Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
February 29, 2004

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I suspect that we’ve all heard today’s Gospel reading before. The story of the temptation of Christ in the desert is one of the most familiar in the Gospels. It contains one of the Gospels’ most memorable lines: "Man does not live by bread alone." Luke 4:4. The story and some of the lines are familiar. And yet I wonder how seriously we take this story. It’s pretty easy to make this story be just about Jesus and not about us. After all, we confess that Jesus is the Son of God Incarnate. One way to look at the story of the temptations is that Jesus is being tempted to misuse his power as God. After all, who but God could turn stones to bread? In this view, the devil is tempting Jesus to misuse his divinity for selfish purposes by turning stones to bread. Or to perform a needless miracle by throwing himself off the pinnacle of the Temple, then miraculously saving himself, presumable for the purpose of wowing the people and proving that he is God. Or to forsake his allegiance to God for allegiance to Satan in return for worldly power. Jesus of course withstands these temptations; but then, he’s God, so what do you expect. It’s easy to see these temptations as being only the temptations of God Incarnate. They have nothing to do with us, or so I suspect it seems to most of us when we hear this story.

And that, my friends, is one of the problems with seeing Jesus only as God Incarnate and not also as a flesh and blood human being. It makes him irrelevant to us, just as last week I said that making his death his only reason for living makes him irrelevant to us. What does a temptation of God have to do with us? We’re not God. We’re just ordinary men and women, flesh and blood human beings. Oh, we may believe that we have a spark of divinity in us; but we certainly aren’t divine in the same sense that Jesus was. So, we say, the Bible stories about him are just that, stories about him and not about us.

That’s an easy conclusion to reach, but I’ve got a problem with it. I’ve said here before, and I firmly believe, that one of the things that makes the great Bible stories so great is that they aren’t just about the people in the story. They are in fact about us. That’s what keeps them alive. That’s what keeps generation after generation of people coming back to them for instruction, inspiration, comfort, and hope. And although it may not be obvious, I believe this is true of the story of the temptations of Christ is also the story of the temptations of us. I want to illustrate my thesis by focusing today on the first temptation, the temptation to turn stones into bread. I could make the same point with the other two temptations, and maybe I’ll do that in the coming years. After all, the temptation story comes up every year on the first Sunday of Lent, so we’ll have occasion to return to it often. When we see what this first temptation means for us, we can see it as doorway to deeper and much more fulfilling relationship to God.

In the first temptation, Jesus is starving. He had had nothing to eat for forty days, or so we’re told. We’re told he was "famished." So the devil said to him: Prove your divine status by turning this stone into bread. In other words, use the power of God, whether that power lies within you or without you, to do something for yourself, to get something for yourself. This is the temptation of the manipulation of the divine. Because we access the power of the divine through prayer, this temptation applied to us is about the selfish use of prayer. It is the temptation of seeing God as Santa Claus, someone who is there simply to give us what we want.

Jesus rejects this understanding of prayer. He does it in a rather round about fashion, but then he did almost everything in a rather round about fashion. He said: One does not live by bread alone. That, of course, is true; but then Jesus certainly knew that we also need bread. After all, he taught us to pray: Give us this day our daily bread. Matthew 6:11 and Luke 11:3. So what is he saying when he deflects Satan’s attack by saying "One does not live by bread alone"? He is saying, I think, that he will not tempted into using the power of God for selfish purposes. Applied to us, that means that we should not give in to the temptation to use the power of God, the power of prayer, for selfish purposes.

This, I think, is a pretty easy temptation for us to understand. Think about it. When you think of prayer, don’t you think first and foremost of praying for something? For most people. praying is about asking God for things, asking God to give us things or to do things for us. In my experience, most church people today have trouble thinking of prayer as anything else. Yet in the Christian tradition, prayer is not primarily, or at least not only, about asking God for things. Let me suggest that you try on several other ways of looking at prayer to see how they fit.

Try on prayer as a dialogue between two persons in covenant with one another. It’s like an intimate conversation between spouses, and indeed Hebrew Scripture often uses marriage as a metaphor for the relationship between Israel and God. In intimate conversation, people with a deep commitment to each other listen as much or more than they talk. They share. They may also ask each other for things, but the dialogue is mutual, not a one sided request that the other person do something for you. It is a give and take. It is sharing. Think how much richer, how much more satisfying for both of you, your primary relationships are with other people when you regularly practice this kind of intimate dialogue. It works with God too. I believe that Jesus must have been engaged in this kind of mutual conversation with God throughout his time in the wilderness. Surely he was seeking to discern what God’s will was for him and how strong his own commitment was to doing that will. Discerning those things is important for us too. We can do it if we think of prayer not as a wish list but as an intimate dialogue.

Or try on prayer as simply paying attention to your relationship with God. Prayer doesn’t have to involve talking to God. Careful examination of your own relationship with God, done with an honest intention to understand that relationship and to improve it, is also a kind of prayer. Prayer in this sense is not so much directed outward to a God out there somewhere as it is introspection, self examination, going deep inside to discover the truth about your relationship with God. How strong is it? How mutual is it? Where is something lacking in it? How can you make it stronger? How can you open yourself to God’s desire to make it stronger? These are all questions that we need to ask ourselves if we want to be honest and intentional about our relationship with God.

Certainly, during his time in the wilderness, Jesus must have been engaged in this kind of deep, introspective prayer. His time in the wilderness is all about discernment, as indeed our own wilderness experiences, whether the wilderness is physical or metaphorical, can be. Coming out of it to confront Satan, he must have felt that asking God simply to give him something, even if he could have done the physical deed himself because of who he was, was a shallow and inauthentic way of approaching God, of manipulating the Divine. He wouldn’t do it, even though he was starving.

Or think of prayer simply as opening yourself to the presence of God. We always think that prayer involves talking, but prayer as opening ourselves to the presence of God involves not talking but silence. Talking gets in the way. When we’re talking we can’t hear the still small voice of God because we’re making too much noise. We can’t open ourselves to the presence of God because we’re too aware of our own presence. The most profound opening to the presence of God involves the loss of an awareness of our own presence.

That is the aim of a type of prayer called contemplative prayer or, to use a term popularized by this kind of prayer’s most popular contemporary proponent, centering prayer. It is very similar to the meditation practices of Asian religions. It’s goal is the loss of self-consciousness (which when it happens is always momentary at best) so that our noisy, demanding, judgmental egos aren’t in the way of the pure presence of God in our hearts. It’s a very difficult thing to attain, but the discipline of centering prayer, even when it does not lead to the perfect state of contemplation, does open us little by little to the presence of God. And that presence transforms us.

And maybe that’s the key to understanding why Jesus rejected the temptation to use the power of God, which we access through prayer, for his own selfish ends. Our life with God is not about us getting things from God. It is about God transforming us into the whole, complete, authentic people God wants us to be. We don’t experience transformation by seeing God as Santa Claus. We don’t experience transformation by asking God for the things our egos desire. We experience transformation by listening to God, by faithfully examining our relationship with God day by day, and by opening our hearts to God’s presence in silence.

Now, don’t get me wrong. God also invites us to use what the professionals call prayer of petition, that is, prayer in which we ask God for things, for blessings, for ourselves and for others. After all, Jesus also said: "Ask and it will be given you." Matthew 7:7 We’re about to do some of that in our own prayer time. The problem is then, I think, not that ask but that we ask selfishly, not that we ask but that all we do is ask. We don’t use prayer in its other, deeper, more transformative ways. That, I think, is what Jesus is telling us when he rejects of temptation to use the power of God, the power of prayer, selfishly.

So, in this Lenten season, let me suggest that we all try the spiritual discipline of prayer that doesn’t ask for anything, the prayer of dialogue, of inner discernment, and most of all of silence. You might be amazed what can come out of it for your life and for the world.