"Frontierland"
February 25, 2007: 1st Sunday in Lent, Year C
The Rev. John MacIver Gage, senior minister
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.unitedchurchonthegreen.org

Scripture:
Luke 4:1-13
Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread." Jesus answered him, "It is written, 'One does not live by bread alone.'" Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, "To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours." Jesus answered him, "It is written, 'Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.'" Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, 'He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,' and 'On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.'" Jesus answered him, "It is said, 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'" When the devil had finished every test, he departed from Jesus until an opportune time.

"May God speak through these words and make from them a holy word for us today. Amen."

Sermon:
I have to confess that our scripture reading this morning from Luke's Gospel, about Jesus' being tempted by the devil in the wilderness, has always exercised a certain fascination for me, going back almost 30 years. When I was a little boy of seven or eight, I had a children's Bible that I loved; in fact, I still have a picture of me with it. Here I am, in between my brothers, who would have been about 15 and17 then. I'm the pudgy little kid in the middle, dressed in my polyester best for Sunday school, with that Bible tucked under my arm. I can still feel the weight of it. It was the largest book I owned and so very important. I can see the mid-60s golden glow of the faux-marbled cover with the title written out in oriental script.

Even more than all that, though, more even than the stories, I admit, what I loved most about that Bible were the pictures, the great, gaudy Technicolor illustrations that accompanied them. And of all the pictures, the one I remember best was a two-page spread accompanying just this story. Imagine it: Jesus, on the ground, looking pretty good for a guy who's been fasting for 40 days—you know, sort of lean but holy—while above him hovers the devil, sporting horns and hooves and a tail, the whole nine yards, with a wicked toothy grin and skin the color of dried blood. I looked at that picture so often, the pages of my Bible fell open to it automatically. I was utterly captivated, probably for a whole lot of reasons, not least of all the revealing the off-the-shoulder mini-toga the devil was wearing.

But then evil has always fascinated us as a species, and the internal conflict between good and evil this story makes so very concrete. We want to know that we're not alone in our struggling to be better than we are. Truth be told, what we'd really like is to have a hero—no, a superhero—who will swoop in slay our particular moral bugbears for us, and down through the ages, many have cast Jesus in that role, based in large part on this story. The devil prances and prowls, he flatters and lies, but our hero remains steadfast. His strong chin still cuts a Heston-esque figure despite 40 days without food or a make-up artist. Through clenched teeth, Jesus tells the wily tempter to "Get your hands off me, you damn dirty devil...!"

What that, it seems, the war was on, the spiritual war between good and evil, with Jesus, our Alpha-and-Omega Man, as commander-in-chief. That's certainly one of the images Saint Paul used in his letters to the church at Corinth, where he said, "the weapons of our warfare are not merely human, but they have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every proud obstacle raised up against the knowledge of God, and we take every thought captive to obey Christ" (2 Corinthians 10:4-5). In the Letter to the Ephesians, believers were urged to "put on the whole armor of God, so that [they] may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil" (6:11). And of course, the writer of The Revelation took up the same image and ran with it, pouring his considerable poetic imagination into fleshing out a full-on spiritual war on earth as it is in heaven, complete with angels and demons and a dragon, oh my. Of course, those Biblical writers were addressing Christian communities whose anti-establishment faith led them into daily conflict with a Roman Empire alternately bent on wiping them out or co-opting them into inconsequence. Under those difficult circumstances, a certain amount of aggressive posturing is understandable.

Nearly 2000 years later and a completely different worldview away, however, the concept of spiritual warfare is still with us; in fact, it's more popular than ever. The idea that every Christian believer should be a foot soldier in a creation-wide conflict between the unseen forces of good and evil began to resurface in the early-19th Century with the evangelical invention of the Rapture, but it's soared to pop culture popularity on the back of the Left Behind series of books, authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' wildly popular take on the spiritual and flesh-and-blood war to come, sooner rather than later, it would seem, with the end of the world. And now, your kids can join in the fun with Left Behind: Eternal Forces, a real-time strategy game for the PC or Mac, where, in a world where all true-believers have been Raptured-away, players enlist as "prayer-warriors" in either the Tribulation Forces or the opposing Global Community Peacekeepers—I'll let you guess which are the bad guys—using the power of prayer and, when that doesn't work, good old-fashioned violence to win hearts and minds for the Lord. (Information drawn from the manufacturer at www.leftbehindgames.com/pages/faq.htm and a review by ign.com at pc.ign.com/articles/745/745956p1.html.)

Of course, spiritual warfare makes a certain kind of sense in culture as obsessed with violence, and particularly heroic violence, as our own. In our mythologized wild west mindset, conflict has been reduced, fetishized, really, down to a tumbleweed-strewn street, a couple of hats—one white, one black—and a single bullet. It's not morning in America, it's high noon. Our hero doesn't want to fight, but when the villain crosses that line in the sand—well, in the immortal words of Bugs Bunny: "Of course, you know, this means war." The hero will fight, and he will kick the crap out of the villain, his henchman, and any wishy-washy townspeople foolish enough to stand in the way of his truth, his justice, and his American way.

And we love it that way. As a country, as a culture, we get off on war-talk. We get a certain adrenaline rush from it, and so we use it liberally, pardon the pun. We keep returning to that same well. We wrap ourselves in the same simplistic, self-righteous imagery, all the Saturday matinee melodrama of an axis of evil putting the screws to the little guys until they cry out for a hero who'll lead a crusade against the evil-doers and bring them to justice, dead or alive—all the little ways we keep telling ourselves it's a just war instead of just war.

All this, despite the evidence of history. Because, don't forget: before our current War on Terror, we've also had a War on Drugs and a War on Poverty and even, back in World War I, a War on War, all waged, I'm afraid, with the same sort of gung-ho enthusiasm... and yielding the same sort of results. Which really is a shame, since they were all good and lofty goals. Who wouldn't want a world without terror or drugs or poverty or, ultimately, war itself? On the more overtly spiritual front, who wouldn't want to see good ultimately triumph over evil? Who wouldn't want to see Jesus take the devil down? But terrorism doesn't work that way. Drugs don't work that way. Poverty doesn't work that way. And neither does faith.

You see, the world just doesn't work like a western—at least not like the classic Hollywood High Noon-Searchers-Shane sort of westerns that have left their indelible mark on our American secular and spiritual psyche. In the real world, bad guys don't always wear black hats or twirl their Snidley Whiplash moustachios as they burn down the barn. Good guys don't always wear white hats or ride white horses and their motives are not always pure as the driven snow. No, the landscape of the human heart isn't filmed in Technicolor and Cinemascope. No, if anything, the world we really live in, day-in, day-out, looks more like another, more contemporary western: HBO's Deadwood.

Now, if you're not familiar with the series, you'll need a few words of explanation. What makes Deadwood, which has run on HBO for three seasons now, so different? One word: mud. Set in the historic 1870s gold-rush town of Deadwood, South Dakota, infamous for being a frontier town beyond the reach of federal law, the series is quite literally caked with mud—mud, manure, and very bad manners. There may be white hats and black hats in Deadwood, but you'd be hard pressed to tell them apart with just the usual cursory glance, glazed-over as they are in that ubiquitous earthy gray. Motivations are muddled, messages are mixed, and heroes are in notoriously short supply, particularly of the super sort.

Oh, there are good people in Deadwood, to be sure, and bad ones, too. It's just that the "good people" do bad things more often than you'd hope, and even the bad ones make good more often than you might imagine, until that hard-and-fast line between do-gooder and evil-doer we've been taught to look for sinks into the quagmire almost completely, and we're left to depend on God to sort 'em all out. There is joy in Deadwood, too, but not of the Rogers and Hammerstein Oklahoma variety. Joy is always tempered with pain. Life blossoms in the midst of death. Flowers bloom in the mud.

According to Luke, Jesus goes out to the wilderness, to the frontier, to prepare for his ministry. It's there that the devil comes at him head on, with grand, operatic visions set in dramatic setting—the stony desert, a high mountain, the very tip-top of the temple—suitable for filming. "Turn these stones to bread," the devil hisses with his forked tongue. "Worship me. Worship yourself." Use your power. Get more power. Trust your power. And, trusting in God alone, Jesus easily shrugs off these obvious efforts to undermine his faith with little more than a quotation from scripture and a toss of his head. Mission accomplished!

But then along comes that little tagline at the end to upset us: "When the devil had finished every test, he departed from Jesus until an opportune time." What's that supposed to mean? Well, it means that Jesus didn't come out to the frontier to win it, but begin it—not to win the war but to begin the life-long struggle against sin and evil. For in a very real way, though he returns to Galilee, Jesus never leaves the wilderness. As he sets his feet on the road that will take him back into the "civilized world," and all the way to Jerusalem, the capital city, and eventually the cross, Jesus knows that the temptations aren't going to go away, they'll just grow more subtle, more slippery, and more dangerous. Instead of a devil's carnival mask, these new temptations will wear the faces of good friends and good intentions. The Roman roads underfoot may be paved, but they still lead to the cross. No, there's no escaping the mud that clings to his ankles still, Jesus knows that, and yet he walks on.

Jesus never leaves the wilderness, and neither do we. We live in this muddy, messy, profane frontier town, on the borders of life and death. The temptations we encounter in our lives are the same ones Jesus faced throughout his ministry: to use the power we have for our own benefit alone; to compromise our principles in order to gain more power; and to test the limits of God's love for us. We face these temptations not only in those more cinematic moments of high drama we run into every once in a while, but more often in the everyday ins and outs of our personal lives and public relationships. And when we do face them, we are called to struggle, as Jesus did, to hold on to God's vision of peace, justice, and compassion.

However, as any soldier can tell you, a struggle is not a war. And while faith, like life and growth, is a struggle, it is not spiritual warfare. That is not a helpful image anymore, if it ever was. We do not need new and better spiritual weapons so we can become more effective prayer-warriors. We do not need to rally the faithful with simplistic slogans or manipulated intelligence. We do not need a superhero, not even a superhero savior. That sort of video-game thinking, those questionable means will poison our purpose going forward as surely as they have in the past, when the worst best intentions of Christian communities resulted in oppression, torture, and genocide in the name of God. And what does it profit the church if we win the world and lose our soul? Instead, what we need is spiritual nourishment to feed our famished souls, the wisdom to discern what is truly of God in a world full of idols, American and otherwise, and renewed trust in God's grace to bear us up again when—not if—we fall.

And as we walk this rough wilderness road, we also need a friend—again, not a superhero, but a friend, not someone who will do it all for us, but someone who has been this way before and is willing to do it all again for our sake. Friends, what a friend we have in Jesus! And what a community of friends we have here in Jesus' name. For that is what we are, that's what church is: a frontier community of spiritual friends dedicated to walking with one another along this way, to waiting patiently for those who move more slowly, to letting the adventuresome have their head, to supporting the weak, to challenging the powerful, to seeking the lost when they wander.

So we come together week by week to struggle together along this upward way from death to life, from this world to a better world, from an earthy wilderness to an earthly paradise and beyond. We come together to share the stories of the One Who Walks Beside Us, and we pray together, saying, "lead us not into temptation"... and if we end up knee deep in the big muddy anyway, Lord—if and when—join us here and now, we pray, just as you did there and then. And we will recognize you not by any stars and bars upon your chest but by your muddy feet, so like our own—those beautiful muddy feet of the "messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation" (Isaiah 52:7). In your good and strong name we pray. Amen.