[Propertalk] 1 Lent c

[Robert P Morrison]

Unproofed draft for Sunday!
Peace,
Bob

	THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF ST. ALBAN, ALBANY 1 LENT C

	DEUTERONOMY 26:1-11 14th FEBRUARY, 2016

	ROMANS 10:8b-13 PSALM 91:1-2, 9-16 

	LUKE 4:1-13

	 “If you are the Son of God ….”

	 What can be worse than sowing the seeds of self-doubt?

	 Jesus is at the start of His ministry. I don’t now how He felt
about it, but He left home. He walked into the Jordan Valley. Quite
possibly He watched His cousin John call the nation to renew its life,
corporately and individually, to center their lives in those
commandments Bishop Michael talked about last week. Jesus may have
wondered how He was going to engage in ministry, but He joined the
others in the waters of renewal and, all of a sudden, everything began
to fall into place. Perhaps a sense of cal surrounded Him. He may have
felt He’d judged his vocation wisely and truly. Then the Spirit gave
Her affirmation. God approved.

	 It must have been such a relief to Jesus to know that He was doing
and planning to continue doing what was God’s will.

	 Then He was sent – some translations say driven, compelled – to
go into the desert.

	 Now the desert was not necessarily the barren place we might
imagine. Certainly, there would be no cell phone coverage. But the
desert was, and remains, the place where one went to test one’s
spiritual personality and vocation. The desert, free from most
distractions, was where one’s sense became heightened and one could
discover God more clearly, who was able to reach deep within one, to
give insight possibly unnoticeable elsewhere.

	 John the Baptist came out from the desert. Jesus went there right
after His baptism, probably feeling weary but really pleased to be
blessed by the Spirit. Jesus may have felt a little awkward, until He
was wrenched out of His meditation and self-examination by those
sweet, sugar-coated, teasing words: “If you are the Son of God…”

	 Of course He was. He’d just been told He was. He wouldn’t BE
there if He didn’t think He was.

	 But this is where Jesus was, possibly, most vulnerable. He was
challenged to give up on the insight He’d obtained. He was tempted
to redefine His whole outlook on life. And, what seems the worst point
of this, He was made to doubt Himself – who He was, what His mother
had told Him, what His friends may have done to encourage Him.

	 I don’t know how many of you have been in the same position. You
apply yourself at school. You may go on to university of a trade
school. You struggle against all the others competing for the same
jobs. Then you land a place where you feel you’ll be happy.

	 The vocation you begin may not be the exact same as imagined as you
left High School. All sorts of circumstances may have impinged on your
lives. Your health and living situation may have taken a strange turn.

	 Nevertheless, here you are, reasonably happy and content, with some
sort of an idea what you may be doing next – whether you’re
retired or not. Then someone or something eases into the picture and
starts to suggest that everything may not proceed as you thought.

	 Somewhere along in the development process of our lives, we’ve
come to some image of who or what is dangerous, or threatening, or
destructive. We look for people wearing red, possibly with a hat, so
we can’t see the embryonic horns, or the tail. We look for those
with a pallid complexion, overly-brightly-coloured lips and extremely
long and pointed eye teeth. We look for those who seem to stare
vacantly into front of them and walk with a stumbling gait. If we see
anyone remotely like these, then our radar is triggered and we go on
the alert immediately.

	 But that’s not what’s most dangerous. The greatest problems to
our spiritual, our emotional, our physical lives comes from the person
who smiles, who talks earnestly, who seems to listen to what we’re
saying creates stress for us in our lives and seems to be most
sympathetic. Their advice may come in such a way that it sounds as if
that person really knows what’s happening, and that that person has
the information and pinion to resolve and connect every issue.

	 You’re hungry? What would you say to a sandwich right about now?
No one seems to respect you? Let me tell you how to put people in
their places and to give you the kudos you so richly deserve.

	 You feel that you don’t have people pay attention to you, and
sympathise with you? We can do something about that!

	 The danger of temptation is that it comes, usually, from the person
or situation you’d never imagine had a mean bone in her or his body.
The danger of temptation is that, nine times out of ten, it seems so
reasonable, as if what you think you need isn’t that excessive, or
beyond what you think you’re owed. 

	 The person or situation MOST disruptive to the entirety of our lives
is, most frequently, the one which suggests that all that we need to
do is to cut a little corner, to take for ourselves just a portion of
what we know belongs to someone else.

	 Remember those ten commandments of which Bishop Michael spoke last
Sunday? How do they relate to the ways in which the urge and
motivation to set aside our principles? What about bearing false
witness? You know, that can mean outright lying, telling someone a
story with just the tiniest amount of truth to it to persuade someone
else that whatever else you make up is actually true also.

	 Or, bearing false witness – going up to someone, especially if she
or he is vulnerable and under stress, and saying, “If you ARE the
Son of God, then God wouldn’t want this and that to go wrong for
you” – saying that with the implication that you AREN’T the Son
of God; that you AREN’T loved by God; That you AREN’T sister or
brother to Jesus.

	 Sowing the seed of doubt that we aren’t really loveable, that we
aren’t really competent, that we aren’t really called to one
vocation or another; sowing such a seed goes directly against God and
God’s loving plan. And the bad news is that this seed-sower can look
like the most friendly, the most innocuous, least troublesome person
on the street or in the room.

	 I think this story is in the Gospel for at least the reason that we
may read it today as a warning and as encouragement.

	 Even Jesus underwent temptations. We’re not the only ones. So we
can take hope that Jesus knows everything that confuses and burdens
our lives; Jesus knows who and what cam appear to be so reasonable and
yet actually has the potential to be really disturbing and
destructive.

	 But the warning is to every last one of us, no matter what our age,
what our background, what our role in life and society.

	 Somehow, we have to be able the difference between trusting someone
and never taking things for granted, possibly never taking things at
their face value.

	 We have to learn and relearn, to ask questions, never to write
anyone or anything off, but to ask ourselves what someone’s
suggestions will do for and to us, both positively and negatively.
Jesus was given the ability to reason. Jesus was able to think through
all the temptations and decisions He had to make throughout His life.
He had the human intelligence and deductive powers to see where those
paths would lead, and He made choices based on how He found these
choices matched up with His learning and experience of God.

	 Just so, each of us has been granted the ability to reason, to
question, to match what we hear and see against what we have
experienced and what others have experienced and described.

	 Ladislaus Boros, a Jesuit theologian and priest, wrote, ”The
temptations were intended to induce (Jesus) to externalize his being,
to turn his life into an expression of power, to dominate, to be
‘extraordinary’; and not, on the contrary, to hold out to the end,
enduring whatever was to befall him, hiding his immediate personal
divinity in the obscurity of his way of life, not imposing himself
upon anyone, living cheerfully and peacefully among simple people, and
not forcing God’s hand even his most extreme need.

	 “When Christ rejected the temptations, he won back the essence of
humanity. He let the powers of evil come right up to him. And at the
decisive moment he shattered them with a simple No. He did not betray
us for a crust of bread. To him our wretchedness was sacred. He did
not hesitate for a moment. His victory was not a dazzling triumph,
since no one knew of it. It took place in utter solitude. Nevertheless
it made possible a new future for mankind—the turning of hearts to
goodness, not of stones to bread.” 1

	 So, as Boros suggests happened with Jesus – that he “won back
the essence of humanity”, so we, in our turn, as individuals, show
our true humanity, show the essence of God within us. Is it easy?
Seldom is anything of value easy. Will living alertly, aware of the
potential for someone or something to sneak up on us, ever be overcome
in our lives? No, not that either. There will always be temptations,
whether it’s as simple as reaching for the chocolate doughnut on the
plate, or of seeking the accolades of everyone in Albany, or Oregon,
or the world. There’s a bit of Walter Mitty in all of us. Not that
we can’t dream – Jesus dreamt continually of the day when God’s
justice, and mercy, and joy would overflow throughout creation. But we
need to ask what anything, what anyone, will do to our souls, to the
soul of the person talking to us, to the souls of everyone else.

	 Because our souls, and their health, DO matter!

	 Maybe ask yourself, for the next ten months, what on earth those
presidential nominees are saying.

	NOTE:

	[1] Ladislaus Boros (1927-1981): _“__In Time of Temptation”_
translated by Simon and Erika Young [1]. Burns & Oates London, © 1968
Ladislaus Boros Archives - inward/outward [2]
inwardoutward.org/quote-author/ladislaus-boros/ quoted in _“__At the
Edge of the Enclosure: Soulwork towards Sunday 1 Lent c_” 14th
February, 2016, by Suzanne Guthrie
http://www.edgeofenclosure.org/lent1c.html [3]

Links:
------
[1]
http://inwardoutward.org/quote-source/in-time-of-temptation-translated-by-simon-and-erika-young/
[2]
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjCiqarjfTKAhVK12MKHQ2FAPoQFggcMAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Finwardoutward.org%2Fquote-author%2Fladislaus-boros%2F&usg=AFQjCNErd6qGyhmv1NNeIpwDDmBxCAmg7Q
[3] http://www.edgeofenclosure.org/lent1c.html

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://stsams.org/pipermail/propertalk_stsams.org/attachments/20160212/63c4b0f6/attachment.htm>