First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

Deuteronomy 26 and Luke 4

“A Moment of Clarity”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

February 25, 2007

Hiking along the Hoh River is a primeval experience. The Hoh River begins as the runoff from the blue glacier of Mt. Olympus. Winding through the dramatic mountains it can be furious and powerful cutting through enormous stones leaving cliffs in its wake; and yet it can be a lazy run spilling quietly into the sea stacked Washington Coast at La Push. The Hoh can be dramatic and then a few miles away it can be ponderous as it meanders through North America’s only rain forest.

To see all of this you start at the Ranger Station at sea level. To reach the peak you walk twenty miles and in so doing gain 10 thousand feet. The first ten miles are a kind of surreal interactive dinosaur movie. The enormous ferns and mushrooms, the mammoth cedar nurse logs that have monstrous trees growing from their slow decay, and the soft earth beneath that sounds hallow all tells you, this is how the world once was. Making progress in the accent up the mountain you literally go back in time. At sea level there is the summer season of flora; by the time you reach 7,000 ft, it is the late spring again.

This was all a glorious experience until I reached 9,000 ft. It was the first time in my life where I hit what athletes call the “wall.” And let me tell you I hit it hard. I hit it because I was not in good shape; I hit because I had the wrong gear for such an effort. Yet, I hit it mainly because I am mortal. Mortality was clearly in mind when my legs wouldn’t move. My good friend Kent saw this coming on and he hiked the remaining mile ahead of me, left his pack at our camp, and came back and got mine and walked beside me.

This told me the ascent was physically possible . . . for a goat. For a mere out of shape pastor it was a wall and it hurt. Kent talked me through it. I would make it a couple hundred yards and then it would hit again. No matter how much I told my legs to move, I received the same message, are you out of your mind? This question was part of the clarity that came to me on the side of a mountain chasing the origin of the Hoh River. There were others. The greatest was simple: there is a physical limit to life, you are going to die someday, just don’t let it be here and now.

There is a necessary contempt to be had for such moments. Like the people who find themselves dying of exposure on the side of Mt. Everest, there is something necessarily in us that says, what are doing at 20 thousand feet anyway? To find that moment of clarity doesn’t need to involve life flight and CPR. I saw this when working out at the Y not too long ago. Peter Schmitt came up to me as I was getting full value for my membership on one of the elliptical machines. “Slow down a bit,” he said. “Not all of my staff are fully checked out on the new defibrillator machines.”

I am not sure what the sense is, why it happens, or even if it should, but there is a sense of clarity in finding physical limits. I missed going to Mexico last year on account of the time with the people and our team, yet, if truth be told, I really missed the clarity which comes from the physical exhaustion. Ten committee meetings in a month can be exasperating, but not exhausting, not like pouring a concrete slab in a Mexican barrio with stray dogs running here and there. I missed the clarity Tijuana brings.

In the Christian tradition one figure stands out as the model of this. Julian of Norwich was fourteenth century English mystic. Like most mystics her writings are cryptic and filled with dramatic and even bizarre images. Yet what distinguishes Julian was that her dreams and visions, what she called “showings”, were part of a near death experience. It was at the very limit of life that she saw the love of God. And it took her years of reflection to fully confess what she saw, but her writings are truly profound and powerful.

She would be an uncomplicated voice if this were the whole story. Julian is though a bit of a complication. The complication comes in that she prayed for her illness. She asked God to take her down a long path of suffering, to the brink of death. This was what she asked God to give to her. And, hence the phrase, be careful what you wish for.

Something tells me Julian could be the patron saint of the folks who take helicopters to the top of mountains and then slide down an avalanche on a piece of fiberglass. There is something just as disturbing in the person who risks death to ride a snow board and the mystic who asks God for illness.

This is the hard part of our passage. Before we get to the temptations and what they mean, we need to pause and wonder why is it that Jesus would go without food for forty days in the desert alone? Why would you put yourself through such suffering? For clarity? For discipline? A rite of passage maybe?

The easy answer is to dismiss the whole scene as lore or legend. Biblical scholars in the last century have taken to this option when faced with passages like ours today. Any element of the fantastic, any story where time and space are set aside, is warrant for dismissal.

Most scholars struggle not with the fantastic here, but the purpose. Why describe these temptations at all? There is no record in the early church that this was a habit of Christians after Jesus, this wasn’t the rite of passage that led one to be a priest; although for some three years in seminary can feel like a kind of hazing ritual. If not an act to be imitated, then, perhaps, an achievement to be recognized. Yet, this is terribly inconsistent with the focus of all the evangelists on the cross. The cross was the test, the challenge, the goal, and the path Jesus invited his disciples to follow not the desert.

Others have seen these temptations as a kind of lens to see the life of Jesus. The temptations were faced in the desert, but they weren’t finished. These three would be the persistent challenges Jesus faced. He would face the temptation to be self-sufficient; he would face the challenge of glory; he would face the challenge of replacing his calling with his intentions. And it would have been tempting. It would have been easy to start fixing things, to chase the praise of others, to create big schemes and exert power and not humility.

I believe this is a part of the temptations. This is a true part of the story. It helps explain the life of Jesus. But it doesn’t explain the forty days or the three quotations from Deuteronomy. There were other things Jesus could have said and it doesn’t take forty days to get hungry enough to find the physical limit of life.

The story of the temptations can take on a whole different meaning and purpose though when we see the forty days is meant to symbolize the forty years in the desert. It was after forty years of nomadic life that the Israelites stood on the banks of the Jordan in the wilderness. It was at this moment, after forty fears, symbolized in the forty days of Jesus, that Moses came to the Israelites and spoke to them one last time. This is the book of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy is his farewell address for Moses would die east of the Jordan. Before his death he sat the Israelites down and gave them one last sermon. The theme of his message was that after you enter in, after you receive the blessing and land flowing with milk and honey, you will forget why you have the land, you will forget your God, and you will see your life as your own. Moses wasn’t always known for his powerful speeches of positive reinforcement. But he did speak the truth.

When Jesus fasts for forty days in the desert he encounters the physical limits of life and there he faces the markers of spiritual death that led to the demise of Israel. And where they failed he succeeds. This would have been a nice story to include in the gospels if the writers were hoping to make Jesus into a hero. Yet the point of the Gospels is not to make Jesus something, but to make you something, to make us something, to make us the body of Christ.

The temptations when they come after forty days and are faced with Deuteronomy are not (in the end) about Jesus, they are about us, about the church. Just as Israel faced these so do we. And thus the question becomes: How are we doing with these? In our reading from Deuteronomy we see our temptations in their positive form as instructions. Moses says, give a first fruit, give a tithe, come to the tent of meeting and worship, and remember who you are, how it is you came here.

It would be nice if the temptations were something Jesus went through as a personal challenge, a kind of savior rite of passage. It is intriguing to think that these three temptations were the shape of his persistent challenge as he went about his ministry. Yet the real message here is: what do these mean for the church? How are we facing the real temptations of a spiritual life? How are we doing with tithing; do we give a first fruit or a remnant of wealth? How are we doing with worship; do we show up on Sunday, or do we show up when we can? And what about our life? Do we see our life as God’s or as our own? Do we remember who we are that it is no longer we who live but Christ who lives in us?

Tithing is the easiest to answer. Do we as a church practice tithing? Well, that can be answered with math. Take 10% of the average income of a Jefferson County resident and multiply it by 160. You will find that we are a little more than half way to a tithe as a congregation. Half way that is if we are all making less than 40k a year. The test Jesus faced in the desert, which was failed by the Israelites, was that they began to bring God what was left over, what they thought they could spare, not the first fruit. The question of the passage is have we fallen to this temptation?

The second temptation is a bit more nebulous. It too can be a question of math. Do we worship God as we ought? Well, if we do the math we will find ourselves in worship two out of every four Sundays. And if we think of worship as also to include personal devotions and prayer or even just an attention to spiritual health, perhaps we are doing better. But if that sounds like a kind of excuse, a kind of rationalization for neglecting corporate worship, you’re right.

The last temptation is hard to determine. Math is not the best marker of seeing your life as not your own or remembering you are the body of Christ and living as such. I guess we could take the enormous body of polling data and see if expressions of faith match our habits of daily life. But that would just be terribly, terribly depressing.

The real temptation is to dismiss the three challenges Jesus faced in the desert as a moment of personal courage. Jesus faced the temptations in the desert and he knew his bible to boot, way to go Jesus. It’s tempting to say this is just lore and legend. Yet, I can’t help but feel the weight of challenge here. Why is it that these three create such a moment of clarity for the life of the church?

Do we tithe . . . ? No. Do we worship as we ought as the people gathered before God on Sunday morning . . . ? We . . . , no. Do we see our lives as not our own and press God in prayer to show us more and more how we are to live . . . ? No. We spend more time on-line and channel surfing than in prayer. We seek amusement more than purpose.

Jesus passed the tests. Yet, the Gospels were not meant to be a record of his accomplishments; the Gospels are the witness of what God wants to accomplish in us. Have we passed the tests? No. But we can. We can tithe, we can worship, we can see ourselves as the body of Christ, as no longer we who live, but Christ who lives in us. That we are asking the questions from the vantage of failure means God is still working, still calling. We can pass the test. We can be the body of Christ in tithing, in worship, in all humility. We can. Amen.