The Inconvenience of Temptation

            When I was in my second year at seminary, our daughter needed to go to her high school for an event.  The night was a Wednesday and the seminary always had a midweek service on that night.  I wasn’t able to go, so my daughter and I got in the car and I drove her to her high school. I wasn’t particularly happy about that.  I really wanted to go to the service. On the way to the high school, we passed the seminary chapel where the service was in progress.  They were reciting the creed.  I heard them saying: We believe in God, the Father Almighty and in Jesus Christ, his only Son our Lord.  All of a sudden, I understood the implication of those words and I felt immediately connected to that congregation.  The “we” included me and my daughter and my wife and all of us who although not attending that service, were a part of the faith.  I have always remembered that moment as a time of connection, a connection of my God to my life. My reluctance to take my daughter where she needed to go disappeared and I was again connected to my family, my seminary and my life.

            Life happens, as they say.  We need to do what is required of us, even if it is sometimes inconvenient.  Jesus returned from the Jordan River where he had been baptized by John the Baptist and was immediately led by the Spirit into the wilderness where he was tempted by the devil for forty days.  This wasn’t particularly convenient for him.  Listening to the devil and his temptations must have been a harrowing experience.  But it was a very human experience.  You and I are tempted constantly.  Sometimes we give in to those temptations and fall into sin.  That also isn’t particularly convenient for us because sin has consequences.  We also don’t always like the consequences.  This season of Lent is a time for us to take stock of our lives and try to get back in tune with what our God has in mind for us. 

            The thing about Jesus’ temptations is that they were all things that he needed very much.  The devil knew that he was hungry, so he suggested to Jesus that he use his power to turn some of the stones into bread so that he could eat.  Jesus told him: One does not live by bread alone.

He then took our Lord to the top of a mountain and showed him all of the cities of the world.  He told Jesus that all of these would he give to him, if only Jesus would worship him.  Jesus answered him: Worship the Lord your God and serve only him. The last temptation was to take Jesus to the pinnacle of the temple and suggest that he throw himself down from the height and then quoted Psalm 91 to him: that God would put angels in charge over him lest he strike his foot against a stone. Jesus said to him: Do not put the Lord your God to the test. The scripture says, having finished his tests, the devil departed from him until an opportune time.

            Nicholas Kazantzakis used this moment in Jesus life as the inspiration for a book called The Last Temptation of Christ which was made into a great movie.  In this story, Jesus is on the cross and is visited by a small girl who suggests that he can come down from the cross and live a normal life.  Jesus almost in a trance because of the pain of the cross agrees, goes back to Bethany where he marries Mary, has some children and begins to live normally.  He encounters Paul who says to Jesus, I really didn’t need you.  I could have done everything by myself.  All of a sudden, Jesus wakes up, back on the cross, still in pain, but knowing that his destiny is to be exactly where he is.  He suffers his death for all of humankind and after three days, he rises from the tomb and provides for all of us the proof of eternal life that God has promised to us all.

            That is what this season of Lent is all about.  We are not the Son of God.  We are not immune from the temptations that come our way.  What we do have is God’s promise to us to forgive our sins and to receive us back, even when we have strayed.  That is the certainty that we can always rely on, even when we have reached the bottom.  Jesus came to us not to make us perfect, but to help us in our humanity.  That is what we all so desperately need.  

Transfiguration as a Preview

            The story of the transfiguration of Jesus is a very special story.  Some scholars believe that it is a misplaced resurrection story; but it is placed in Luke’s Gospel as a prefiguring of the glorious time in Jerusalem when Jesus rises again.  He has told his disciples several times that this would take place, but like you and me, they had a very hard time believing it.

           Jesus took Peter, James and John up on the mountain to pray.  While he was praying, a cloud came over them, Jesus face shone brightly and all of a sudden Moses and Elijah were standing with him.  Peter babbled something about building houses, but Jesus ignored this.  Then a voice of God from the cloud spoke and said: This is my beloved Son, listen to him! Nothing more was said.  The disciples and Jesus came down from the mountain to find a crowd of people at the bottom with a man who wanted his son to be healed.  The other disciples had been trying to effect the healing, without any results.  Jesus rebuked the demon that was possessing the son and the young man was healed.  He then was given back to his father. The passage ends with the statement that  All were astounded at the greatness of God.

            The mountain of the Transfiguration is supposedly Mount Tabor in Galilee.  Rosie and I went to that mountain back in 1983 on a tour of the Holy Land.  We were taken up the mountain by a team of wild Palestinian taxi drivers who drove like madmen up a narrow road where we thought we would probably never survive.  Several times, other taxis passed us on the way down while we were on our way up.

            When we arrived at the top, we discovered a peaceful place with a lovely temple that existed.  A German tour group was inside the temple singing hymns.  Strangely, there was a mist covering the top of the mountain that certainly reminded us of the story of the Transfiguration.  It was a holy moment at the top of that mountain.

            What I believe about the Transfiguration is that it was a holy time for those three special apostles to see the Risen Christ in all of his Glory before the time that was coming in Jerusalem that would include the crucifixion of their Lord.  It was a moment for those three to see the Glory of their Lord on full display before the time of his death.  It makes real for me the remarkable truth of the mysterious resurrection of Jesus, something that you and I have never seen, and along with it the promise of eternal life.

            I think that we need to know this because our lives all end in death and we need some certainty about eternal life.  When I have stood in church aisles at a funeral I have always wished that I could preside at a resurrection for the sake of the families involved.  The pain is often almost overwhelming and we need a glimmer of hope in that moment. I think that is what the Transfiguration was supposed to be for those prominent apostles.  Peter never really got the message.  His fear drove him to deny his Lord after the crucifixion; but Peter came around and became one of the great bearers of the truth of Jesus and his love after the resurrection was made real to him.  It was Peter who was specifically forgiven by Jesus for his denials on the shore of the Sea of Galilee when Jesus asked him three times if he loved him and Peter replied each of those times that he loved him.  That is when Jesus told him to feed my sheep. 

            That is the role of the church today.  To acknowledge the truth of the resurrection of Jesus and the certainty of eternal life, our job is to take care of the multitudes among us who have little or nothing.  To take care of the people whom we encounter in our daily lives.  Like Jesus at the bottom of the mountain, when he found the young man who needed to be healed when his disciples were unable to do it, he responded with love and compassion.  He didn’t ask if the young man deserved to be healed, he simply did what needed to be done.  Jesus had a heart full of love for those whom he met. 

            Being sure that our love is on display when we walk through our daily lives is what our Lord asks of us.  We simply need to care. When we do that, we prove to the world the truth of God’s love even in the face of disaster.  God is present in this world in the profound love that we show to each other and to all of those whom the world seems not to love and are excluded.  They are not excluded by God and we need to help them to understand that.

Change, Conflict and Love

            In the late seventies, when I had been the rector of St. Philip’s in Moon Township for only a short time, the prayer book was changed.  When I got to the parish, they had never tried any of the various revisions that had been provided; the green book, the zebra book, so I took them through the whole process in a year’s time.  Finally, after the new book was accepted and we had purchased our copies, one Saturday, we took the old 1928 prayer books out of the pews and distributed the new books.

            The next day was Sunday and we used the new prayer books for the first time.  After the service, one woman came to me at the door of the church as she was leaving, pounded my chest with her clenched fists and said to me: “you have ruined this church!: I could have argued with her and given her all of the reasons why the prayer book needed to be changed, but somehow, with God’s grace, I didn’t do any of that. Instead, I reached out my arms and I held her for a few moments while she cried.  I certainly understood her feelings.  She thought that she had been betrayed by her church.  She was blaming me because I was the only visible person with authority that she could see.  She continued to come to church.  We didn’t lose her.  I was glad that I was able to show her some compassion in her time of trouble.

            When Jesus went to Nazareth, it was after he had healed people in Capernaum, the people in his hometown expected that he would do the same things there.  He read the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, told them that in their hearing the prophecies had been fulfilled.  He then went on to tell them that he knew that they expected him to do the same things that he had done in Capernaum.  He then said that a prophet has no standing is his home town.  The people then tried to throw Jesus over a cliff and that failed.  Jesus simply walked away.  That is a simple story with a great truth.  We don’t honor our local prophets in quite the same way that we honor those who come from afar.  But it was worse than that for Jesus.  The people of Nazareth saw him only as the son of a carpenter, one of the lowly folk.  Here was the Son of God among his own people and not treated in quite the way that he imagined that he ought to be accepted.

            We have also had a strange incidence of this in the past couple of weeks.  The Primates of the Anglican Communion, meeting in Canterbury, England have decided that the Episcopal Church ought to be excluded from denominational decision making for a period of three years because our General Convention has approved allowing its clergy to officiate at same sex weddings.  This has been a boiling issue for a long time.  In 1976, when the church approved the ordination of women, the Anglican Communion also went bananas and some threatened to throw us out of the denomination.  When Katherine Jefferts Schori was elected Presiding Bishop of the church nine years ago, we were again under fire for permitting such a thing.  Unfortunately, it is mostly the African bishops who are heading up the protests against what we are doing in this country. 

            There is certainly nothing new here.  Change always produces conflict.  We saw that in the Reformation when Luther posted his 96 theses on the church in Wittenburg; we have seen it countless times in our own communion when differences of opinion have brought us to great argument.  We certainly saw it in Pittsburgh when Mr. Duncan took a number of our churches with him when he left the Episcopal Church over what he termed our lack of a conservative position on the many issues that confront us. 

            Paul also faced conflict when he preached to the churches that he founded.  I think that his most eloquent statement is what we heard this morning in the reading from First Corinthians, chapter 13.  This is Paul’s statement about the meaning of love and what it means to us to show love in every instance.  He says that even if he has faith enough to move mountains, gives away all of his possessions and even gives away his body, if he doesn’t have love, it means nothing.  That is the word that we need to hear in the middle of all of the conflicts that we experience, particularly in this election time.  We fail miserably if we fail to love in the middle of our disagreements.  When we can keep this in mind, we will make the right choices and do the right things.  Our God is with us in the life and teaching of our Lord Jesus.