Getting Out of the Maze

Getting Out of the Maze
A sermon by Rev. Aaron Fulp-Eickstaedt
At Immanuel Presbyterian Church, McLean VA
On January 15th, 2023

Matthew 4:1-11

Today’s text is from the 4th chapter of Matthew’s Gospel. Last week, we saw Jesus humbling himself, embracing a higher righteousness in receiving baptism from John. That text concluded with the spirit descending like a dove on Jesus as he stood there in the River Jordan and a voice from heaven saying, “This is my son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” There is something special about hearing that kind of affirmation from on high.

As we move now to the fourth chapter of Matthew, Jesus is led by the spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the Devil. In the gospel of Mark’s version of the story, it says that the Spirit immediately drove Jesus into the wilderness where he was tempted. Matthew’s a little different than that. It’s a gentler leading. But still, something happens right after Jesus’ baptism. He faces challenge.

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. He fasted for forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished. The tempter came and said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.’ But he answered, ‘It is written,
“One does not live by bread alone,
but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” ’
Then the devil took him to the holy city and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written,
“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.” ’
Jesus said to him, ‘Again it is written, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” ’
Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor; and he said to him, ‘All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Away with you, Satan! for it is written,
“Worship the Lord your God,
and serve only him.” ’
Then the devil left him, and suddenly angels came and waited on him.

The story of Jesus being tempted by the devil is almost guaranteed to capture church-goers’ attention. First off, there’s the sheer drama of it—the back and forth that begs to be acted out. Jesus, fresh off his baptism at the River Jordan, tired and hungry after 40 days of not eating, going toe to toe with the figure of a Tempter in the Judean wilderness. I mean, it’s awesome. If that doesn’t catch your attention, what will? Then there’s the whole notion of the existence of “The Devil” in the first place, which is a hook in itself and makes most people who find their way into mainline churches like ours lean forward in the pew a bit to listen for just exactly what the preacher is going to do with this. Right? There’s the popular culture’s depiction of a person trying to decide what to do in a given situation. You know the cartoons: on one shoulder, the little red devil with a pitchfork and horns whispering one thing in the person’s ear, and on the other, a tiny angel clad in white whispering the opposite.

While we may be too sophisticated to believe in the personification of evil like that, we are also students of our own experience enough to know that sometimes we encounter destructive impulses within ourselves that can take on a life of their own. The yearning to get even, the compulsion to cling to resentment, the anxiety that tells us we will never have or be enough, the depression and despair that keep us focused on worst case scenarios rather than believing in the possibility that even though our todays and tomorrows surely won’t be perfect, they could still contain some blessings, some love and maybe, just maybe, even some joy.

It’s so powerful, isn’t it? That destructive impulse that faces each of us, regardless of whether we ever face any serious anxiety or serious depression. By the way if you anxiety and depression, it’s okay to take medication.

There are things that are so powerful that grab us and it seems like they don’t want to let us go.

Ask any addict. Heck, consider the attitudes and behaviors that you yourself are inclined to give into that are not healthy for you or others. There are urges that seem to come from beyond that are destructive to our own and other’s well-being. We see evil writ large in genocides and acts of terror and wars of domination, but it comes, too, in the quiet whisper that says, not just, go ahead and take that drink, but go ahead and despise your neighbor. Go ahead and look down on the poor. Go ahead and forget your connection to the one’s Jesus called the least of these. Go ahead and forget that you, too, are beloved and are worthy of being treated that way.

You don’t have to believe in the existence of a literal devil to know that all of us face temptation in life—and that the temptations we face are often bigger than whether to sneak an extra piece of chocolate cake or to give the one finger salute to the person who cut us off in traffic.

My favorite story of temptation on that smaller scale was the year in my first parish where I decided I was going to give up sweets for Lent. And I’d forgotten when I made that pledge that I’d signed up to receive four boxes of Thin Mints. Those boxes of Thin Mints arrived on the first Sunday in Lent.

I’d done well from Ash Wednesday to the First Sunday in Lent, but when I got back to my office after worship, I was hungry. I thought, “Maybe I’ll just have one Thin Mint.” A box and a half later….

Of all of the temptations in life and faith, though, I think one of the most insidious is to look at our relationship with the Living Divine—and at the living of life itself—as if it were all just a series of transactions, rewards and punishments for behaviors. The very idea is actually sort of baked into a lot of religion and certain religious perspectives. You know, you do good, you get good. Keep your nose to the grindstone, say your prayers, believe in the existence of a higher power, be a reasonably kind person—and nothing too unfortunate will ever happen to you or people you love. The trouble with that viewpoint is that sooner or later it runs up against the truth that, as the Bible puts it, the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. It runs up against our experience that sometimes what we would deem to be bad things happen to people we would consider to be basically good. But nevertheless, the idea that life and faith are or should be transactional is a powerful drug.

Nadia Bolz-Weber, that tattooed former stand-up comic and Lutheran preacher, described that mindset as the notion “that God set life up to be like a moral reward and punishment system. Like we are all rats in some kind of cruel cosmic lab experiment—receiving shocks from God for going the wrong way and little reward pellets for going the right way in an existential maze.”

And here, finally, is where we get back to the story of Jesus being tempted by the devil in the wilderness. If you’ve ever wondered why this story is in the Bible in the first place—especially since nobody was there to witness or record it, aside from Jesus—I think there are at least a couple of reasons. One, the traditional view, which is embraced by the author of the book of Hebrews is that, in Jesus, “We do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with us in our weakness, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are.” Jesus was a fully human being, the author of Hebrews wants to say. But I’ve come to believe that the second, and even more important reason, this story is in the Gospels is to address and reject a certain if/then, transactional approach to life and faith.

Because what the Devil—this personification of evil, or that self and other destructive impulse in human beings and societies—does is present a tired and starving Jesus with a bunch of if/thens. If you are really a child of God, like you say you are, then prove it to me by making stones into bread. If you are really a child of God, like you say your are, then jump off the pinnacle of the temple and let God save you. If you will just reject God, and worship me, then I’ll give you all of the kingdoms of the world and all of that power. If, then. If, then—as if life were just one big Let’s Make a Deal.

The way Nadia Bolz-Weber puts it, after saying that she doesn’t think that God sets up an existential reward and punishment maze for us, is this:

Even if God doesn’t set up that kind of maze, I am pretty sure the devil does. Because sometimes I feel trapped in an invisible maze of the if-then propositions.

Like some voice is whispering through the air vents psst … If you have done something bad then you are something bad.
If you really belong to God, then why is your life so hard?
If you just buy this map, or say this prayer, or “Manifest” this desire, then you can get yourself free.

The trouble, Nadia says, is that it never works.

That if/then drug is powerful. To a certain degree the notion that if we do good we will get good helps society run. Heck, it’s how most of us wound up here. I was the valedictorian of my college and seminary classes. Because, you know, if you do good, you get good. You strive and strive and strive and maybe you wind up on top.

But that transactional approach to life and the divine has terrible side effects that become apparent when life really gets challenging. When we, as terribly human as we are, make huge mistakes, when we blunder in ways big and small, when we hurt those we love, when we, not to put too fine a point on it, sin—and all we can feel is shame. Or when life deals us hardship and loss that we never asked for or anticipated—and we begin to wonder if we belong to God after all, or if there’s a higher power at all, because life is no longer as easy as it was and the payoff for “being good” is no longer readily apparent. Or when we think if we just do this or that or the other, we hold our mouth in the right way, we can avoid hardship or that all of our prayers will be answered exactly like we want.

What Jesus does in today’s story is to show us how to resist the lure of the if/then—and he does it in at least three ways.

Number one, he remembers who he is. Which is not terribly hard because he’s just had this remarkable experience of baptism at the River Jordan. He’s heard the voice of God booming out you are my beloved child and you I am well pleased. He’s had that experience and even if we might get some sort of lesser version of that Sunday after Sunday, but it doesn’t happen in that kind of dramatic way right?

What Jesus does is he remembers who he is.

When I was a freshman in college, my mom started to get a little worried about me. She was worried about, you know, the kind of things I was experimenting with as a college freshman and she wondered about whether I had kind of gotten a little further from who I was meant to be than I needed to be.

So she sent me a care package. Mom used to send care packages to me all the time in college. And this particular care package, in addition to having the peanut butter cookies that I liked so much, contained a little book called The Little Penguin

The Little Penguin was all about this penguin at the zoo who decides, that maybe he needs to be something other than a penguin. So he goes around to the different exhibits and he tries to be a seal and he tries to be a lion and he he tries to be a giraffe (which is hard for a penguin to do) and then finally he realizes because his mom tells him so, “All you have to do little penguin is be a penguin.”

All you have to do is be a child of God and you will be beloved whether you always feel like it or not. By the way, everyone you meet, everyone you hear about, everyone you’ll never meet is a child of God, too. You’re not a child of God just when everything goes well, but you’re a child of God when everything goes off the rails, too.

Now the second thing Jesus does is that he responds rather than reacts to the situation he faces.. Now we don’t know how many beats
followed on what the devil says to Jesus and how Jesus responded, but I like the idea that maybe, just maybe, Jesus paused a little bit before he responded.

I’ve got a friend who says to practice the pause. In every situation pause, ponder, pray, and then proceed.

Jesus paused and then he responded. We don’t know how long the pause was, but I guarantee you, there was a pause.

The third thing that Jesus does is that he relies on the resources of the community. In that moment, he doesn’t have anyone else there with him. Even the angels don’t show up and minister to him until after the whole back and forth with the devil is over. But what he does have is the scroll of Deuteronomy, which he has no doubt come to know by studying it in the synagogue with the rest of the community of faith.

So the resources we have in the times that are inevitably going to be challenging are not just the people who are right there with us—and there are people who will be with us if we will just pick up the phone—but also the spiritual books we’ve read, and the passages we’ve studied and the spiritual practices in which we’ve engaged.

When we move beyond the if/then approach to God and life, we realize that living in faith is not about rewards and punishments, it’s about living in love and service. That’s what it’s about. And Jesus needed to go through what he went through to demonstrate that to other people.

In Jesus’ name. Amen.