Temptation: Luke 4:1-13

1st Sunday of Lent, Year C

(There is no church today, but here is the sermon I was going to preach.)

Like last year I decided this season to give up meat for Lent. I’d like to be a vegetarian but it doesn’t work too well with my family, so I figure tithing my diet – 40 days is a little more than 10% of the year – is a decent attempt. So Wednesday morning I got up and my mother-in-law put a plate of the most delicious smelling bacon in front of me and I ate it up. Then I remembered it was Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, and said, “Oops.”

That is how temptation seems to us – "oops. I didn’t mean to. It was right there in front of me. I couldn’t help it." Temptation seems like a trick to us, a game – we are trying to be “good” but someone or something got in our way. We are trying to follow this narrow path while temptation looms on every side.

Our text this morning is the story of Jesus in the desert facing three temptations. This story should be a help and inspiration to us, right? Except that Jesus seems so perfect, he can’t possibly understand the temptations and difficulties we face. He goes into the desert for awhile, the devil shows up one afternoon and tosses three temptation to him, Jesus responds quickly and accurately with the right scripture quote and “Bingo!” Temptation is all done. He leaves the desert and goes about his ministry untroubled.

Parker Palmer would suggest that it isn’t this way. We are reading his book, The Active Life in Sunday School. He writes,“If we are to experience the story of Jesus in the desert as anything other than a boringly predictable morality play, we must be open to the educative potentials of temptations, to the fact that temptations are not there to be avoided…If the temptation is put before you, and you flunk the test, as Adam and Eve did, it may not be a terminal failure at all. It may be the opening of a great and generative journey into truth.”

Being human means having choice. The story of the apple and serpent with Adam and Eve tries to describe what this means – that our relationship with God involves the possibility of us choosing God or not choosing God. If we can’t choose God, we can’t have a real relationship. If we have the option of not choosing God, we can get into trouble. And we do.

It seems we always have two choices – good and bad. We feel sometimes as if we have someone luring us into the bad choice, and God is sitting quietly watching us in judgment as we try to discover the correct option. If we take the wrong road we are lost forever, it seems.

But I think it’s more than Choice A and Choice B. It’s much more complex. At any given moment we have many, many choices. We choose one. Some doors are now open to us, some doors are now closed. But the way ahead is not closed. Not until we die. Maybe not even then. God is always with us, and God is luring us into the best possible next choice, and then the next. God is right with us, gently trying to suggest to us what choice will be most filled with life and possibility. When we get it right, we experience grace and new life. And a new vista of roads open up before us.

I spoke to someone recently about a colleague of mine who has been brought up on criminal charges. It’s a sad story, and although he hasn’t had a trial yet he’s been tried in the local newspaper. I said, “He’s ruined his life, his whole life.” I worry about him -- he must be seeing a very barren desert in front of him. The woman responded, “No, it is never ruined. There is always hope.”

She’s right. I should have remembered that. I’ve had moments – not like this colleague, although pretty dramatic nonetheless – where I thought I had made a choice that would be the end of me; I thought I had ruined my life. But I finally found the voice of God with me in that place, and I’ve been led, one choice after another, into a wonderful new life. Even when we seem most lost, God offers a way forward, through the desert, into life.

We are looking this Lent at issues of choice, life and temptation in our world – issues of whether we have ruined our lives or if there is hope. We are going to delve this season on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings into a discussion about Global climate change, global warming. Some are saying it is too late; some are saying there’s no problem; some are saying our choices from here on out are critical. However it plays out, we are not alone.

James Healey in Starting Point puts it well: "Whether we gaze with longing into the garden or with fear and trembling into the desert, of this we can be sure – God walked there first. And when we who have sinned and despoiled the garden are challenged now to face the desert, we do not face it alone. Jesus has gone there before us to struggle with every demon that has ever plagued a human heart. Face the desert we must if we would reach the garden, but Jesus has gone there before us."

Jesus has gone there before us, and walks with us on the way, whether we make good choices or not, whatever it is we are headed to. There is always hope.