I Lent

 

February 26, 2023

Gen. 2.15-17; 3.1-7; Matthew 4.1-11

 

+ One of my Lenten disciplines this year is to re-read the theologian who has probably influenced me more than any other.

 

Any of you who know me well have heard me talk about him  ad nauseum.

 

He is the great Scottish theologian and poet George MacDonald.

 

I first read MacDonald when I was in my mid-20s.

 

I happened to pick up a book about him at a Christian bookstore.

 

I was intrigued by the claim on the cover of the book that MacDonald was THE major influence in the life of C.S. Lewis.

 

So, I picked up the book, and I devoured it.

 

I then devoured almost everything MacDonald wrote.

 

MacDonald was really one of the first Christian theologians that I read who was unapolgetically a Christian universalist.

 

Meaning, of course, that he did not believe that anyone would suffer in hell for all eternity, that all would, in the end, be saved.

 

He actually was influenced in this belief by the great Anglican theologian F.D. Maurice (whose work I would later also devour).

 

Universalism is still such a controversial belief in the Church.

 

But in MacDonald’s day, and throughout history, Broad Church and Hugh Church Anglicans, as well as Anglo-Catholic Socialists and others embraced and expounded these beliefs.

 

None were quite as appealing as MacDonald.

 

MacDonald’s Universalism came from a reclaiming of the belief that God was truly our loving Parent.

 

And from that idea sprang all of MacDonald’s theology, including his Universalism.

 

God is our loving Parent.

 

And a loving Parent would never send a loved child off to a metaphysical hell for all eternity.

 

However, according to MacDonald, that does not mean that disobedient children, children who do bad things, get off scot-free.

 

There are consequences to our actions.

 

And worse yet, even good children sometimes have to suffer the effects of a comic evil that simply exists.

 

Bad things happen, MacDonald believed.

 

And we sometimes simply get caught in the path of bad things.

 

For us, those bad things are sometimes nameless things.

 

Things that we can’t really define.

 

Things that don’t seem to have names.

 

You know what I’m talking about.

 

When we’re dealing with emotions, when we’re dealing with heavy things in our lives, we don’t worry about labels and names of things.

 

But sometimes, when something is given a name, we find it’s easier to confront and deal with.

 

It’s easier to deal with depression, when we know it’s known as depression.

 

It’s easier to deal with anxiety, when we know it is known as anxiety.

 

It’s so much easier to fight our demons when we know the names of our demons.

 

But there are those things in life that don’t seem to have names.

 

An example is: the fact that we are growing old.

 

There are limitations that go along with growing older.

 

We find ourselves not being able to do things we did when we were younger.

 

There is nothing we can do about it.

 

It’s just a fact of life.

 

Or the fact that sometimes we get sick and it has nothing do to with anything we have done.

 

We can get treatment for our illness.

 

We can follow that treatment.

 

But we can’t rush the healing process.

 

It happens on its own.

 

So, for the moment, we simply must be sick.

 

Or, in the case of losing a loved one.

 

There’s no getting around this loss.

 

We can’t hide from this loss.

 

We can’t pretend we haven’t experienced this loss.

 

It’s just a reality in our lives.

 

And we must simply live with it—with all its pain, with all of its heartache, with all its frustrations.

 

In all of these things, we know they’re realities.

 

But we don’t have a name for all of these things.

 

But…there actually is.

 

One of my personal heroes (secondary to George MacDonald), someone I mention on a very regular basis, is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

 

Teilhard was a Roman Catholic Jesuit priest.

 

He was also a paleontologist.

 

In fact, he found the Peking Man, an important link in the Evolution of Humanity.

 

He was also a great philosopher.

 

And he coined a term to describe these unavoidable, somewhat unpleasant facts of our lives.

 

He called them “passive diminishments.”

 

According to Teilhard, these passive diminishments were simply the acceptance of suffering that we cannot change.

 

Robert Ellsberg describes Teilhard’s passive diminishments in this way:

 

Our spiritual character is formed as much by what we endure and what is taken from us as it is by our achievements, and our conscious choices.

So, in essence, is it accepting ill fortunes, whether disease, old age or accident, as part of our journey to holiness.

 

The great novelist Flannery O’Connor, who also was devoted to Teilhard and who suffered throughout most of her adult life with lupus, described passive diminishments as “those afflictions you can’t get rid of and have to bear.”

 

As we enter this Season of Lent, I think it’s a good thing to understand our passive diminishments and how we deal with them.

 

Do we accept these unavoidable moments of suffering in our lives?

 

Or do we fight them?

 

Or worse, do we try to avoid them?

 

The fact is passive diminishments are the boundaries of our lives.

 

They keep us within this human condition in which we live.

 

And I think acknowledging these diminishments in our lives draws us closer with Jesus.

 

 After all, no one knew more about passive diminishments than Jesus.

 

He too knew these limits in his very Body.

 

Being limited is just a reality for us.

 

But… it is not a time to despair.

 

Our limitations, especially when we place them alongside the limitations of  Christ endured, has more meaning than we can fully fathom at times.

 

Jesus shows us that in our limitations, we realize we can no longer feel separated from God, our truly loving Parent, by those limitations, those diminishments in our lives.

 

It is a moment in which we are, in fact, uniquely and wonderfully joined TO God in our shared limited existence.

 

And what we glimpse today in our scripture readings is, on one hand diminishment, and on the other hand, wholeness.

 

In our readings from the Hebrew Bible and from the Gospel, we get two stories with one common character.

 

In our reading from Genesis, we find Satan in the form of a serpent, tempting Adam and Eve in the Garden.

 

In our Gospel, we have Satan yet again doing what he does best—tempting.

 

But this time he is tempting Jesus.

 

What we have here is essentially the same story, retold.

 

We have the tempter.

 

We have the tempted.

 

We have the temptations.

 

But we have two very different results.

 

In fact, we have exactly opposite results.

 

But ultimately these stories tell us this:

 

No matter how diminished we are, no matter how much we are at the whim of our passive diminishments in this life, somehow God renews us in the end.

 

When it comes to God, what seems like a failure—the fall of Adam and Eve—eventually becomes the greatest success of all—the refusal of God’s chosen One, Jesus, to be tempted.

 

And whatever is broken, is somehow always fixed and restored.

 

Still, we must deal with this issue of temptation.

 

It is the hinge event in both of the stories we hear this morning from scripture.

 

Alexander Schmemann, the great Eastern Orthodox theologian, once said that there are two roots to all sin—pride and the flesh.

 

If we look at what Satan offers both Adam and Jesus in today’s readings, we see that all the temptations can find their root mostly in the sin of pride.

 

Adam and Eve, as they partake of the fruit, have forgotten about God and have placed themselves first.

 

The eating of that fruit is all about them.

 

They have placed themselves before God in their own existence.

 

And that’s what pride really is.

 

It is the putting of ourselves before God.

 

It is the misguided belief that everything is all about us.

 

The world revolves around us.

 

The universe exists to serve us.

 

And the only humility we have is a false one.

 

When one allows one’s self to think along those lines, the fall that comes after it is a painful one.

 

When Adam and Eve eat of the forbidden fruit, they are ashamed because they realize they are naked.

 

They realize they have nothing.

 

They realize that, by themselves and of themselves, they are nothing.

 

This realization is that it is not all about them, after all.

 

They have failed themselves and they have failed God in their pride.

 

But the amazing thing, if you notice, is that Adam and Eve still have not really learned their lesson.

 

They leave the Garden in shame, but there is still a certain level of pride there.

 

As they go, we don’t hear them wailing before God.

 

We don’t see them turning to God in sorrow for what they have done.

 

We don’t see them presenting themselves before God, broken and humbled, by what they have done.

 

They never ask God for forgiveness. Instead, they leave in shame, but they leave to continue on in their pride.

 

From this story, we see that Satan knows perfectly how to appeal to humans.

 

The doorway for Satan to enter into one’s life is through pride.

 

Of course, in scripture, we find that Satan’s downfall came through pride as well. Lucifer wanted to be like God.

 

And when he knew he couldn’t, he rebelled and fell.

 

We see him trying to use pride again in his temptation of Jesus in the wilderness.

 

When Satan tempts Jesus in the wilderness, he tries to appeal to Jesus’ pride.

 

He knows that Jesus knows he is exactly who is.

 

Satan knows that Jesus truly does have the power to reign and rule, that he has all the power in the world.

 

And Satan further knows that if he could harness that power for himself—for evil—then he will have that power as well.

 

Because Jesus was fully human, Satan knew that he could appeal to the pride all humans carry with them.

 

But Jesus, because he, in addition to being fully human, was also divine as well, refused to succumb to the sin of pride.

 

In fact, because Jesus, this divine Son of God, came to us, the ultimate sign of humility came among us.

 

So, these two stories speak in many ways to us, who are struggling in our own lives.

 

As we hear these stories, we no doubt find ourselves relating fully to Adam and Eve.

 

After all, like Adam and Eve, we find ourselves constantly tempted and constantly failing as they did.

 

And also like them, we find that when we fail, when we fall, we oftentimes don’t turn again to God, asking God’s forgiveness in our lives.

 

We almost never are able to be, like Jesus, able to resist the temptations of pride and sin, especially when we are in a vulnerable state.

 

Jesus, after forty days of fasting, was certainly in a vulnerable place to be tempted.

 

 As we all enter the forty days of fasting in this season of Lent, we too need to be on guard.

 

We too need to keep our eyes on God—who, in addition to being our God, is also our companion in this earthly adventure we are having.

 

Whatever failings Adam had were made right with Jesus. And, in the same way, whatever failings we make are ultimately made right in Jesus as well. Jesus has come among us to show us the right pathway. Jesus has come to us to lead us through our failings and our brokenness to a place in which we will succeed, in which we will be whole.

 

Jesus reminds us that, fail as we do, we are loved by God.

 

Always.

 

So, let us follow Jesus in the path of our lives, allowing him to lead us back to the Garden of Eden that Adam and Eve were forced to abandoned.

 

Because it is only when we have abandoned pride in our lives—when we have shed concern for ourselves, when we have denied ourselves and disciplined ourselves to the point in which we realize it is not all about us at all—only then will we discover that the temptations that come to us will have no effect on us.

 

Humility, which we should be cultivating and practicing during this season of Lent, should be what we are cultivating and practicing all the time in our lives.

 

Humility is the best safeguard against temptation.

 

Humility is the remedy to help us back on the road to piecing ourselves back together from our shattered brokenness.

 

So, as we move through the wasteland of Lent and throughout the rest of our lives, let us be firm and faithful in keeping the God of Jesus as the goal of our life.

 

Let us not let those temptations of pride rule in our life.

 

In these days of Lent, let us practice personal humility and spiritual fasting.

 

Let Jesus set the standard in our lives on our path toward God.

 

And let God raise us up from the places we have fallen in our journey.

 

And let us let God piece our brokenness back into a glorious wholeness.

 

Let us pray.

 

Holy God, loving Parent, you know our limitations. You know we are fallible human beings, bound by our passive diminishments; give us strength to meet what we cannot avoid and let the Light of your presence guild us through the difficulties of this life; we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.