Scripture: Mark 1:35-40
Jesus, the scripture says, before he did anything else in the way of public ministry, went off into the wilderness and spent forty days in conversation with God, in conversation with Satan, and in conversation with himself, the point of the story being, at least one point being, presumably, that there were some issues he had to work through regarding who he was and what he was to be all about before he embarked on that ministry. Maybe he just had to get clear about things so he could stay focused. He was human after all and subject to distractions and temptations.
That story about Jesus in the wilderness traditionally begins the Lenten season. For those who follow the lectionary readings, it is the gospel reading for the first Sunday in Lent. For people who observe Lent at all, the story frames the season. The forty days of Lent are meant to remind us of Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness, and I chose to have the story read as we observed Ash Wednesday a few days ago. And I have chosen to let that story frame my preaching not just for today but for the several weeks ahead leading up to Easter.
Specifically, I’m focusing on the idea of temptation as a concept to frame my thinking about sermons during this Lenten season. I know. It’s not very creative. Temptation is hardly a novel idea as a theme for Lent. I’ve used it before, but every time it seems to come out a little different, and I’m sure it will this year as well. Before I get to this morning’s particular struggle with temptation, there are a couple of general things I want to say.
First, I don’t want to be tied too literally to the Biblical story in thinking about temptation. The Biblical story describes temptations experienced by Jesus, but I am not primarily interested in understanding Jesus’ temptations. I am interested in understanding my own, and there is no reason to assume that his were the same as mine, in fact some reason to assume they were not. So I don’t read the story about Jesus being tempted to turn stones into bread and fling himself down from the temple and fall down and worship Satan, I don’t read these as somehow describing the real nature of our temptations. I do read the story and let it suggest to me that I might want to think about temptations in my life, and what they are, and think about that somewhat seriously, but without the need to fit them into the categories of the story, just think about my temptations, whatever they may be, with an open mind.
Secondly, I don’t want to think of temptation as a synonym for sin. Temptation is not all about being enticed by things that are bad, bad, bad or naughty, naughty, naughty. Sometimes, ok, that’s the case. But mostly I think we are enticed by things because there is something good about them. They tempt us not because they are bad but because they are good, or at least understandable, or necessary. Temptation, in my way of thinking, is not about exercising will power to resist things we know are evil. It is often more complicated and has to do with real points of struggle in our lives. And it’s those points of struggle that I am more interested in.
All that said, let me get to the “opposite of love” and what that may have to do with temptation. Mo Nichols and I were talking recently not in our regular capacity as partners in the church office but in the more specialized capacity of worship planning partners. Mo had volunteered to do that, and early on I asked her whether she had specific interests or topics that were on her mind in relation to worship. She said, well as a matter of fact, yes. And then she said that she had been thinking about a statement she remembered Ashley Montague making in one of his writings to the effect that the opposite of love was not hate. The opposite of love was apathy or indifference.
Now of course Mo had her own reasons for remembering that and her own lines of thought relating to the idea that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference, but after we established, I should say that after she established that being a planning partner did not mean she would be giving the sermon, it became apparent that I would have to follow up on the theme in my own way. Which I was and am happy to do because it happens that I not only agree with the statement; I resonate with it on a number of levels.
Just on a basic personal level, it seems hardly deniable. To be in a loving relationship with someone—a life partner, a parent, a child, a friend—to be in a loving relationship with someone is almost by definition to be engaged with that person, and to be committed enough to the relationship to stay engaged, even when it’s uncomfortable, or difficult, or painful. A loving relationship is not sustained—again this is almost a truism—by withdrawal, avoidance, and denial. It is sustained by people willing to respond to each other, recognize each other, deal with each other, work it through with each other. A person feels unloved not so much, certainly not only when confronted with anger or disappointment or frustration but when one’s feelings, one’s being is neglected, ignored, treated with indifference. We show love when we recognize someone’s being, when we respond, when we make ourselves available to the other person, with the possibility of being hurt. All that seems simple enough, though of course there are all kinds of ins and outs of how people relate to each other, coming close, withdrawing, working things through, letting things lie, letting things go, lots of ins and outs. Still, on the whole, it seems undeniably true that the opposite of love, the enemy of love is not so much and not as often hate or hostility as it is indifference.
That’s the kind of thing I was thinking anyway when I remembered something I had read a while ago that had the effect of making things more complicated. A minister had written an article in which she had recalled her days in Clinical Pastoral Education, which is a program that is part of many ministers’ preparation for ministry. It supervises people through an experience, quite often in a hospital, where you are trying to minister to people who are in crisis—people who are seriously ill, families of people who are seriously ill. The person who had written the article recalled a colleague in the program who, she said, was much better at ministering to people than she was. She, the writer, said that her typical response when she was called to an emergency in the middle of the night was to go, do what she felt she could, and go back to bed, whereas her colleague would go and stay through whatever needed staying through. Faced with one heartbreaking situation after another, she would let it all in, and let her own heart go out, and she seemed never to run out of compassion, until one day, the writer says, she found her in the chaplain’s lounge with her hands pressed to her chest. When asked what she was doing she said that she was trying to stop up the hole in her heart so that she could gather up enough strength to go on. She may have been a good chaplain in her ability to relate and identify with people, but she didn’t last as a chaplain. She had what are often referred to, somewhat coldly, as boundary problems. She didn’t know when to pull back. Didn’t know how to disengage or separate. She didn’t know how to keep an appropriate distance.
Last week after I talked some in the sermon about black history month suggesting to me that we not only need to be more inclusive in our history but more honest about the history that has been carried out and controlled largely by white men, and asking the question how we are going to redeem this painful, broken, sinful history of ours, I had several conversations connecting what I had said to the “truth and reconciliation” process in South Africa, and suggesting that maybe we need such a process in the United States, that maybe that would help us redeem our past, that maybe in fact we need something like that in Charlottesville, that maybe we need some public truth telling as a nation and a community, and that maybe in order to redeem our racial history we at least need to meet it head on, not meet it with indifference or denial. Another way to look at the idea that the opposite of love is not necessarily active hostility but indifference.
Well, I don’t want to go there too much this morning. We’ll need much more time for that on other occasions. But I mention it because those conversations also reminded me of something I read about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa: that everyone who served on that commission had become ill, physically ill. The person making the observation said that he didn’t think it was just some coincidence that all those people happened to get sick. It was that what they heard had made them sick, not as a figure of speech, but quite literally sick. They had their own form of boundary problems. Not because they weren’t good at what they were doing, but because they were. They took in the stories they heard, the truths that were told to them, took them into the bodies, just as the woman in the hospital took in the truths, the worries and fears and sorrows and griefs of the people she encountered as a chaplain. Being responsive, available, open, engaged—caring—is not a matter for simple moralizations.
It is tempting, for good reason it is tempting to disengage, to withdraw, to distance oneself, to not care. In fact it is more than tempting. It is at some times in some circumstances necessary. It can even sometimes be wise. Obviously we cannot care about everything and everyone all the time. We can’t engage with everything we in fact care about. To truly engage with even one person or one concern often puts us at risk or in peril. The temptation not to love is not a sin, not in any simple sense anyway.
But it is a temptation. It is a temptation because it is so easy and so sensible to disengage. And it so easily becomes a habit. And we do it more often than we need to. It is a temptation not because it is in itself so awful, but because it doesn’t reach for anything. Love, peace, justice, shalom all depend on our willingness to cross the boundaries that keep us safe and isolated.
I think about loving God in these terms too. We have just received new members today. I usually explain when we do this that there are no belief requirements connected with Sojourners membership, and I am not going to ask people whether they believe in God or accept Jesus Christ as their savior as part of the membership ceremonies. Part of the reason for that is that believing in God seems like such a dry and lifeless and uninteresting thing to do. Being engaged with God is something else again. Being engaged with God can involve believing or not believing or questioning or seeking or wondering or arguing or praying or a million other things and there can be no assumption about what our engagement should look like. As in our human relationships, being engaged with someone is not the same thing as love, but without the engagement, the love is not possible.
The passage from Mark that Nerice read earlier I chose just because it is a story of Jesus involved in making a conscious choice about whether to respond to a man pleading with him for healing. “If you choose,” he says, “you can make me clean.” “Moved with compassion,” the scripture says, “Jesus stretched out his hand, touched him, and said, ‘I do choose. Be made clean.” A simple story, but just the words “I choose” raise my consciousness about the choices I make—every day—every minute practically—about where and when and how and with whom I am going to risk being engaged. That feels to me like a wilderness area of my living. I don’t expect there to be firm answers to my questions. I do pray to be able to say “yes” more often. Amen.
Jim Bundy
February 29, 2004