Humanity and Humility
Humanity and Humility
Rev. Chandler Stokes Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7 & Matthew 4:1-11
The First Sunday in Lent March 5, 2017 Scripture Introduction A colleague of mine once said, When I find I am before two equally true and mutually exclusive truths, I sense I’m on holy ground. Another said, To get this Christian faith right, we must speak about paradoxes. Throughout Lent, I am planning to explore paradox as a way for us to be present to the holy. Today’s paradoxes entail freedom and obedience, and the human and the divine. Today’s texts are iconic ones that have generated insight for the church for millennia. On this Sunday, the lectionary takes two sentences from Genesis 2 with a paragraph from Genesis 3, and then pairs those with the account of the temptations of Christ in Matthew. That combination will lead us in a certain direction. Scripture Readings 15 The Lord God took the human and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. 16 And the Lord God commanded the human, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” 2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; 3 but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’ ” 4 But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die; 5 for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” 6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. 7 Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves. 2 4 Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. 2 He fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished. 3 The tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” 4 But he answered, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’ ” 5 Then
the devil took him to the holy city and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, 6 saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written, 1
New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), Genesis 2:15–17.
2
New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), Genesis 3:1–7. Because sermons are prepared with an emphasis on verbal presentation, the written accounts may occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.
Humanity and Humility ‘He will command his angels concerning you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’ ” 7 Jesus
said to him, “Again it is written, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’ ”
8 Again,
the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor; 9 and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” 10 Jesus said to him, “Away with you, Satan! for it is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’ ” 11 Then
the devil left him, and suddenly angels came and waited on him. 3 ***
May the words of my mouth and the meditations, the imaginations, of our hearts be acceptable in thy sight, may they reflect the truth you hold, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen. Pairing these Old and New Testament texts, as the lectionary does, helps us focus on a particular place in the text. But I don’t want us to miss the words “led up by the Spirit”! The thing is, Jesus joyfully contradicts Satan, as if he were smiling and responding, “No, pal. I’m not gonna do that!” He is very much in the Spirit: confident, clear. Imagination is deeply powerful. How we picture the world, how we imagine what is going on, what we think is possible or real, can affect how we feel about the world and what we think we should do. Imagination is so powerful that no one, not even God, can force people to change their imagination, the way they interpret who they are and what the world means. As theologians tell us, love and grace simply do not coerce people to accept them.4 Love and grace do not coerce us. There is no forcing us to imagine the world or ourselves in a particular way, but it is precisely “at the level of the human imagination” that God engages us.5 God engages us in our imaginations, and thus in an essentially non-coercive way. That is both why we seek to understand God, why we try to imagine what God is saying, and why temptation is real. God engages us in our imagination but never coerces it, so we can go another
3
New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), Matthew 4:1–11.
4
Gregory Anderson Love, Love, Violence, and the Cross: How the Nonviolent God Saves Us through the Cross of
Christ, Kindle Edition (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2010), 234. 5
Love, in Love, Violence, and the Cross, writes, “…through the living, risen Jesus and the Holy Spirit, God
engages the person or group at the level of the human imagination…”,222.
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI
Page 2 of 6
March 5, 2017
Humanity and Humility way. We can choose to see the world other than how God has fashioned it and told us. We can choose to see the line or not, cross the line or not. I am not going to pretend that today’s interpretation of the Garden of Eden is final or definitive. However, read as the lectionary presents this text, the emphasis is clearly on temptation. And the particular temptation that is highlighted for the first human beings is the serpent’s lure: “You will be like God.” God commands the first humans, Adam and Eve, not to eat of the one tree. God doesn’t force them to obey or coerce them to buy the story about the tree that God tells them. God simply offers the picture. Human freedom is a given. The serpent, then, lures the human beings into looking at things differently. The serpent tells them another story and tempts them into seeking to be something that they are not. Jesus is faced with a parallel situation. The devil attempts to lure Jesus into looking at things differently than the way Jesus imagines Scripture teaches him. The devil keeps telling him another story and tries three times to lure Jesus into being something he is not. This is how preacher and theologian Barbara Brown Taylor summarizes the two stories: “Whereas Adam stepped over the line and found humanity a curse, Jesus stayed behind the line and made humanity a blessing. One man trespassed; one man stayed put. One tried to be God; one was content to remain a human being. And the irony is that the one who tried to be God did not do too well as a human being, while the one who was content to be human became known as the Son of God.”6 I like that. I especially like that last line—Jesus was content, deeply, joyfully, and meaningfully content, to be human. That’s helpful. That’s more helpful than my thinking that I try to be God. Do I try to be God? We don’t want to be God, do we? That’s not the temptation, is it? In the garden, Scripture says, Adam and Eve wanted to be like God. But was that really it? They just wanted to eat the fruit of that particular tree. They wanted to do what they wanted to do. They weren’t trying to be God. They wanted what they wanted. It was a victimless crime. The rule seemed arbitrary. The serpent’s story made sense. That story gave them a reason to want to eat from the tree. That’s not trying to be God, is it? Now, people who have done work on their addictions know this better than most. You want what you want. And you will believe any story that tells you are allowed to want it. And the serpents are everywhere. Recovering addicts also know that it’s not a victimless crime and that they are only the first victim. They know that the rule seems arbitrary but that keeping the rule leads to life, but by
6
Barbara Brown Taylor, "Remaining Human," The Christian Century (February 7-14, 1996),
p. 127, cited in an unpublished paper by Ted Wardlaw for the Moveable Feast: January 2017, Louisville.
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI
Page 3 of 6
March 5, 2017
Humanity and Humility breaking it—they will surely die. They know that were made for the rule and the rule is a gift made for them. Throughout Lent, we are going to use the Ten Commandments as our summary of the law. In the past we have used Jesus’s summary, “love God and love your neighbors as yourselves” or “love one another as I have loved you.” But it’s helpful to recite these ten rules, to describe these lines—they are not different from, nor are they are more coercive than, love and grace. In the children’s worship centers, these commandments are referred to as the “ten best ways to live.” Indeed. They are the ten most human ways to live, I would say. But they are even more than that. Irenaeus, the secondcentury church father, said that the glory of God is the human being fully alive. To live these commandments is to be fully alive. It is to live as we were created to be. For us addictive sinners, they are to choose life. These were made for us and given to us—like abstention for the addict. “Our hatred and our hurtings and our failings and our violence are not evidence of our humanness, but our inhumanity. Sin is not that which defines us but rather distorts us.”7 These commands remind us who we are at our core. If we cross over the line, we become inhuman. It may be that we are not good at being human, but we don’t want to be God, do we? We just want to do what we want to do, without the limits, without having to keep back from any line. It’s not that we want to cross the line. We just don’t want a line; it seems to limit our freedom. Take Sabbath. Now, sadly, many of us in this neck of the woods have seen too many examples of keeping the Sabbath that were either hypocritical, or self-righteous, or legalistic—or all three at once. And so we abandon the idea of Sabbath altogether. We erase that line. We work seven days a week. We certainly don’t rest with conviction. We are in a system that rewards working a seven-day week and punishes us for not being constantly available. But is there any less wisdom in Sabbath than there is in not murdering or stealing? Oh, but breaking Sabbath is a victimless crime! Maybe like the alcoholic’s drink.… You may have seen in the recent Westminster prayer email that was sent out that Karen and I asked your prayers for our friend Michael Donahoe and his sons. Heidi, Michael’s wife and Karen’s good friend, died very suddenly back in January. Cancer—diagnosed in December, dead in January. We knew them when they were members of Karen’s church in Oakland. Michael had a corporate job. He traveled constantly. Eight days a week. They were hardly ever together as a family. The boys were young—three and five, I think, when they decided to change things. They moved to Maine: much lower overhead, far lower stress. Michael started his own business, and they made a Sabbathoriented life together for twelve years. Those were twelve years they might not have had at all, had they not imagined and chosen something different. They chose to stay on their side of the line, and so chose life, human life. Again, the recovering addict knows well that there is no victimless crime and that we will believe any story that tells us that we should want what we want and do what we want. We don’t want to break the Sabbath, to cross the line. We just don’t want the requirement getting in the way of … our freedom? 7
Tom Are, unpublished paper for the Moveable Feast: January 2015.
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI
Page 4 of 6
March 5, 2017
Humanity and Humility Or do we want instead to be fulfilled? Fully, deeply, meaningfully alive and laughing at the devil? Maybe we do want to be God… in that way. Again, I especially like Barbara Brown Taylor’s last line—that Jesus was content to be human. Content to be human. That’s what these texts want us to imagine. Somehow it leads to abundance, to being fully alive, which is cråitical when we know, as we reminded ourselves on Ash Wednesday, that we are dust. Jesus refuses to cross the line. One commentator understands the temptations as temptations to power. In them, Jesus affirms that he will not misuse his power for personal material gain, that he will not misuse his power to make himself safe and secure, that he will not misuse his power to amass clout and esteem.8 It is about power. Not all our sin is addiction. The temptation here is about power. When we talk about “playing God,” we are usually talking about exercising power over another person. In the Ten Commandments, what are murder, adultery, theft, and lying but all, in one way or another, the exercise of power over another person? What does it mean to refrain from that, to stay behind that line? It is paradoxical. The humans, Adam and Eve, are told not to eat from the one tree. However, God did not exercise power over them. God doesn’t force the humans to obey or coerce them to buy the story about the tree that God tells them. Human freedom is a given. And God doesn’t violate it. And that freedom certainly doesn’t go away when we choose not to cross the line. We choose freely. We choose to obey. Freedom can be choosing to love God and our neighbors as ourselves, choosing not to exert power over them, not to coerce them. Love and grace do not coerce. Do you see? Somehow this obedience to God and not seeking to be God—that is, our refusing coercive power, begins to sound divine itself. Not even God can force us to change our imaginations. Love and grace do not coerce us. There is no forcing us to imagine the world or ourselves in a particular way, but as my colleague, Gregory Love, put it: “…through the living, risen Jesus and the Holy Spirit, God engages [us] at the level of the human imagination.” 9 And so temptation is real. God never coerces our imagination, so we can go another way. We can choose to see the world other than how God has fashioned it. We can choose to see our world in such a way that it doesn’t really seem to need Sabbath rest, or fidelity to our vows, or telling the truth. But Jesus tells a different story of human existence. In choosing Jesus’s way, we choose life, we choose obedience and genuine freedom.
Robert A. Bryant, “Exegetical Perspective on Matthew 4:1–11,” in Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary: Year A, ed. David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, vol. 2 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 49. 8
9
Love, Love, Violence, and the Cross, 222.
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI
Page 5 of 6
March 5, 2017
Humanity and Humility Matthew tells us that “Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted,” but the Spirit did not then leave him alone. My colleague, Ted Wardlaw, concludes our journey today with this Good News: “Fouled-up men and fallen women that we are, nevertheless.… Led by the Spirit, we, too, are able to face our own tempting by recalling that our job is not to be God but to be obedient to God—by relying on that Spirit to keep us company on our side of the line.”10 Inside these lines are joy, contentment, and peace.
10
Ted Wardlaw, unpublished paper for the Moveable Feast, January 2017, Louisville, KY.
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI
Page 6 of 6
March 5, 2017
Rev. Chandler Stokes Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7 & Matthew 4:1-11
The First Sunday in Lent March 5, 2017 Scripture Introduction A colleague of mine once said, When I find I am before two equally true and mutually exclusive truths, I sense I’m on holy ground. Another said, To get this Christian faith right, we must speak about paradoxes. Throughout Lent, I am planning to explore paradox as a way for us to be present to the holy. Today’s paradoxes entail freedom and obedience, and the human and the divine. Today’s texts are iconic ones that have generated insight for the church for millennia. On this Sunday, the lectionary takes two sentences from Genesis 2 with a paragraph from Genesis 3, and then pairs those with the account of the temptations of Christ in Matthew. That combination will lead us in a certain direction. Scripture Readings 15 The Lord God took the human and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. 16 And the Lord God commanded the human, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” 2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; 3 but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’ ” 4 But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die; 5 for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” 6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. 7 Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves. 2 4 Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. 2 He fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished. 3 The tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” 4 But he answered, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’ ” 5 Then
the devil took him to the holy city and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, 6 saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written, 1
New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), Genesis 2:15–17.
2
New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), Genesis 3:1–7. Because sermons are prepared with an emphasis on verbal presentation, the written accounts may occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.
Humanity and Humility ‘He will command his angels concerning you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’ ” 7 Jesus
said to him, “Again it is written, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’ ”
8 Again,
the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor; 9 and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” 10 Jesus said to him, “Away with you, Satan! for it is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’ ” 11 Then
the devil left him, and suddenly angels came and waited on him. 3 ***
May the words of my mouth and the meditations, the imaginations, of our hearts be acceptable in thy sight, may they reflect the truth you hold, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen. Pairing these Old and New Testament texts, as the lectionary does, helps us focus on a particular place in the text. But I don’t want us to miss the words “led up by the Spirit”! The thing is, Jesus joyfully contradicts Satan, as if he were smiling and responding, “No, pal. I’m not gonna do that!” He is very much in the Spirit: confident, clear. Imagination is deeply powerful. How we picture the world, how we imagine what is going on, what we think is possible or real, can affect how we feel about the world and what we think we should do. Imagination is so powerful that no one, not even God, can force people to change their imagination, the way they interpret who they are and what the world means. As theologians tell us, love and grace simply do not coerce people to accept them.4 Love and grace do not coerce us. There is no forcing us to imagine the world or ourselves in a particular way, but it is precisely “at the level of the human imagination” that God engages us.5 God engages us in our imaginations, and thus in an essentially non-coercive way. That is both why we seek to understand God, why we try to imagine what God is saying, and why temptation is real. God engages us in our imagination but never coerces it, so we can go another
3
New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), Matthew 4:1–11.
4
Gregory Anderson Love, Love, Violence, and the Cross: How the Nonviolent God Saves Us through the Cross of
Christ, Kindle Edition (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2010), 234. 5
Love, in Love, Violence, and the Cross, writes, “…through the living, risen Jesus and the Holy Spirit, God
engages the person or group at the level of the human imagination…”,222.
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI
Page 2 of 6
March 5, 2017
Humanity and Humility way. We can choose to see the world other than how God has fashioned it and told us. We can choose to see the line or not, cross the line or not. I am not going to pretend that today’s interpretation of the Garden of Eden is final or definitive. However, read as the lectionary presents this text, the emphasis is clearly on temptation. And the particular temptation that is highlighted for the first human beings is the serpent’s lure: “You will be like God.” God commands the first humans, Adam and Eve, not to eat of the one tree. God doesn’t force them to obey or coerce them to buy the story about the tree that God tells them. God simply offers the picture. Human freedom is a given. The serpent, then, lures the human beings into looking at things differently. The serpent tells them another story and tempts them into seeking to be something that they are not. Jesus is faced with a parallel situation. The devil attempts to lure Jesus into looking at things differently than the way Jesus imagines Scripture teaches him. The devil keeps telling him another story and tries three times to lure Jesus into being something he is not. This is how preacher and theologian Barbara Brown Taylor summarizes the two stories: “Whereas Adam stepped over the line and found humanity a curse, Jesus stayed behind the line and made humanity a blessing. One man trespassed; one man stayed put. One tried to be God; one was content to remain a human being. And the irony is that the one who tried to be God did not do too well as a human being, while the one who was content to be human became known as the Son of God.”6 I like that. I especially like that last line—Jesus was content, deeply, joyfully, and meaningfully content, to be human. That’s helpful. That’s more helpful than my thinking that I try to be God. Do I try to be God? We don’t want to be God, do we? That’s not the temptation, is it? In the garden, Scripture says, Adam and Eve wanted to be like God. But was that really it? They just wanted to eat the fruit of that particular tree. They wanted to do what they wanted to do. They weren’t trying to be God. They wanted what they wanted. It was a victimless crime. The rule seemed arbitrary. The serpent’s story made sense. That story gave them a reason to want to eat from the tree. That’s not trying to be God, is it? Now, people who have done work on their addictions know this better than most. You want what you want. And you will believe any story that tells you are allowed to want it. And the serpents are everywhere. Recovering addicts also know that it’s not a victimless crime and that they are only the first victim. They know that the rule seems arbitrary but that keeping the rule leads to life, but by
6
Barbara Brown Taylor, "Remaining Human," The Christian Century (February 7-14, 1996),
p. 127, cited in an unpublished paper by Ted Wardlaw for the Moveable Feast: January 2017, Louisville.
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI
Page 3 of 6
March 5, 2017
Humanity and Humility breaking it—they will surely die. They know that were made for the rule and the rule is a gift made for them. Throughout Lent, we are going to use the Ten Commandments as our summary of the law. In the past we have used Jesus’s summary, “love God and love your neighbors as yourselves” or “love one another as I have loved you.” But it’s helpful to recite these ten rules, to describe these lines—they are not different from, nor are they are more coercive than, love and grace. In the children’s worship centers, these commandments are referred to as the “ten best ways to live.” Indeed. They are the ten most human ways to live, I would say. But they are even more than that. Irenaeus, the secondcentury church father, said that the glory of God is the human being fully alive. To live these commandments is to be fully alive. It is to live as we were created to be. For us addictive sinners, they are to choose life. These were made for us and given to us—like abstention for the addict. “Our hatred and our hurtings and our failings and our violence are not evidence of our humanness, but our inhumanity. Sin is not that which defines us but rather distorts us.”7 These commands remind us who we are at our core. If we cross over the line, we become inhuman. It may be that we are not good at being human, but we don’t want to be God, do we? We just want to do what we want to do, without the limits, without having to keep back from any line. It’s not that we want to cross the line. We just don’t want a line; it seems to limit our freedom. Take Sabbath. Now, sadly, many of us in this neck of the woods have seen too many examples of keeping the Sabbath that were either hypocritical, or self-righteous, or legalistic—or all three at once. And so we abandon the idea of Sabbath altogether. We erase that line. We work seven days a week. We certainly don’t rest with conviction. We are in a system that rewards working a seven-day week and punishes us for not being constantly available. But is there any less wisdom in Sabbath than there is in not murdering or stealing? Oh, but breaking Sabbath is a victimless crime! Maybe like the alcoholic’s drink.… You may have seen in the recent Westminster prayer email that was sent out that Karen and I asked your prayers for our friend Michael Donahoe and his sons. Heidi, Michael’s wife and Karen’s good friend, died very suddenly back in January. Cancer—diagnosed in December, dead in January. We knew them when they were members of Karen’s church in Oakland. Michael had a corporate job. He traveled constantly. Eight days a week. They were hardly ever together as a family. The boys were young—three and five, I think, when they decided to change things. They moved to Maine: much lower overhead, far lower stress. Michael started his own business, and they made a Sabbathoriented life together for twelve years. Those were twelve years they might not have had at all, had they not imagined and chosen something different. They chose to stay on their side of the line, and so chose life, human life. Again, the recovering addict knows well that there is no victimless crime and that we will believe any story that tells us that we should want what we want and do what we want. We don’t want to break the Sabbath, to cross the line. We just don’t want the requirement getting in the way of … our freedom? 7
Tom Are, unpublished paper for the Moveable Feast: January 2015.
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI
Page 4 of 6
March 5, 2017
Humanity and Humility Or do we want instead to be fulfilled? Fully, deeply, meaningfully alive and laughing at the devil? Maybe we do want to be God… in that way. Again, I especially like Barbara Brown Taylor’s last line—that Jesus was content to be human. Content to be human. That’s what these texts want us to imagine. Somehow it leads to abundance, to being fully alive, which is cråitical when we know, as we reminded ourselves on Ash Wednesday, that we are dust. Jesus refuses to cross the line. One commentator understands the temptations as temptations to power. In them, Jesus affirms that he will not misuse his power for personal material gain, that he will not misuse his power to make himself safe and secure, that he will not misuse his power to amass clout and esteem.8 It is about power. Not all our sin is addiction. The temptation here is about power. When we talk about “playing God,” we are usually talking about exercising power over another person. In the Ten Commandments, what are murder, adultery, theft, and lying but all, in one way or another, the exercise of power over another person? What does it mean to refrain from that, to stay behind that line? It is paradoxical. The humans, Adam and Eve, are told not to eat from the one tree. However, God did not exercise power over them. God doesn’t force the humans to obey or coerce them to buy the story about the tree that God tells them. Human freedom is a given. And God doesn’t violate it. And that freedom certainly doesn’t go away when we choose not to cross the line. We choose freely. We choose to obey. Freedom can be choosing to love God and our neighbors as ourselves, choosing not to exert power over them, not to coerce them. Love and grace do not coerce. Do you see? Somehow this obedience to God and not seeking to be God—that is, our refusing coercive power, begins to sound divine itself. Not even God can force us to change our imaginations. Love and grace do not coerce us. There is no forcing us to imagine the world or ourselves in a particular way, but as my colleague, Gregory Love, put it: “…through the living, risen Jesus and the Holy Spirit, God engages [us] at the level of the human imagination.” 9 And so temptation is real. God never coerces our imagination, so we can go another way. We can choose to see the world other than how God has fashioned it. We can choose to see our world in such a way that it doesn’t really seem to need Sabbath rest, or fidelity to our vows, or telling the truth. But Jesus tells a different story of human existence. In choosing Jesus’s way, we choose life, we choose obedience and genuine freedom.
Robert A. Bryant, “Exegetical Perspective on Matthew 4:1–11,” in Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary: Year A, ed. David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, vol. 2 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 49. 8
9
Love, Love, Violence, and the Cross, 222.
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI
Page 5 of 6
March 5, 2017
Humanity and Humility Matthew tells us that “Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted,” but the Spirit did not then leave him alone. My colleague, Ted Wardlaw, concludes our journey today with this Good News: “Fouled-up men and fallen women that we are, nevertheless.… Led by the Spirit, we, too, are able to face our own tempting by recalling that our job is not to be God but to be obedient to God—by relying on that Spirit to keep us company on our side of the line.”10 Inside these lines are joy, contentment, and peace.
10
Ted Wardlaw, unpublished paper for the Moveable Feast, January 2017, Louisville, KY.
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI
Page 6 of 6
March 5, 2017
