Author: KPB Stevens

Luke 4:1-13 The Wilderness

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

There are many reasons why we might find ourselves in the wilderness.  When my mother died, I spent a year in a wilderness of grief. In a way I was lucky, because I could point to some loss, some reason for me being there.  Sometimes, we find ourselves in the wilderness without a reason that we can name. We are simply there. The world has become thin and arid. We feel lost and alone.

Whether we can name the reasons or not, the Gospels are clear that the wilderness is necessary to our spiritual life.  Being in the wilderness is a step along the path of awakening, of realizing the divinity within ourselves. Much of that awakening has to do with stripping away – losing our sense of insecurity and our craving for protection, surrendering our need to assert our status, setting aside useless shame and the stories that we have allowed to define us.

The wilderness is a place where the clutter of life is stripped away so that we can learn to pay attention.  Attentiveness is the first thing that the spirit is inspiring in us and that Jesus is modeling for us. His attentiveness was sharpened by fasting, and anyone who has ever fasted knows that it concentrates one’s attention on the body.  Within Christianity, fasting has always been a primary form of body spirituality, a way of getting us to listen to our bodies, a way of bring our minds and spirits into alignment with our physical forms. It is, of course, also a form of self-denial, of setting aside the demands of the flesh and the mind so that we can focus deeply on God and God’s creation.

So the wilderness teaches an attentive, embodied, self-denying spirituality, and most of us are poor students.  I don’t think I’m alone in being afraid when I enter the wilderness, and continuing in fear as I consider what each of the wilderness’s lessons will reveal about me – about the person I’ve been and about my limited capacity to change.  At the end of Jesus’ wilderness sojourn, when Satan inflicts three trials upon him, those trials enact our usual responses to fear, and assure us that those responses can be overcome.
Jesus was tempted to turn stones into bread.  When we are afraid or threatened, we reach for those things that normally give us a sense of security.  We might stuff our bodies like squirrels preparing for a long and dangerous winter. “Eat, eat” our fear shouts at us, “because you may not know when you can eat again!”  We are tempted to satiate our bodies so that we can go back to ignoring them, and curl up into a kind of hibernation until the reason for fear goes away again.

Jesus was tempted to assert his sovereignty over all of the kingdoms of the world.  When we’re afraid, we might take our security from a sense of power and prominence. Surely we are too powerful and important for anything to hurt us, and we should remind people of that just in case they get any funny ideas when they see us in a weakened state.  More than that, we should remind ourselves that we’re still in control, that God is only there to help us get through this, not to change us or show us the limits of our strengths.

These first two temptations are basic and recognizable, and we all fall prey to them.  But if we follow Jesus’s example and get past them, there’s still one tough temptation awaiting us.  Because the very fact that we overcame the fears that wanted us to fall back on our old patterns of security is going to make us feel pretty good about ourselves.  And it’s then that we might begin to feel that we’re better than other people. What enlightened spiritual beings we must be, to have resisted the first two temptations so well!  Surely other people must recognize our exalted state and find us just the teensiest bit worship-worthy. This, too, is in the end only a scrabbling after security. We tell ourselves that if we can’t fall back on ourselves and our known patterns of behavior, we can at least fall back on our community.  But we secretly suspect that they won’t take care of us, even when we know that they’re good and they love us. We need to give them other reasons for caring for us, we need to earn their love and admiration, or show them that we have earned it by our spiritual goodness.

If we avoid these temptations, then we emerge from the wilderness awakened and transformed.  Or, more accurately, we emerge with some wisdom gained that can help us as we continue down a path of more profound awakening and transformation.    Many things have changed in us, and there are many difficulties still ahead. We might, even, find ourselves returned to the wilderness as we move through life.  But always with the awareness that we’ve come through it at least once, and with a better appreciation of our ability to imitate Christ.

 

Luke 3:21-38 Son of Adam, Son of God

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Matthew’s Gospel begins with a genealogy.  So far in Luke, we’ve escaped it, and yet here it comes.  All of those names that bewilder readers and seem so utterly pointless.  Yes, there are some important names in the list. David is there, so we know that Jesus is descended from Israel’s great king, and therefore has some claim to political power, or at least a political critique.  And Boaz is there, David’s great grandfather, who married Ruth, a foreigner, and not just a foreigner but a Moabite, a traditional enemy of the Hebrews. So we are reminded that ethnic purity and exclusion of others are ideas that can’t really fit with the story of the Jewish people, nor with the story of the followers of Christ that Luke is just beginning to tell us.  And there are the patriarchs, Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, one confused, one bland, and one crafty, to remind us of the oldest stories and that those stories tell us about people who were far from perfect and whom God chose anyway, just as Jesus will choose the flawed and fumbling disciples.

We are able to receive and hear the Holy Spirit because it is speaking to the divinity that is already inside us, that has been there from the beginning.  And that divinity isn’t a homunculus, a little upside down man hidden and protected from our everyday lives. That divinity is in every part of us. It’s cellular and system-wide.

This is a lot for Luke to reveal within a list of names, but that’s part of his point.  We might be shot through with the divine, but we should remember that each of us is only one among many.  There is a subtle subversion of human grandiosity in this list. Every human being is the protagonist of her or his own story.  Our consciousness is constructed in such a way that we can’t help being at the center of our own universe. Yet each of us has to come to terms, at one point or another in our lives, that we are simply one of eleven billion people who are each just as grandiose in their thoughts about themselves as we are.  And if we allow ourselves to think historically, we seem to become even more insignificant. An estimated 108 billion people have lived upon the earth. Even the famous ones aren’t really famous within the grand sweep of time.

God’s inclusion at the end of Luke’s genealogy hints at how we can deal with this, and not despair in the face of our own insignificance.  Yes, we are small and finite. But we are also part of divinity, God’s gifts to a creation that God gives us in return. The Gospel will tell us, and our spirituality will affirm for us, that God knows us, every part of us, down to the smallest hair on our heads.  No matter the confines of our individual human lives, we are known and loved by the eternal, forever. And we are helped to turn away from our grandiosity by acknowledging that whatever gifts we have, whatever talents and personal appeal, are not entirely ours, but God’s, and our only real task is to use those gifts to reveal the divine in ourselves and others, and work for justice and the repair of the world.

Luke 3:1-20 Everything We Know About Power, Undone

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Gardner Taylor, the great preacher and Civil Rights leader, began a sermon on Luke’s third chapter by slowly reading the names and titles of the authorities.  “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas.”  Then Taylor paused and said, slowly, letting the words resonate, “and you would think that everything there was to say about power had been said.” But no, Taylor said, for here is John, son of Zechariah, in the wilderness, and he is the one who receives the word of God.

For Taylor, Luke isn’t simply using the names of emperors, governors, kings and priests to put a date on the moment that John’s ministry began.  Luke is holding John in contrast and opposition to these powers. What is real power? How is it expressed? For Luke, it comes only from God, and it can come to anyone, and title and privilege have nothing to do with it.

As we examine Luke’s spirituality, we should never lose track of the fact that he has as much to say about opposing the powers and principalities of the world as he does about individual spiritual development.  For Christians, mindfulness, while important, is never enough. John, as he grew up in the wilderness, had plenty of time for mindfulness. There was little to do but watch the sky and the sands, to notice the little skittering animals as they darted to and from their holes in the ground, to listen to the shush of the wind through oasis trees, to lay beside the river as sunlight glinted off of the water.  These things, the things we notice and give our hearts to, are so beautiful that we can, indeed, become lost in them. But John didn’t stay in the wilderness. He took his wild self to the banks of the Jordan and began to preach, and people came flowing out of Jerusalem to listen to him, and to be baptized by him. He wasn’t calling them to a mindfulness retreat, but to repent, to turn back to God, to convert their hearts and their ways of being.

John’s choice of the Jordan River for his baptisms is important.  It is the boundary that the Chosen People crossed as they entered the Promised Land.  They were supposed to be a new people, and to model a new way of being human, holding a deep ethic of welcoming the stranger, forgiving debts, setting aside their land and their wealth for the benefit of the poorest among them, and being guided, always, by their sense of the divine.  Something went wrong along the way, and John is asking them to cross the Jordan again, to turn back to that original vision of justice and harmony.

Spirituality without conversion is simply a hobby.  It might make us feel good in the moment, but we should ask ourselves whether its changing our lives, and, just as importantly, the lives of those around us.  If we have a vision of justice, then those things that are unjust come into stark relief. And if we name them, we start to empty them of their power. Luke starts by naming the powerful, the instruments of injustice in his world, the shadows that fall flat and heavy when the vision becomes bright.  Part of Christian spirituality centers on naming the principalities and powers of our own world, of stating honestly those things and ways of being that are corrupting us, and that we need to turn away from.

Luke 2:22-52 Age and Youth

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Simeon’s song is sung at night, during compline.  When I first arrived as chaplain to Kenyon College, the students were saying compline together in the chapel every evening.  I was in my early thirties, only eight years older than the seniors, still young and trying to negotiate the questions that our culture imposes on youth: who will I love, what is my vocation, where will I call home?  I was married and a priest. The first question had been answered with great assurance, but the the second still felt electric, as I was unsure of my vocation even as I tried to live it out. And the third question was very present.  After a hard day, deep in the evening, I would often say to myself “I want to go home.” Sometimes I would say it while I was sitting in my house. And my daughter, as she grew and began to speak, would say it, too, especially when she’d been injured or was upset.  What was this home that we longed for, and why was I still so restless? These questions caused me to take great comfort in the Song of Simeon, there in the semi-darkness of the Chapel of the Holy Spirit. As I and the students spoke Simeon’s words together, it felt like we were part of a community of longing.  We all wanted the freedom and peace that God had given to Simeon in his old age.

Both Simeon and Anna are full of the Holy Spirit.  Anna is a kind of God obsessive, never leaving the temple, praying and fasting constantly.  In a later age, she would have been an anchorite, living in the walls of a church and peeking out through a tiny window at the services.  Her and Simeon’s lives have been guided by the spirit, and in Luke’s Gospel it’s the spirit that takes preeminence in these early chapters.   But what is the Holy Spirit? Is it a mood, a feeling, a noticing, an inspiration? The catechism in the Book of Common Prayer describes the Holy Spirit as God at work in the world and the church, and tells us that we’ll recognize it when we “are brought into love and harmony with God, with ourselves, with our neighbors, and with all creation.”  Such harmony seems ambitious and hard to attain. But it is attainable. I’ve experienced moments of it, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. And when I’ve experienced it, I’ve had a deep sense that I am home, that this spiritual place within the embrace of the spirit represents rest from my fear and longing.

Yet Simeon’s message to Mary and Joseph is not restful in the least.  He tells them that many in Israel will rise and fall because of Jesus’ life and ministry, and that these people’s opposition to him will reveal their inner natures.  And he tells them that a sword will pierce their souls. Because the Holy Spirit is only one part of the Trinity, and that deep sense of rest and home that it can bring us, that deep harmony with God, ourselves, our neighbors, and all of creation, is not enough.  Our hope is not to only have individual spiritual moments, although we need those to sustain us. Our hope is to see the repair of the world, the coming of the Kingdom of God, the moment when everyone and everything gets to experience the peace that Simeon sings about.

This is the message at the heart of Christian spirituality.  If we put all of our energy into working for justice, and ignore our need for spiritual rest, we will become controlling, embittered people who are constantly separating ourselves from God.  If we spend all of our moments pursuing beauty, looking at stones and flowers, trying to connect with the Kingdom of Heaven that’s all around us, we will become self-isolated, passive people who are implicit in the continuing corruption of the political and material world.  Somehow we must do both. We must work for justice in truth and love, and we must engage with the power and principalities of the world and strive to convert them. Grace helps us. The moments of harmony that we have with God, ourselves, our neighbors, and all creation prepare us for mission.  And when our hearts are pierced by the difficulties of the work and our disgust at corruption and cruelty, moments of harmony will renew us. We need the Holy Spirit to help us in our imitation of Jesus.

If I could, I would like to replace those three questions that our culture makes so important in our youth.  Who will I love? It’s a good question, but we might add to it and ask, who will I love and serve? What is my vocation?  We might change that to, what will my service look like, what shape will it take? Where will I call home? Perhaps we can simply expand this question’s meaning, to how will I seek harmony with God, myself, my neighbor, and all of creation?  We are restless beings, and there’s a blessing in our restlessness. It leads us to seek the repair of the world, to ensure that everyone has those moments of peace and prayer that allow them to seek and find the Kingdom of Heaven. The peace that we have been promised will come.  We’ll have moments of it when we open our eyes to see the salvation that already exists and is being proffered to us in our day to day lives. And at the end of those lives, our hope is that we’ll see the Kingdom all of the time, that we’ll be reborn into the pure beauty of divinity, allowed to sit in God’s eye and see everything with God’s sight.