sometimes the pull of temptation is so demanding that the choice of turning at a major intersection is all we can see. At other times, it’s in small choices, slight detours that, when followed one after another, lead us to ungodly destinations.
The 15th century German devotional writer Thomas a Kempis wrote about these detours when he said, “For first there cometh to the mind a bare thought of evil, then a strong imagination thereof, afterwards delight, and evil motion and then consent. And so little by little our wicked enemy getteth complete entrance because he is not resisted in the beginning.”
The Bible notes that same sequence by using four verbs when it tells of David’s sin with Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11:1-5). First, David, from the vantage point of his palace roof, “saw” Bathsheba. Then he “inquired” about her. Next, he sent messengers to “get” her, and finally, he “lay” with her. There was no sin in the seeing of Bathsheba, but that was a fork in the road, and by inquiring about her, David was making the first of a string of decisions that would lead to moral collapse.
The problem with temptation is that we don’t get to make just one big correct choice and the battle is won. After Jesus faced his temptations in the wilderness, he still had to face others. If we read on in Matthew, we find that, when Peter tried to get Jesus to stop saying he was headed for suffering and death, Jesus replied, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block for me” (16:23), revealing that the temptation to turn off the road God wanted him to walk was still going on. And then at the Garden of Gethsemane when Jesus said to his Father, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want” (Matthew 26:39b). Temptation was still looming in Jesus.
So we, like Jesus, have to keep deciding afresh, whether we will be who God calls us to be or something else. We may not be tempted by the things that tempted Jesus, but at the roots, our temptations have a commonality with his: to mistrust God’s readiness to strengthen us to face our trials. Do we face our temptations trusting in God to see us through or are we trusting in ourselves?
The Apostle Paul heard God say to him, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9), and the forks in the road are good places to remember that for ourselves.
Lent
In this season of Lent, we ask ourselves to be honest of about who we are. We are being disoriented in order to become reoriented to the ways of God. In Lent we confront the truth about our true situation and ourselves. And we see that inasmuch as Jesus was tempted but did not succumbed to the tempter’s enticements, we who are God’s people find ourselves also tempted to live our lives in ways that are less noble than God intends for us. We are not who we know we are meant to be.
And the good news today is that God forgives. We can dare to be honest because, in Jesus Christ, God dared to forgive us. Knowing that we are loved and forgiven gives us the ability not only to tell the truth about our sin but sometimes, in times of temptation, we have the choice of choosing the right fork in the road and in the end, we may triumph over our sin.
Lent calls us to develop a regular and disciplined time of prayer such as reciting the Lord’s Prayer, “lead us not into temptation.”
There’s s story about a passenger on a boat on Lake Tahoe during a violent storm far from the shore. He was well known as a preacher. The storm was so severe that people began praying for survival—saying the Lord’s Prayer, reciting the rosary or murmuring silent prayers under their breath.
Some people noticed that the preacher wasn’t anywhere to be found, so one man went looking for him. He found the reverend sitting on deck, on the bow, facing the wind and riding the swells as the boat rocked back and forth. The man shouted, “Why aren’t you down below praying with us?”
The preacher man said, “No need. I’m all prayed up.”
Facing temptation that comes relentlessly every day is not blocked by the fact that we are smarter just look at those in the state penitentiary. Facing temptation offers us choices to travel at forks in the road that can lead us to destructive destinations or to the right one of being united with Christ. Facing temptations usually disorients us but it can also reorient our lives toward personal and spiritual maturity because we are made ever more aware of our strengths, commitments and values.
And just like the preacher who in the midst of a violent storm that we fear for having fallen into the temptation of trusting in our own abilities rather than in God, we may pray every day and stay prayed up.
Let us pray.
Walk with us, Lord Jesus, during these forty days of Lent, that as we walk with you, we might come to face our temptations and in truthfulness, repent our sins, and turn and be forgiven by you. Amen.