Sunday Message: We Need Help

A few weeks ago, I had a humbling eye exam. I have had 20/20 vision for nearly forty-eight years, but evidently I don’t anymore, and I need prescription glasses. The doctor administering the exam said part of my problem is what is known as presbyopia. She didn’t even need to explain what that is: I know the word “presby” means elder in Greek. It’s part of getting older. Up until this point in my life, my eyes have been able to depend on themselves. Now, they need help.

Humbling, but it put me in the right spiritual posture for Lent. The call to repentance we are invited to hear in these weeks is not about listing all of the things we’ve done wrong to feel bad about them. It’s about asking where are we putting our faith? Are we relying on our own abilities and our own powers, or are we looking in every moment to the mighty power of the living God?

In today’s gospel lesson, Jesus is driven into the wilderness to be tested by the devil right after his baptism. The thing about the test is that the devil is not enticing Jesus to do bad things. All the temptations are to do good things: turn bread into food, demonstrate God’s power, claim all the kingdoms of the world for God. The problem lies not in what the devil wants Jesus to do, but in where is inviting Jesus to place his faith. He’s inviting him to feed himself, secure himself and his status, and impose his (good and right) will on the nations by worshipping the devil and boxing God out, rather than surrendering fully to God’s power. The temptation is for Jesus to use his own eyes, rather than receive the help of the glasses.

The root of human sin, the root of evil, oppression, and suffering in the world, is the way in which we place our faith in ourselves, rather than in God. In the middle of Dostoevsky’s great novel, The Brothers Karamazov, there is a short story called The Grand Inquisitor that focuses on the temptation of Jesus. It’s set during the height of the Spanish inquisition, and Jesus returns in disguise and begins performing miracles of healing in and around southern Spain. The church authorities arrest him, and plan to execute him. He is visited late one evening by the cardinal in charge of the inquisition, and in a thrilling back and forth, the inquisitor tells Jesus that he made a mistake when he refused the devil’s temptations in the wilderness. If he had turned stones into bread, dramatically thrown himself off the temple to demonstrate God’s power, and ruled over all the nations of the earth, then Jesus could have imposed God’s will on earth. People would have no choice but to believe in him after such a dramatic demonstration of power. They would be happy and the world would be at peace. So, the cardinal explains, that’s what the church is doing with the inquisition. It is trying to assert God’s will on earth by making itself an unquestionable power. The cardinal explains that Jesus had his chance, and that the church has no place or need for him going forward.

Human agency always turns into oppression when it puts itself in the position of God. In our own day, the gospel of Jesus Christ has been co-opted by a movement that shows us once again the grave dangers of misplaced faith. White Christian Nationalism, a movement critical to Donald Trump’s ascendancy, seeks to impose a vision of a racially narrow corruption of Christianity through state force. It’s the hook in the third temptation of the story: “all this will be yours.” It’s the same impulse that was behind the Manifest Destiny doctrine in the 19th century that led to the decimation of Indigenous peoples and the enslavement of Africans. It’s why so many political revolutions through history simply replace one oppressive regime with another. When it is all up to us, or when we believe we can do it all, there’s no longer any room for God to be God.

This tendency to place our faith in ourselves is the root of sin and suffering in the world. It’s the thread that connects oppressive political regimes through history, all the way down to the interpersonal conflict in our ordinary lives. Imposing our will, or our understanding of God’s will, rather than giving ourselves over in surrender to God’s power and love.

The church is never called to occupy the centers of power and privilege. The church is always called to form small communities of witness and resistance to the present darkness. We don’t build God’s kingdom, we point to it. God is the builder, we folow and point to what God is doing. The spiritual practice of our small communities of witness and resistance is always about surrendering our will, our desires, our preferences, our opinions, our efforts, the very institution of the church itself, over to the the will and power of God.

So the question we are invited to ask ourselves in these weeks of Lent is: where are you putting your faith? Do you think the world, and your own life, can be saved if you just try harder, do better, or get your way? Or, are you offering every moment, every breath, every encounter, over to God’s power, using your life to join up with the way God is already loving, healing, and liberating?

In these hard times, our work is to follow Jesus in resisting the temptation to impose our will on the world, and instead practice giving ourselves over to God: caring, loving, standing against injustice, always remembering that it is God, and God alone, whose mighty power will finally and fully flood our whole hard world with perfect, liberating love.

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