Tempted By the Political Game (The Politics of Jesus, Week 1)

Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16

Luke 4:1-13

Presidential candidates are storytellers.  They tell stories because stories work.  They capture our attention and can connect people into a shared project.  Policy discussions don’t do that.  Name calling doesn’t do that.  But stories do.

My family was an immigrant family . . . ok now we’re listening.  Our family had a child who was addicted to drugs . . . . now we’re listening.  I’m from a place where middle class people are struggling to find work . . . I’ve spoken with too many veterans who return from combat and are forgotten . . . Those are stories about what it means to be a leader.  They’re also stories about what it means to be American.

 

I don’t pretend to be a political expert.  But I do think that the tangled intersection between politics, faith, and ordinary life has a lot to do with the stories we tell.  Which political party you align with and which presidential candidates you’re drawn to are determined by the kinds of stories you tell about yourself and others.  You might focus on borders and fences, or health care for all, or illegal immigration, or economic inequality, or military budgets, or a higher minimum wage.  But all those issues will be determined by an underlying story you’re telling about what it feels like for you and others to be an American in 2016.  They are stories of fear, justice, confidence, revenge, weakness, strength, wealth, and generosity.

I have just begun reading Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates.  It is written in the form of a letter from a black father to his 15 year old son.  In one early scene the son stays up late to watch the news of the indictment of the officers who shot Michael Brown.  There was no indictment.  The son walks into his bedroom and shuts the door.  The father walks to the door, and hears the son crying on his bed.  He wasn’t crying for revenge.  It was his sadness for black people.  And what it feels like to be black in America.

You see, there were two, conflicting stories happening.  There is the story of the American Dream.  The story we learn in history class.  That our forebears were God’s missionaries.  That America is more divine than human.  That is what’s meant by phrases like “manifest destiny” and “city on a hill.”  That’s what’s meant when politicians who want our votes talk about “American exceptionalism” and call America “the greatest nation the world has ever known.”  But here is a black 15 year old boy who knows other things too.  He knows we claimed this land on a murderous rampage against those already here.  He knows we built this world-class economy on the backs of African slaves – his grandparents – for 250 years.  He knows that black bodies are still under assault.  And his dad has to let him live in the pain of these conflicting stories, stories that don’t seem to fit together.

Any elementary and basic reading of Luke’s gospel reveals the intense and lively political character of the text, of the questions Luke raises, of the political nature of the identity of Jesus Christ and the way of life he demands for his followers.  For example, Just before Luke tells us of Jesus’ baptism, he adds this ominous note: “But when John rebuked Herod the tetrarch because of his marriage to Herodias, his brother’s wife, and all the other evil things he had done, Herod added this to them all: He locked John up in prison” (3:19-20).   And if you’re not familiar with the story, John will soon lose his head.  I don’t know how else to put this – a story about long awaited Messiah who announces a new kingdom in the midst of an already existing Empire with the ability to imprison and murder – that’s a political story.

And yet American Christians have been reading this as a story about personal, private piety for quite some time.  Why is that?  Because we inhabit a narrowed down version of faith.  In our storytelling, religion and faith has shrunk into a kind of private, personal sphere.  In modern Europe, religion and religious identities were the source of war, violence, oppression, name-calling, and so on.  And so out of this fatigue, Europe and American decided life would be easier if faith and religion were contained within an individual sphere of personal conscience.  And so we will have to relearn how to read the gospel with an eye for the politics of Jesus. 

And so I invite you to hear the story of Jesus’ temptation not as a story about personal piety.  Rather, hear it as an invitation to sort out the kinds of choices he made in a world of politics, wealth, and power – and what that might mean for those of us who claim to follow him.  When Jesus was baptized, the voice from heaven declared him a “beloved Son,” and the Holy Spirit descended upon him.  And so you might assume that his course was set.  That everything was aligned and ready to go.  That he knew who he was, his loyalties were clear, and his mission was obvious.

But that’s not usually the way life feels for most of us.  We have a sense of who we are and who we want to be, and yet we have to struggle to stay true to that sense of ourselves.  We have to fight and negotiate the ambiguous and unexpected parts of life.  Just knowing where you want to live, or what kind of work you want to do, or who you want to share your life with – important as these are – none of these convictions make the way forward an easy one.

Jesus emerges from his baptism, hears himself called God’s beloved Son and experiences the descending Spirit alight upon him.  What happens next is that all of this is immediately called into question.  Neither his identity as God’s beloved child nor the presence of the Holy Spirit made his way forward clear.  Nothing would be easy.  He’d have to fight and struggle to be God’s beloved Son in a period of testing.  He’d have to experience the intense pull on his life from other directions.  He’d have to bypass a number of promising opportunities and short-cuts.

Every human life is an ongoing test.  The test concerns what you ultimately trust, what you hope and desire.  What kind of bet are you placing on your future, your neighbor’s future, and the future of the whole world?  That is the test.  No one’s life will be easy.  Everyone will make their way forward through periods of intense and often painful testing.

The way this story is told suggests that this is not simply an interesting tidbit about the man Jesus.  This is a story about an ongoing crisis or testing for all those who want to travel with Jesus.  Here we are on the first Sunday of Lent, a season specifically designed to be 40 days long (not counting Sundays).  It is a period of the year which invites us to imagine ourselves alongside Jesus, fasting and praying, wrestling with evil, resisting temptation, and trying to get a clearer focus on what it means to be called God’s beloved children and to live under the influence of the Holy Spirit. 

Thank goodness the church does not promote some kind of heroic faith, where we are expected to perform like Jesus.  No, we won’t be as loyal to God and to the good of others as he was.  We tend to cave, to give in, to yield, when the pain becomes too great or the costs too high.  But in our half-baked loyalty to God’s kingdom, we still belong to Jesus and learn from him.

Most good stories have cues, little signals to the perceptive reader.  And by paying attention to the cues you can get in on the story in a way you might otherwise miss.  So what are the cues in the story?  I want to point out just two.

The first clue is that the gospel writers tell us that the period of Jesus’ testing lasted for 40 days.  Why not 13, or 27, or 55?  Because this number is meant to call to our minds the 40 years Israel spent wandering in the desert, tested by God, often hungry and thirsty, frequently confused and angry.  They emerged from slavery in Egypt not into some idyllic and cozy life of pleasure.  They were freed into a life that was a prolonged period of trial and testing.  And during these times of testing, we all have to wrestle with whether we’re willing to take responsibility for the gracious work of God on our behalf, and what it might mean for who we become and what we work for.

The second clue is that Luke pictures Jesus responding to the devil’s three tests by quoting scripture three times.  All three scripture quotations come from Deuteronomy, which is the story of Israel’s testing in the desert.

These tests from the devil were forms of evil.  They were demonic possibilities.  They represent destructive ways of moving through life.  They are paths that are wide and welcoming at their entrances, but become snarled and menacing after you walk them for awhile.

We might imagine the first test as the opportunity to become a feeding program for the hungry masses.

We might imagine the second test as an opportunity to lurch for success and effectiveness by avoiding pain.

We might imagine the third test as an opportunity to treat God as a trick pony who is always automatically on our side.

The ability to face these tests and remain faithful was a defining feature of Jesus’ readiness for ministry.  Only by bracing himself against these tempting opportunities was he able to be God’s beloved Son in the midst of a messy world. 

And these tests remain real and vivid options for us.  And so we receive these gospel stories, and we continue to read them prayerfully together, asking what faithfulness to God looks like for us.

The primary test and temptation for us involves our identity as Americans, as participants in a particular kind of capitalist economy that is now global in scope.  So what is the test?  What’s at stake for us?  The question is whether our lives take their shape from a deep trust in God, or whether we have yielded our trust in other directions, to different kinds of stories and projects. 

Are my hopes and dreams for life rooted deep in the soil of God’s kingdom of forgiveness, sacrifice, sharing, mercy, and generosity?  Or are my hopes and dreams given shape primarily by the advertising industry and life in a consumer society where enough is never enough?

Does the way I’ve arranged my life – how I spend my time, energy, and money, and the people I identify with – does all of that reflect a singular and joyful embrace of Jesus’ way of life?  Or does it reflect a preoccupation with lesser and more trivial things – like status, power, wealth, security, ease, and pleasure.

The reason Jesus had to confront a variety of evil possibilities at the very beginning of his ministry was so that he could develop a pattern of resistance to prevailing expectations and a willingness to live in conflict with what passes as common sense. 

Now I don’t know how you hear a story about the devil appearing to Jesus and talking to him.  Is there such a figure as “the devil” or the “Satan”? The gospels seem to assume such things.  But whether these features of the story are to be taken literally, or whether they are literary ways of expressing important features of life as we experience it – it’s hard to say.

But here’s where there can be no doubt.  The story is about conflict, about friction.  The story is about the direction of Jesus’ life, and he will have to cling to that direction even though a thousand demonic claws grasp at him to try to pull him off course one way or another.  The season of Lent is a period of 40 days when we are invited to commit ourselves to practices of scripture reading and prayer, practices of gathered worship and perhaps other disciplines that strengthen our resolve in the face of the many demonic possibilities that open before us.  O Lord, deliver us from evil.  Amen.