The Antidote to Temptation

Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7; Matthew 4:1-11

It’s all about temptation, today, isn’t it?

The stories of scripture, our prayers, our music, all remind us of the spiritual perils and pain of temptation, something most of us deal with every day.

That’s the way our human story begins, after all: God creates the world, creates humanity, brings it all together as paradise… And then along comes the serpent, chatting up the woman, talking about that one tree, the only thing in the garden that God has put off limits, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Knowledge of good and evil is – this one story aside – something that you and I have been taught all our lives to value. We call it maturity, when we can distinguish between what is good and what is bad.

Perhaps the temptation in this story lies not in the knowledge itself, but in the results of that reach for knowledge: in the dangers of sudden independence, the nakedness of knowing the scope of goodness and evil, and being suddenly faced with the power and responsibility to make choices between them, all by ourselves.

There’s some subtle wordplay going on between the “craftiness” of the serpent and the “nakedness” of the newly informed humans – a similarity of sound in Hebrew that links the two, as if our nakedness is, perhaps, exposure to the shrewdness, the craftiness – the prudence, in some translations – of the world.

The vulnerability this woman and man experience in their nakedness is the precarious pain of having the kind of knowlege that makes us try to be careful – to understand, plan and control our own risks - and losing the confidence and protection of our absolute dependence on God.

I suspect that’s the core of most of our temptations, actually. That the pain of not having something lies in a desire, a felt need, to control our risks, to be careful with resources, to plan, and arrange, and control our own reality. And that when we are living fully and completely in the reality of our dependence on God’s grace, forbidden desserts, other people’s wealth or perfect relationships, and all our other “temptations,” big and small,

just don’t matter, because we are not trying to manage our health, our weight, our happiness, our popularity by our own power.

We simply live in God’s abundance, however little or much of it happens to be in our hands in this moment.

Knowing with every fiber of our being that it all depends on God protects us from the pain of not having this or that, and gives us the confidence to face whatever risks may come, whether we control them or not.

The woman in the garden story is manipulated by the serpent into eating the fruit of knowledge, in the same way that many of us are manipulated by society’s insistence, by peer pressure – which is as real for 60 year olds as 16 year olds – into trying to manage the world for ourselves: to manage reality, challenges, and daily life on our own, instead of trusting with our whole hearts and selves, instead of leaning in to our dependence on God, and on one another.

That’s how Jesus resists “temptation,” by the way. Did you notice?

In that hungry wilderness, the “tempter” invites him into doing things for himself – making bread, ruling the world – and Jesus declines by leaning in to dependence on God.

Even though the tester isn’t necessarily asking Jesus to be selfish - making bread that could feed not just himself, but lots of hungry people; ruling the world as the Messiah is supposed to do – Jesus leans in to his humanness, to dependence on God as God is, instead of using divine power to control and manage his life.

Even when the tempter tries to use that trust in God against him – quoting scripture, and inviting Jesus to physically experience that trust and prove that dependence by throwing himself off the top of the temple and letting God catch him – Jesus goes even deeper into trust.

“You shall not put the Lord your God to the test,” he reminds us. In other words, you can’t really trust God while you’re trying to make God prove God’s trustworthiness.

Jesus models for us that the antidote to temptation is not willpower; it’s not getting away from it all, it’s not management, or power, or having it all already or knowing what is right.

The antidote to temptation – the only thing that makes temptation lose all its glamour and power – is deep and unescapable dependence on God, a trust that is not a choice, but a fact of life as essential as breathing.

Ideally, that’s what we are practice when we give something up for Lent. Ideally, we’re experiencing how not having what “tempts” us doesn’t matter, because God has more than we could need.

But I have to admit I’m often tempted to treat that Lenten practice as a test of my own will and strength, as practice in choosing good from evil and maintaining my sense of control over my own risks and reality.

That’s not what Jesus would do.

But I don’t think we have to give up “giving things up”, because fasting is something that Jesus would do, and because when I let go of some of the things I desire, I do have more space to trust in God.

So while I’m still going to give something up this year, I’m going to add another practice as well, something I think might just help make me more aware of my dependence on God’s abundance and grace.

I got the idea from our guest last week, when Canon Rob Droste told us that Christians are called to be intensely curious about what God is doing – in the world, in people’s lives, in the moment. 

“What if you could text someone at the end of every day to report how you had seen God at work in the world right now?” he asked us. “Wouldn’t that change the way you experience God and the world?”

So I’m going to report my “God sightings” every day. I’m going to be intensely curious about what God is doing in your lives, in mine, in my friends’ lives… even the lives of strangers and politicians and people on TV.

I’m going to look for what God is doing in the world, every day.

And let someone know.

Will you do this with me?
Will you choose a buddy – someone you will check in with every day, to support each other in this habit – and look, with intense curiosity, for what God is up to, right here and now?

If we do this, this Lent, I can almost guarantee that it will increase our trust in God; it will make our dependence on God’s grace a joyful thing; and it will defeat temptation before we know we’re tempted.