February 7, 2008
Compulsion
Lent 1A Mt 4.1-11
Anybody wrestling with vocation is probably influenced and even tempted at one time or another by the world’s three grand compulsions: relevance, control, and notice.
When we’re pondering what we’ll do with our life or when we’re wondering what on earth we’re already doing with our life, we want our life and work to mean something, to be relevant. We want to have at least enough control over it and our environment to keep “between the curbs.” And we want to be noticed, if even only for Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes.
The daemons presumed compulsions like these to be going on with Jesus, maybe even before he did. They seemed always to recognize him and what he was about before anyone else. Something like this may be true for us. The devil is, indeed, in these kinds of details. Those stages in one’s life preoccupied with confusion about vocation can be the neatest briar patches of details as to make the devil feel right at home. Like why else was the devil waiting out there in the sand dunes until Jesus was half starved to death before moving in on his puzzled anguish?
You want to be relevant? Satan said. Then turn these stones into bread. You want to be in charge? Here’s a whole empire of kingdoms and all the power and glory that goes with it. You want to be noticed? Then take a flying leap off the pinnacle of this lofty temple. Surely the angels won’t let anything happen to the Son of God, himself. No vocational headhunter could come up with better tests than these then or now for an individual or even for an institution.
Yes, even for an institution. Our vocation as the church is not exempt. Indeed, clear and strange parallels of temptation are going on in the church’s life at this very moment. We’re in a kind of wilderness, although I wonder whether it’s by choice, a self-imposed test. There’s a wait-for-us contingent claiming to be the church, organizing and hoping and threatening and spending a lot of money just to be the most relevant, the most noticed, and the most powerful, even if it means pulling down the rest of the whole community just to make it so.
This contingent’s name is legion. Most know who they are. They want it all — relevance, power, and most of all to be noticed by the major worldwide Anglican brass. It is astounding the deference paid to the primates and the Windsor Report and the self-styled and so-called instruments of unity which are proving to be anything but.
The devil expected to have a field day by using these temptations against Jesus. The church’s breakaway contingent is dangerously close to being caught in the same web. But the gospel as Jesus understood it and as it has been received never fails to confront every one of such pretentious priorities as it asks us not for relevance or power or fame, but for justice and peace and a fair concern and respect for all.
Of all the answers Jesus gave Satan and of all the answers we must give ourselves and those who would dismantle us, one stands above all. “You shall worship the Lord your God, and God only shall you serve.”
This major turning point in Jesus’s understanding of himself and his work became the furnace of his transformation to protect him from becoming a victim of society and from becoming entangled in the illusions of a false self. We are faced now, as well, with our own challenge to protect us from becoming a victim of society and from continuing to be entangled in the illusions of a false church.
In the face of these temptations, Jesus affirmed God as the only source and substance of his identity. In the face of these temptations, so must we affirm God as the only source and substance of ours.
There’s a lot of Jesus-talk among the dissidents. Like that of Scripture-quoting daemons, it can be devilishly manipulative, mesmerizing, and as downright wicked as it was out there in the desert. It is altogether too seductively tempting to wrap that mantle around oneself and claim to be speaking for God.
It would be so easy to think that these problems are simply and really just bad management got all out of hand. But I believe them to be something far more sinister where management just becomes something behind which to hide real purposes. It is absolutely no surprise to me that these arrogant and destructive forces in our Communion are circling for what they suppose will be the kill. Obviously, they are clearly casting about to make friends wherever they can find them.
What Jesus told the devil in the wilderness, he tells the church today. Someone has put it like this… Lent is an even more appropriate time than most to remind us that religion’s proud towers are for princes and tourists. That its intricate doctrines are for the angry and the arrogant. That its pretensions to power are just warmed-over Caesar outlined in fancy script.
The call of Lent is clearly that “You shall worship the Lord your God, and God only shall you serve.”
It has also been said that when the kingdoms of this world become the idols of our pride, they are not humanity’s glory, they are its mistake. Can you imagine Jesus vested in silks and sitting on a throne demanding that we do him homage? Rather might he be here at table with us erasing centuries of warfare, turning us to discover our common humanity, easing us out of our historic enigmas and into the shared language of love and justice and peace.
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