A Sermon by the Reverend Ellen Rowse Spero
First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church,
Chelmsford, Massachusetts
February 6, 2005
Ancient Reading: Matt. 4:1-11
Modern Reading: From A Hidden Wholeness by Parker Palmer
Copyright 2005, Ellen Rowse Spero. All rights reserved.
In one of my seminary classes, I was assigned to write an interpretive paper on Jesus’ temptation in the desert. I was surprised at how immersed I became in the story. How deeply it resonated with where my own soul was at the time. How, even years later, I find it still serves me as a way of naming part of the struggle of being human. Often, as this story is read through modern eyes, there is no tension or uncertainty about how it will end. Of course Jesus is going to beat the devil. Of course, he won’t fail. It is read unquestioningly as a demonstration of Jesus’ sure and triumphant victory over evil. We don’t need to believe it to recognize that. But a story isn’t much of a story unless there is conflict or tension or doubt that speaks meaningfully to the listeners. For the ancient community who heard this story, the potential for Jesus’ failure was real. The Gospel writer we call Matthew was a member of the Jewish community that followed Jesus. He and his community were still waiting for peace, for liberation, for wholeness, for God’s reign on the earth. They believed that Jesus was the messiah, an anointed one chosen by God, the fulfillment of the promises of prophets from Elijah to Isaiah. Forty days in the desert was part of the preparatory boot camp for chosenhood, if you will. Remember the Israelites and Moses wandering around there for forty years? After all, it is God’s Spirit that leads Jesus, Moses-like, into the desert. Supposed messiahs had come and gone before. Matthew’s community was asking the question: how would this be different?
The idea that failure was possible opened up the story to me in new ways. It allowed me to place myself in it. For it struck me that the devil does not tempt Jesus with doing evil. Rather, he tempts him with doing good. For the first two trials, he and Jesus engage in a game of proof-texting, using a single quote from the Bible to support a position. Satan quotes one piece to convince Jesus to do something while Jesus refuses by quoting another. In the final test, Satan is more blatant, but he is not offering Jesus something he cannot already have. Certainly Jesus’ followers believed it would do tremendous good if he were to rule of the world. But Jesus recognizes something important about all of Satan’s tests: they are wrong not because they would do evil but because they would do good out of context: either for the wrong reason or at the wrong time or in the wrong way. Satan tempts Jesus to show that he is the Son of God, that he is special, and that he is worthy of glory and honor. But Jesus realizes the power of his ministry lies not in playing God but in being human, in power-with, not power over the people he serves. The goal of his ministry was to reveal the love of God for all, even to those who believed themselves unworthy of any possible redemption or those whom the society had condemned as such. The goal of his ministry was to make that love accessible to human touch. His acts of feeding and healing were not the ends, but a means for these goals. They would come at a tremendous cost, however. And that is why Satan’s temptations present a real struggle for Jesus. They would save him a lot of time, and ultimately, his life. But then, he would only have been a magician-king, not a radical prophet.
This story haunts me in particular is because it speaks a revealing truth about ministry and about being human. We face all kinds of temptations. Some are harmless indulgences and even good for us, if they pull us out of our seriousness to have some fun. But others are more troubling. Some pull us away from healthy relationships and living toward ones that are destructive and demeaning for ourselves and those we love. Other temptations are self-involved and self-serving: the worship of money, power, youth, fame: anything that makes us the center of the universe. But the temptation to try too hard, to do the right thing for the wrong reason or at the wrong time or in the wrong way, is harder to discern and more slyly seductive. I have become more aware of it over the years, not only as a minister, but as a mother, as a wife, a friend, and as a human being. I have fallen into the trap of believing I can play God. Not in a grandiose, look-at-me, I'm all knowing, all powerful kind of way. Rather, I have believed that I can actually fix people’s lives for them, that I can fill people’s wants and needs, that I need to show that I am worthy of my call, of praise, of love. That I must personally ensure the success of every church program and the happiness of every church member. Likewise for my spouse and children. In other words, to be a good mom, a good wife, a good friend, a good minister, a good person, I must be perfect. And, I must do it alone, because it is my responsibility, and of course, I don’t want to burden anyone, and it is easier just to do it myself anyway. I believe I should be able to be perfect, or almost perfect anyway. The danger here is not only for myself in taking on more than I can handle. It is a refusal also to acknowledge the gifts and abilities of those around me. I am engaging in power-over instead of power with those whom I love and minister to.
On more than one occasion I have failed to notice how deeply and successfully I have succumbed to the temptation to try too hard, to pursue perfection. When I encountered this story in seminary, I was just discovering that I was metaphorically deep in the desert. I am not sure how I got there, but I was suddenly and painfully aware of how I had separated myself from those I loved and how I had hurt them, how I had failed so awfully at being the person I imagine I should be. It shattered me, for that had never been my intention. I had tried too hard to play God: to handle difficult personal problems all by myself and to try and fix the life of another. In doing so, I caused tremendous pain for those I love most. I was trying to do good but I had lost sight of the context and done harm instead. I had lost touch with my soul and needed to find a way to return to it.
In order to pull myself out of the dust of the desert, I had to turn away from my mistakes and turn toward love: loving and being loved in spite of my failings and because of them. I could not erase the hurt I had caused. But I have, in the words of Palmer, embraced and integrated my moments of brokenness into the larger wholeness of who I am. I am still capable of love and being loved, probably more so now that I recognize it is as a genuine gift and not a reward for being the person I imagine everyone wants and needs me to be. Or as the counselor I worked with instructed: "Remove the ’should’ves’ from your thinking."
That was awhile ago. So as this story entered back into my thoughts, I’ve tried to pay attention to where it pops up. Every week, I spend a lot of time with this congregation, in the larger gathering of worship and in the smaller and less formal gatherings of committee meetings and conversations. I am constantly learning about what matters to you, what hopes and dreams you hold for yourself, for your loved ones, for this congregation, for the world. About what you love most and how you trust and hope this place can help you give voice and shape to that. I bear witness also to the harder moments of living: loss, pain, conflict, confusion, and doubt. In those moments, I often hear concern or frustration at falling short of who we think we should be: as parents, as partners, as children, in our work, as church members, as neighbors, as citizens of the world.
At the heart of the temptation to try too hard is confusing perfection with wholeness. Religious traditions and the secular culture emphasize achieving perfection, whether it is in how we live our lives, how we do in school or at work, how we balance family and career, how we maintain our youth and our bodies. But as Parker Palmer notes, perhaps what we are really seeking is wholeness. Wholeness is being aware and in touch with the core of our being, what Buddhism calls the original nature or big self, what Quakers call the inner light or inner teacher, what Hasidic Jews call the divine spark, what Humanists call identity or integrity, what is popularly called the soul (rephrase of Palmer, p. 33). According to Palmer, the soul "…wants to keep us rooted in the ground of our being…to keep us connected to the community in which we find life…to tell us the truth about ourselves, our world, and the relation between the two, whether or not the truth is easy or hard to hear…(and) to give us life and wants us to pass that gift along, to become life-givers in a world that deals too much with death" (pp. 33-34).
So, what I want to emphasize is that we are not striving for perfection here: either as individuals, or in our families or our work or in our church community. The goal is not to create a community that is free from the conflicts, failures, hurts, doubts, and struggles inherent in human living. Rather it is create one that engages these moments in an honest and patient and reflective way. That is part of what it means to walk together in right relationship. Our work together as a community of faith is not to show that we are so special that we can turn stone into bread or be caught by angels as we jump off the steeple. It is not to show how perfect we are or that that we have power over those things that tempt us away from perfection. Nor is it to be recognized as spectacularly better and more enlightened than anyone else. It is not to make every person here happy. It is not even to fix the world. Our work together is to create and sustain a community engaged in ministry: serving in power with one another and our community in the ways of compassion and justice, making the Spirit of Truth accessible to our human living, the Spirit of Love accessible to our human touch. It means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life and helping one another through the desert times. It is all we do that connects us to the core of our being, to our inner light, our hidden wholeness. As Annie Dillard observed: "Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? Or who shall stand in her holy place? There is no one but us. There is no one to send nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers (and mothers) are all dead--as if innocence had ever been--and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves, unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and involved. But there is no one but us. There never has been." Or perhaps, as Rumi noted, "The soul is here for its own joy."
Resources:
Parker Palmer. A Hidden Wholeness. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004.