Bible Text: Matthew 4:1-11 | Preacher: Pastor Dorry Newcomer | High expectations, high support.  I have appreciated this paradigm for parenting, and for life in the church, for many years.  With just a handful of scripture passages, we have established that, God asks us to do an awful lot!  Christianity is not for sissies!  But we have also established that God gives us the utmost in support: God’s very self, as well as each other!  There’s no such thing as a solitary Christian.  God’s expectations are that together, we will be the hands and feet of Christ, at work in the world.  Now, as a church, together we enter into the season of Lent, a time to dig deeper into our spirituality so we can further understand God’s expectations and hopes for us, as well as more fully experience the richness of God’s support.

But even as we collectively enter the season of Lent as a church, there’s something about Lent that, more than any of our other liturgical seasons, demands our individual attention.  Like Advent, it’s a season of preparation.  During Advent many people make an intentional effort to do personal devotions to prepare for Christ’s birth.  But because there are so many celebrations and fun traditions in December, rarely does Advent allow much time for silence and introspection.

Not so with Lent.  We set aside these forty days as a tithe, roughly 10% of the days of the year, to focus in on our personal relationship with God.  Interestingly, Sundays are not counted in the forty days of Lent.  The day of the week we gather for communal worship and fellowship, the day we set aside every week as a mini Easter—those “all together” days are not counted in Lent.  The season of Lent consists only of Mondays through Saturdays, the days most of us are pretty on our own spiritually.  Lent is a season and practice of the whole church.  But it is more importantly an endeavor of each individual soul.

The pattern for that, of course, comes from Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness.  After his baptism, the Spirit of the Lord immediately led Jesus away from his family and community of support to go off by himself.  Alone for forty days and forty nights.  I have a print at our house in the Poconos that says, “Happiness is a little peace and quiet.”  I like some solitude!  But there’s a big difference between a little peace and quiet—and solitary confinement.  There’s a big difference between solitude and isolation.  Can you imagine being alone for that length of time?

Of course, Jesus wasn’t completely alone.  He was led by the Spirit, and there’s nothing to suggest he wasn’t accompanied by the Spirit that whole time.  Jesus was not abandoned by God, dropped off like an unwanted puppy on the side of the highway.  He was led by God, he was accompanied by God.  But he was alone, as in, without the companionship of other people.  The only thing he had to keep him company was his own thoughts.

And in time, his own thoughts became the devil.  Now, it could be that an actual physical being in a red suit and carrying a pitchfork showed up in the wilderness with Jesus.  But whether a “devil” like that showed up or not, we have enough experience with our own attempts at solitude to know, the devil is inside our own heads!  The desert fathers, early Christian mystics, knew this better than anyone.  They devoted great stretches of their lives to living in silence and isolation in order to get closer to God.  But what they discovered was, in addition to getting closer to God, silence and isolation can get us closer to the devil, the devil within.

The desert fathers wrote of the eight logismoi, a Greek word that doesn’t have an easy English translation, but it describes the spiritual struggle with our own thoughts.  Jesus was “logos”, the Word made flesh.  If Jesus is the true word, logos, then logismoi are false words.  They are passions, temptations, false ideas we hear inside our heads that disrupt our peace.  They lure us away from our true selves and jerk us around with false teachings. Jesus is the true word; the logismoi are the devil.

The eight logismoi the desert fathers named are gluttony, lust, greed, anger, dejection, listlessness, vainglory, and pride.  In the wilderness, Jesus wrestled with at least three of these logismoi, or tempations.  His legitimate physical hunger drove him to consider using his powers to turn stones into bread.  His righteous desire to show the world that he is the Messiah drove him to consider vainglory, throwing himself off the temple so he could attract everyone’s attention.  His passion to heal the world drove him to greedily consider ruling it.  He went into the wilderness to prove he was worthy to be the Messiah.  But to be worthy, he would have to successfully overcome the voice inside his head that would encourage him to do destructive things, things that tempted him to abandon his true self in order to pursue something that seems better but is ultimately not good at all.

 

I used to think Lent was the worst time of the year.  It seemed downright cruel of the Spirit to lead Jesus into forty days of physical and emotional suffering.  And the church’s response to that seemed cruel as well.  All that talk about sin and repentance and putting ashes on our heads and giving up chocolate—for what?  To me it seemed like forty days devoted to making pretty good people feel pretty bad.  But every year in ministry, I have learned more, and God has shown me the beauty of this season.  It’s now my favorite time of the year. I see Lent as a tithe, a tenth of the year, time to focus in on my relationship with God!  What could be better than that?  Over the years, I’ve used Lent to learn how to meditate, go on retreats, visit other churches, and seek healing for old wounds.  And each year I have been better able to celebrate Easter because of it.

I guess you could say that, every year in ministry, my faith has been growing.  I’ve been challenged to live more fully into God’s expectations and hopes for me, while also experiencing more deeply God’s support for me.  The result of that has been a journey with some ups and downs, but by and large, the graph is going up and to the right.

But when I moved to Lima, things changed for me spiritually.  I found myself in the wilderness, and it wasn’t Lent.  It was July.  It was August.  It was September.  Then it was Christmas.  And then it was a new year, and spring, and then June, July, August.  And then it was Christmas again.  For about eighteen months, I felt in the wilderness here.

I wasn’t alone—I was in fact blessed with tremendous support from so many of you.  But for the first time in my life, I had an extended season where the graph wasn’t going up and to the right, where I didn’t feel like I was incrementally growing closer to God and more able to meet God’s expectations for me.  I felt confused and uncertain.  I am sure much of this has to do with what is happening in our denomination right now.  I am sure much of this has to do with what is happening in our culture right now.  We are not living in a time when the church’s biggest challenges are problems with known solutions that we just have to implement.  We are living in a time when our biggest challenges have no known solutions!  Our only choices are to abandon our faith—or to lean on and learn from God as we journey through the wilderness.

Thankfully, 2020 is the year that everything comes into focus, and since the New Year, I have felt the wilderness give way to much more solid ground.  But what I have learned during this time, and what I continue to wrestle with, is that the logismoi are real.  Several years ago I had a church member say to me, “The battle is in the mind, Pastor Dorry!”  I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, but now I think I know.  There is a force at work in the world that is anti-God.  That is anti-life.  That is anti-truth.  We might call that force evil.  We might say it’s the devil.  And it lives inside our own heads.  In the wilderness, our encounters with this force are heightened.  When it’s quiet, or when it’s chaotic, and we’re scared and we cannot solve things on our own, there’s something about the wilderness that allows us to hear and name this anti-life force.  The wilderness shows us that it is in our own thoughts that the anti-life force has the most power.

It is this anti-life force, the devil within’s voice, that told Jesus he needed bread, rather than God.  It is this anti-life force, the devil we all know, who said his best bet was to make a spectacle of himself, rather than be a servant.  It is this anti-life force, the devil who seduces and deceives, that told Jesus he was deserving of his own kingdom, rather than ushering in God’s kingdom.  This anti-life force is also the source of my temptations.  It’s the devil within that tells me that it’s all up to me, I need to work harder rather than empower others.  It’s a temptation, the voice that says I should be anxious about the future rather than trust God.  It’s the liar within that says I am not enough, or I’m too much, or if only I could please everyone, this church would be doing great.  I don’t know which of the logismoi you’d call my false thoughts—whether I am grappling with vainglory or gluttony or dejection or pride.  But what I can tell you is that all these false words are not coming from the voice of God.  They are coming from the thief who wants to steal our peace, joy and hope.

Lent is a time for us to see and respond to the fact that that force lives within us as individuals.  In our minds.  If we are going to live into God’s expectations for us, and love God with our whole hearts, souls, and minds, we will have to do exactly what Jesus did:  we will have to face our temptations, our false thoughts, and subject them to the true words of God.  That is the only way we can be faithful.  From godly thoughts flows godly action.

But thankfully, we do not have to face our temptations alone.  Two thousand years ago, Paul wrote, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.”  He was writing to the church as a whole, for he knew that the battle is universal.  It is, for each of us, in our individual minds.  But we have the power of the collective to fight this battle together.  During this season of Lent, I hope you will take time for individual reflection and introspection.  But I hope you will also make a concerted effort to stay connected to each other.  No one wins a battle this big alone.  It is through the gathered community that the power of Jesus is best mediated.

The poet Emily Dickinson called Jesus the “Tender Pioneer”.  I used to feel so badly that Jesus was led into the wilderness and was subjected to stress for such an extended period of time.  But now I find it a great source of comfort, because during my own wilderness time, I knew I was never alone.  Even on the days when I didn’t feel as close to God as I once did, imaging Jesus in the wilderness allowed me to see that a certain amount of spiritual discomfort is probably normal!  Picturing Jesus as our tender pioneer helped me have compassion for myself and refute the logismoi inside of me that says, you wouldn’t be struggling if you were doing everything right.  Clearly Jesus did everything right.  But clearly he also struggled.  I thank him for being our Tender Pioneer, who out of great compassion, left heaven to come to earth, and who, out of great compassion, left his regular earthly life to begin his journey to the cross.  It is with tenderness that Jesus asks us to follow him.

And that brings me back to our diagram on the front page of the bulletin.  I still really like this idea, that God has very high expectations for us, and God also offers us the highest support.  But I’d like to take that a step further and say, many people, in their faith journey, will find themselves in a time when this diagram no longer makes sense.  When they are in the wilderness, and they are unsure what the expectations are, or at least, how to live them out in their unique situation; and they can’t grab hold of the support like they once did.  I think it’s safe to say our whole denomination is in that place these days.  And to that I say, “Thank God for Lent!”  Lent is a season that reminds us that winter always gives way to spring.  Light always conquers the dark.  God always guides us through. Don’t let the devil inside your head tell you otherwise.  Amen.