Last week we started looking at an episode in the life of Jesus, one of many episodes that sound really strange it you stop and look at what is really happening. Jesus presented himself to John to be baptized, as his public statement that he was standing up and accepting God’s calling on his life to be Israel’s Messiah. Something wonderful happened. The Holy Spirit came down on him in some visible form. He heard the voice of God himself, saying, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
So what’s next? We modern people might expect that the Spirit would lead him to something glorious or something practical, but instead the Spirit led him into the wilderness where he was tempted by the devil. What did he do that for? There were so many things to do. But the first thing was for him to face three temptations. And he would be useless for God, even dangerous, until he had these settled.
And this isn’t just a history lesson of what Jesus did. He was our representative in this. We all face the same temptations. He showed us what to do. And if we don’t learn the lessons that Jesus demonstrated for us, our usefulness for God will be greatly hindered. As we all know, the history of the Christian church includes some horrible misadventures. And we could even do great damage to God’s kingdom. And if we learn these three lessons we will be well equipped for most any temptation we face in life. So today we’re going to look at the first of the three temptations.
Please stand for the reading of God’s word, Luke 4:1-13. I encourage you to turn in your pew Bible to page 61 so that you can see it for yourself.
1 Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, 2 where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. 3 The devil said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread." 4 Jesus answered him, "It is written, 'One does not live by bread alone.'"
5 Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. 6 And the devil said to him, "To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. 7 If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours." 8 Jesus answered him, "It is written, 'Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.'"
9 Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, 10 for it is written, 'He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,' 11 and 'On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.'" 12 Jesus answered him, "It is said, 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'" 13 When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.
Is it humanly possible to fast for 40 days, or was this a miracle? In 1981, an Irish Republican Armey, Bobby Sands, went on a hunger strike in a British prison and fasted to the death to draw world attention to his cause. He died on the 65th day. So a 40 day fast is possible. But you pay a price for it. Who here has done the 40 hour famine with World Vision? It’s difficult, but doable.
But why in the world would you do such a thing as fasting for 40 days?
Is the Bible teaching us that it is wrong to enjoy our food? Not at all. The Bible describes our God as a loving father who created a world that was thoroughly good and put us on it as his children to enjoy its blessings. The creation story in Genesis is very clear that God made sure we had good food to eat.
But even in God’s creation there is nothing so good that it can’t be taken to an extreme and abused. Chocolate is a wonderful. But we’ve probably all gotten into trouble with it.
And this is a broader issue than just food. Sleep and rest are blessings from God. But sometimes people can let their desires to take their comfort get out of control so that all they do is loaf around and their life is wasted.
Our sexuality is a wonderful gift from God, a gift for married couples to share in the covenant of marriage. But it’s so good that we have a plague of people seeking sex without love and without commitment and who turn it into something ugly.
The Apostle Paul had a word for this tendency for us to allow God’s good gifts to be distorted in our lives. He called that ‘the flesh,’ that force in us, part of our sinful nature, that distracts us from obeying God, that pulls our lives out of balance, that drives us into laziness and self-indulgence, and is at the root of much of what is wrong in the world today.
To put that into more modern, scientific terms, I’ve been reading a book by a psychologist, Dr. David Walsh, called “No: Why Kids of all ages need to hear it and ways Parents Can Say It.”
He describes our brains as an electrical system, with impulses firing back and forth, generating enough current to light a twenty-five watt light bulb. And this electrical system is made of brain cells, called neurons, which each have long cables flowing out of them. A human baby is born with about 100 billion neurons. And each one of those 100 billion neurons has about 10,000 branches.
When a baby is born, the brain has incredible potential to make connections and store information, but it hasn’t figured out yet how to coordinate it all.
Have you ever seen a newborn with a quizzical look on its face, struggling to focus, struggling to make sense out of what it is seeing? Those neurons are sending thousands of messages back to the brain, dots of color like the dots that make up your TV screen. And the brain is buzzing away trying to figure out what they mean, to make the connections. And it won’t be very long at all before the moment comes when the baby learns to recognize its mother’s face, and the smiles come. And it won’t be long before it learns to recognize its mother’s voice, too, and pick it out from all the random noises of this world.
And as he lies in his basket his arms and legs will just be churning and churning as the brain is making the connections that will enable it to coordinate those arms and legs to run and play some day.
I took piano lessons many, many years ago. I remember looking at the sheet music and being almost overwhelmed to figure out how it worked to read the notes for “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and move my fingers to hit the right keys at the right time. But in time it became pretty easy for me to read the notes, not only the different pitches, but the changes in rhythm, to even be able to see whole chords as one unit and play them with both my left hand and right hand together. I could never do what, our organist, does every week. But I learned some. And it took hours and hours of practice, to read the music, to train my fingers to move to the right place at the right time. And I didn’t know it at the time, but my brain was making those connections, and every time I played a certain note a neuron was firing in my brain and making the connections stronger and stronger, so that, as I practiced, my fingers would start to work by habit without me consciously thinking about them at all.
I took some years off and it became harder again. But if I sit down and work at it, it starts coming back again. The connections aren’t lost.
My mother used to tell me that I could do anything I set my mind to. And that’s not far off. These brains that God gave us are amazingly adaptable. American babies can learn to speak in English. Chinese babies with the same brains learn to think in Chinese. With repetition, we can memorize those arithmetic tables, we can learn to keep track of the traffic around us as we drive our cars, controlling the direction and the speed, drinking our coffee and talking with our friends, hardly thinking about the driving at all. But remember the first time you drove and it took all your energy to fit it together.
Please hear in this that there is hope for change. We can grow. We can be different. And, of course, this works best when we are young, but there is always hope. My father started learning to use computers in his 60s and learned how to do all sorts of useful things.
There are some impulses that are hard wired into our brains. If there is danger, our adrenaline will start pumping automatically to prepare us to fight or flee. We are hard wired to want to eat regularly and we have a strong attraction to good food. We all have a strong attraction to enjoy the good things of life. Those are just hard wired into us. That’s the way God designed us to be.
And to crown it all off, to separate us from the animals that are just driven by those instincts, we have the wonderful gift of a free will. We can step back and look at our impulses and decide whether we will listen to them or not. We can learn not to throw a punch if we feel someone has threatened our reputation. We can learn to push away from the table after we have eaten enough. We can learn to get up and go to work early in the morning or push ourselves to go out and shovel the snow even when we don’t feel like it.
Dr. Welsh didn’t have a word for this, but I’ll gladly call it our human spirit. And when our spirits keep all these impulses working together in harmony and balance, we humans can accomplish wonderful things.
But it’s a battle to maintain that balance. The path to that very soft chair with the remote beside it, about the laziest, easiest way to spend an evening, can get very deeply engrained into our lives. As can the path to the ice cream cabinet at the grocery store, the habit of firing back hurtful words when we don’t get our way, the temptation to impose your way on other people, the habit of planning our entire day with things for ourselves, ignoring what plans that God may have for us.
And so in today’s responsive reading we read the words of the Apostle Paul, describing this battle between the flesh and the spirit. And in too many people the flesh has become so powerful that the spirit is almost destroyed.
The more we do those less pleasant but necessary things, the easier they get. And every time we choose to take the easy way out, to sleep in later than we should, to over eat, to lose our temper with someone, the easier that gets, too. Every day the choices we make are molding our brains. 'Sow a thought, reap an action. Sow an action, reap a habit. Sow a habit, reap a character. Sow a character, reap a destiny.' We are choosing every day who we will be.
Jesus chose to work the impulses deeply into his brain that he would say yes to whatever God asked him to do, even if he was desperately hungry, even if it was uncomfortable, even if it was scary. He did it over 40 intense days in the wilderness.
And if we don’t learn the same lesson, to live on purpose, to be free to follow when God calls, our lives may well be wasted in going from one indulgence to another, pushed around by impulses that drain our time and energy.
Fasting is one of the best ways to help our brains learn to say ‘no,’ or, to use Paul’s terminology, to empower the spirit.
This probably sounds strange, but do you think that 21st century Americans can learn to practice spiritual disciplines, can learn to focus their lives for availability for God? Yes, we can! For those of us who are up there in years, can you still learn new ways? Can you teach an old dog new tricks? Well, some times of learning are slower, but our seniors can learn new things. My father demonstrated that to me.
But there are many other spiritual disciplines, besides fasting, that can help us strengthen our spirits and gain control over our lives. In the early days of the Methodist movement they would spend most of their time working on learning to use spiritual disciplines and then encouraging each other to apply what they had learned.
John Wesley wrote up a document called ‘The Rules of the United Societies’ that describes 3 categories of disciplines that the Methodists were constantly working on together. And I encourage you to think carefully about taking a spiritual discipline this year for Lent from one of these categories.
First of all, to do no harm. A spiritual discipline in this category may be to stop gossiping about people, to stop some practice that is ecologically irresponsible, to get part of your daily diet under control, to cut back on the hours you spend watching TV.
Second, to do all the good you can. Spiritual disciplines here might be to visit someone who needs a friend, write encouraging notes to people, contribute to a charity, pick up trash along a street, work to speak an encouragement to one person a day. Pray every day for our missionary, Dr. Elma Docson. Write her an encouraging note. There are lots of possibilities.
And the third category was to feed your soul. That may mean a special effort to attend church every Sunday in Lent, to read your Bible every day, to spend time listening for God each day, sharing his heart for the world.
We are Methodists. That means we have accepted the calling to be methodical about growing in usefulness to God. It’s a calling we have too often ignored. It’s a calling that gives us hope for new life.
I invite you to take a post-it note from your bulletin, or one on the pads in the narthex, write a spiritual discipline that you think would be a good idea for Lent. And if it’s a bit of a challenge, that doesn’t hurt. Dare to dream that God can do big things in you. Post your post-it in the narthex and we’ll add to them up to Ash Wednesday. Then, on the first Sunday of Lent, we’ll encourage you to make your commitment to grow in grace this year. AMEN
