Temptations

Matthew 4: 1-17 Temptations 07/03/16

“And now we’re lost in the wilderness. Lost, crying in the wilderness. And if anyone’s watching it seems they couldn’t care less. We’re lost in the wilderness.” Pointed words sung by an actor portraying Cain in the 1998 musical Children of Eden. But pointed words that effect us here, today, in this moment as well. 

This week we are beginning a sermon series on some of the stories of our faith that are found in the gospel of Matthew. The gospel of Matthew was written to a primary Jewish audience, those who would have known the Hebrew scriptures inside and out. Those who could identify Jesus as the Messiah they had been waiting, longing, for. Up to this point in the gospel, Jesus has been born, visited by the wisemen from afar, has had to escape to Egypt in order to avoid being killed by King Herod, and has been baptized by his cousin, John the Baptist. 

We pick up on Jesus’s story today in an unlikely place - the wilderness. While today we think of the wilderness as a place to retreat to in order to find refreshment, the words from the song “Lost in the Wilderness” remind us that this idilic picture does not portray the wilderness of scripture - a deserted place, maybe not a desert, but a wasteland of sorts. 

As soon as Matthew’s hearers would have heard the word wilderness, they would have been taken back to their history, the roots of their faith and the family - that story of the Israelites wondering in the dessert for forty years before reaching the promised land. But while Israelites wondering was a test from God that they stumbled through, at best, this testing of Jesus would be different. This time of testing would prove to us - prove to Matthew’s audience - that Jesus is truly the Son of God who can conquer anything.

One after another Jesus faced the tempter who asked him to prove that he was the Son of God by going against God - by commanding stones to become bread, by throwing himself off of the highest point in order to have the angels of God catch him, and to worship the Devil in order to be given the Kingdoms of the world. But each time, Jesus pushed aside the temptation he was facing by bringing his focus back to the Word of God. Jesus conquered temptation by focusing on God alone. 

Friends, this scripture isn’t important just because it is the beginning of Jesus’s ministry. It is not important just because it helps prove Jesus’s Messiahship. It’s also important because the temptations that Jesus faced back then are the same ones we face everyday in one form or another. Jesus’s temptations foreshadow our temptations as well.

The reality is that we all give into temptation. We all sin. But it has become taboo, even in church, to talk about being tempted by Satan. We would like to pretend that we have the power to control ourselves. That no outside force could ever make us go astray, when this simply is not true. We are tempted every day to focus on our own interest and aims instead  of God. We are tempted to take the good gifts God has blessed us with and turn them into idols. We are tempted to survive by our own power alone. 

We are disciples and the Church universal face this  temptation of power today, only sometimes we don’t fare as well as Christ in overcoming it. We try to create our own version of the gospel story, by focusing solely on the message of Good Friday (the death of sin) without the glory of Easter (so that we can be raised to new life) or vise versa. Some disciples want the promise of the Kingdom of God without the cross, and others want just the cross and no hope in Earth and Heaven. Or we focus on the afterlife in Heaven without talking about the courageous life of faith Jesus modeled for us to live. When we cherry pick what we want the gospel to be about, we have given into the temptation of placing our own order, our own control, our own understanding, over God’s message.

So how do we confront the temptations we face? What wisdom can we glean from Matthew’s account of the temptation of Christ? For Christ such preparation came in knowing the scriptures. Satan quoted scriptures to him out of context, to try to make his own point, and Jesus replied with scriptures quoted in context, making God’s point. This temptation sequence came between Jesus baptism and ministry. It wasn’t just a blip in his life. Temptations never are. 

We also need to take account of our own lives and in order to honestly assess when we are most vulnerable to temptation. For most us, temptation comes on the strongest when we are in the wilderness of life. When we sense that we are all alone. When we are struggling - with family issues, work issues, marital issues, financial issues.  Here’s the truth folks, when we are in the wilderness of life, some of us can be prone to making bad choices. It’s one of the realities of the wilderness. But it’s also in the midst of the wilderness that we have opportunity after opportunity to ground ourselves in the love of Christ and claim our identity as children of God. 

Another song from the Children of Eden musical has God proclaiming to Adam and Eve, “where there is choice there is pain.” That’s most true when we don’t have our priorities straight. When we think that taking what seems like the easy path is the best choice, even when it leads us away from God or is contrary to God’s word. Let’s be honest for a moment - those type of choices don’t end well. Instead, we need to choose again and again to walk in the path that leads to light - the light of Jesus Christ. 

But Pastor Michelle, what type of Good News is that? What hope is to be found in the message that we all face temptations and have to make choices? The Good News, friends, that we do not walk through this life journey alone. The Good News that even in the wilderness, even in the chaos, even in the darkness, God is with us and God has blessed us with the Word to guide us, even when life is hard. 

Bad news and the wilderness surround us, even here today. And in the midst of that wilderness is temptation.The thing that we don’t want to talk about, because all too often we cave into our desires. The thing we don’t want to talk about because it brings back memories of shame. Or perhaps the thing that we don’t want to talk about because we really don’t want to change. But simply avoiding to talk about temptation does not make it go away. We will constantly be tempted. And how we respond to Satan testing us defines who we are as children of God who are called to minister to the world. So let us leave this place, strengthened by the Word of God, to face the wilderness of life and proclaim the Good News - by God’s strength and power - not our own - we will make it through. We will not be lost in the wilderness. Amen.