Audio is available for this sermon, as well as text. It was preached for the First Sunday of Lent in February of 1997.
The gospel text is listed as Mark 1:12-13 This sermon follows the text for the First Sunday of Lent, Year B in the Revised Common Lectionary
There is an interesting reference to “The Screwtape Letters” by C.S. Lewis.
TO STRUGGLE OR TO MUDDLE 1LentB (2/16/97) Mk 1:12-13
Dear friends in Christ, grace & peace….
I repeat two sentences from our Gospel reading, which cover (in Mark) Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness: “And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.”
Today, with your permission, we continue a journey in the desert. It began last Wednesday with our confession of sin, our admission that we are from dust and to dust we shall return. Today we continue that journey with Jesus who was driven by the Spirit to a lonely deserted place and tempted by Satan. The desert might sound pretty inviting to us this cold winter morning, a place hot and dry. Many of our ‘snowbirds’ head there for a few weeks of escape the winter weather. But let’s be honest…the desert is more for visiting than a place to live. Someone said that if the devil owned both hell and Texas, he’d live in Texas and rent out hell. It isn’t the humidity that gets you, its the heat…lots of heat. Many parched areas of Texas are larger than other whole states….mile after mile of sand and dirt, as far as the eye can see. Snakes, scorpions, and other critters dwell in that hostile environment. If you venture into the desert unprepared, you can lose your life.
Into such a place Jesus was driven by the Spirit. The desert does have its rewards. There is a heightened sense of awareness in the clear, dry air. The heat seems to rise from the ground in ripples and push away the sky and the horizon. This is nature’s sauna, causing the sweat to cleanse your pores. Jesus was there for 40 days, and about those days Mark says only that he was ‘tempted by Satan; and was with the wild beasts, and the angels waited on him’.
To understand the nature of temptation today, we need to look at how Jesus handled temptation in the whole Gospel of Mark. I contend that Jesus did not falter in direct struggle with evil supernatural beings…he easily cast out demons when they confronted him. His toughest struggles were with people - - the authorities, with his friends, and with himself.
You see, I think that for most of us temptation is less a struggle and more of a muddle. We delude ourselves and each other into sin rather than confront it head on. This past week I reread the little book by C.S. Lewis called The Screwtape Letters. Screwtape is one of Satan’s helpers in hell, and he has taken a new recruit, his nephew Wormwood, under his arm. Wormwood is having some trouble winning converts from the ‘Enemy’ (Christianity). In particular, there is one man who toys with temptation, but does not easily submit. Screwtape tells his nephew not to worry so much….for when the man feels he is religious enough and good enough, he will muddle himself right into Satan’s grasp.
And that’s the way it is for us. Very few of us look up to heaven and shake our fists at God, vowing that we will commit ourselves to evil. No, our journey into sin is much more subtle. We deceive ourselves, and try to fool others. We say “Well, anyone would have done the same if he were in my situation”, or “Everyone does stuff like that in his sophomore year”. Our sin is so deep that we can’t recognize it anymore. I wear clothes from J.C. Penny made by workers in Jamaica who are treated more like slaves. I buy frozen vegetables from California picked by migrant workers who are mistreated. I eat chicken plucked and cleaned by underpaid Black women in North Carolina. And is it easy to remedy those things? …just changing brands may not guarantee that I am participating in anything less evil. It is so easy to muddle ourselves into sin rather than struggling with evil. That’s what this walk in the desert is about.
The 40 days in the desert are just a picture of what is to come… three times in Mark it tells us how the authorities came to ‘tempt’ Jesus, seeking a sign, pressing him concerning the difficult questions of divorce and taxes..trying to trip him into doing or saying something that would trip him up. Jesus first struggle was with the authorities.
And we struggle with these voices too. Did you read in the paper this last week that 2% of our population now lives in prison. This past year we spent $450 million to incarcerate people in Wisconsin prisons. How could this be? Well, we have become muddled into thinking that violence is the answer to our problems…and we can’t build prisons fast enough to house the people who have been muddled into thinking this is the way to live. Did any of them say, “I want to grow up to be a thief, or a murderer, or a rapist”? Very few. But they got the wrong message along the way…and we all are paying a tremendous price for this kind of thinking.
The second struggle Jesus had was with his friends. When he tells the disciples he must suffer and die, Peter shouts, ‘No, Lord!’ and Jesus has to say to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan!” We struggle also with our friends. The people who mean the most to us in this world often seek for us to take shortcuts, to avoid some of the most important things in life.
The third struggle of Jesus was with himself. In the Garden of Gethsemane Mark tells us that Jesus was ‘distressed and agitated’. In his humanity, he did not wish to suffer and die on the cross. We struggle with ourselves, too. We want what’s comfortable, what’s familiar, what’s easy. God calls us to do what’s right.
Well, our forty days in the desert of Lent will continue as we look at the passion story, as we worship around the theme of the “Crowns of Lent” on Wednesdays, and as we approach Holy Week once more. The most important thing to remember is that despite his struggle with the authorities, with his friends, and with his own humanity…Jesus wins a victory over evil. The closing verse of our text say it so well: “Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the Good News of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe the good news.”
May God’s kingdom come near to each of us as we repent and hear the good news, and may the peace of God which passes all understanding keep us one in Christ Jesus. Amen.
Scans of the original sermon are also available:
Here is a recording of the full service: