March 1, 2009 + Spiritual Foundations for Life + Frank Alton

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Spiritual Foundations for Life: Baptism, Temptation & Vocation
I Peter 4:18b-22; Mark 1:9-15

I said both last Sunday & on Ash Wednesday that Lent is a season for training our lives to dwell in the way of the cross. Since that path is counter-intuitive, we need “practice” to create new habits to keep us on the path. The question for this morning is, “How does the connection between three foundational elements of life – baptism, temptation and vocation – increase our capacity to choose the way of the cross – the way of life – over other ways?”
Each year the three-year lectionary cycle focuses on one of the synoptic Gospels. This year it is Mark, the first and shortest Gospel. The advantage to that on this particular morning is that we get three important parts of Jesus’ life presented in a few verses. Jesus’ move to the wilderness happens “immediately” after his baptism. The first effect of receiving the Spirit in baptism is to “drive” the baptized one into a period of focused weighing and testing of baptismal vocation (discernment).
These spiritual foundations give us the courage to confront the conflicts of the heart. Good intentions are never enough. Dramatic conversions never last a lifetime. We never completely silence the voices of our demons. It is the eternal conflicts of the heart that constitute the drama to which we return each year at the beginning of Lent. Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan ends the long peace of his growing up years in Nazareth. That life is exchanged for a life of struggle that begins with the devil & is consummated on the cross. Baptism as a new moment of opportunity always brings with it the temptation to take too much advantage of it or to use it in the wrong way. We have to wrestle with the tempter before we can discover our true vocation.
So, let’s look at these three foundations, beginning with baptism. Baptism grounds us in an affirmation that makes it possible to live with what I Peter calls “a good conscience.” The affirmation is, “You are my beloved child in whom I am well pleased.” I believe that the Gospel’s intention is for each of us to hear that voice as spoken to us in baptism. If we don’t hear the voice from someone somewhere we wander our whole lives looking for it. Last week we had a gathering of fathers. I asked each father to share a positive and a negative memory with our fathers before the age of 10. Two things struck me in our sharing: First, most of the men had experienced violence from their fathers in the home. But secondly, even where there had been violence, if there was an emotional connection between father & son the violence took a back seat to a sense of satisfaction about the relationship. God offers us that connection in baptism but most of us need that to be incarnated by some human being in order to act on it.
And acting on it is the bottom line. One writer proposes that baptism is where we commit to ‘do the right thing’ – his translation of Peter’s word, “conscience.” The right thing involves blessing when we’ve been cursed or insulted, loving when we’re hated or ignored and being compassionate and humble when others are taking all the credit. The salvation promised in baptism is thus the promise to imitate Christ. (Preaching Peace – Krantz)
Christ overcame sin not by flooding it or destroying it, but by transforming it through his own death and resurrection. Peter writes, “He was put to death in the flesh, but was given life in the spirit,” so that now he has “dominion over angelic authorities, and powers.” The very way the world works is changed, not by being destroyed and remade as in the Flood, but by being redirected to new ends in Christ. Likewise baptism is here seen not as a wiping the slate clean, not simply “a removal of dirt from the body,” but as a new relationship with God that gets at the root cause of corruption. Baptism allows us to conceive our own actions in terms of the good possibilities they offer to God for creative work in the world. Baptism represents a conscious and intentional redirection of our personal aims to new ends in Christ.
In Mark’s terms, we move immediately from baptism to temptation. Wrestling with temptation honestly is what empowers us to live out our vocation faithfully against all odds. In the early church, this deepening of vocation consisted of a period of meetings with the bishop in which the newly baptized were instructed in the mysteries of the faith that had been named but not explained to them during their preparation for baptism. Jesus didn’t have conferences with a bishop; instead he was directly exposed to the powerful influences of the Spirit and of the Enemy. The wild beasts, the angels, the Spirit, and the Enemy represent various influences on Jesus, presences that tugged his emotions and his aims in various directions, so that he had to test and sift and sort them into coherence with his overall vocation as God’s Beloved. (Paul S. Nancarrow)
Before saying what that accomplished we need to unpack the meaning of Satan. What do we do with the idea of wrestling with a personal devil? What can we take away in the 21st century as the meaning of satanic life? William Sloan Coffin often repeated four meanings to his congregation: 1) The mystery of evil is symbolized by a person because the reality of evil is experiences as personal power; 2) Satan is given a separate identity because evil is experienced as something bigger than ourselves (not outside ourselves; not “the devil made me do it” but “this evil in which I am caught up is much bigger than me”); 3) Evil doesn’t arise in our lower nature (our appetites – be they for food, for sex or for drugs and alcohol) but in our higher nature –in the realm of freedom; 4) rarely does Satan suggest that we do anything bad but to do something good that is not the right thing.
Let’s see how this works in one of Jesus’ temptations. The temptation for Jesus to throw himself from the pinnacle of the temple and trust the angels to keep him from falling was an invitation to laziness. Some people commit themselves to God with the secret expectation that now God will do all the work. This is a lazy spirituality reminiscent of the story of the priest who went golfing with a rabbi. Each time the priest putted, he crossed himself. By the ninth hole he was nine strokes ahead. The rabbi asked, “Father, do you think it would be all right if, before I putted, I too crossed myself?” The priest answered, “Sure, Rabbi. But it won’t do you any good until you learn how to putt.”
The spirituality to which Lent invites us is definitely not a lazy spirituality. The journey of Lent is the journey to the cross, which is what the church has called the way of the cross. Jesus called it taking up our cross. It is the journey of becoming other-centered rather than self-centered. As I said on Ash Wednesday, it is about becoming cooperative communities rather than competitive ones. The need for this is evident in so many ways. We see the escalation of violence with each act of revenge.
I read recently in a book about the brain (The Accidental Mind, David Linden) of an experiment that proved how ingrained this escalation of violence is. Two adult subjects face each other, each resting the left index finger, palm up, in a molded depression. Both subjects were given the same instructions: exactly match the force of the tap on your finger that you receive with an equivalent tap when your turn comes. Neither subject knew the instructions given to the other. Despite explicit instructions to the contrary, when the subjects took turns pressing on each other’s fingers, the force applied always escalated dramatically, just as it does in schoolyard or bar-room confrontations. Each person swore that he matched the force of the other’s tap. When asked to guess the instructions given to the other person, each said, “You told the other guy to press back twice as hard.”
My God, it’s in our biology for violence to escalate. And we see it in the history of weaponry. The invention of the stirrup on horses gave more power to mounted warriors; so armor was made. Big guns proved able to sink wooden ships, so iron plates were applied to the ships’ sides. The machine gun multiplied fire power; tanks were invented. Aircraft begat antiaircraft. Big bombs became superbombs at Hiroshima. 25 years and 5 trillion dollars worth of weapons later, The US and Soviets were not deterred from an arms race. And today, 25 years after that, the race goes on.
Through the temptations Jesus confirmed his commitment to the vocation God had for him. He returned from the wilderness to his vocation to proclaim with authenticity “This is the time of fulfillment. The reign of God has come near; change your hearts and minds, and believe this good news.” And what was the good news that it was his vocation to proclaim and embody? The same as he heard in his baptism: “You are my beloved child with whom I am well pleased.” That’s the news that converts competition into cooperation.
In Northern Minnesota a farmer’s five-year-old child was playing in the kitchen while his mother was doing chores. Unnoticed, the child toddled out of the house and into the wheat field. When she noticed the child was missing, the mother began a frantic search for her baby. She called her husband and together they searched through the heaped-up sheaves of wheat. They summoned all the farmhands and later the townspeople of every vocation, economic level and religious faith. Someone finally suggested: “We’re going off in all directions. Why don’t we join hands, form one large circle, spread out, and then close in, encompassing every inch of the land?” As a result, preacher joined hands with the worker, physician with the town idler. People of every station of life and of every faith joined hands to form a gigantic circle. Carefully examining every inch of the land, they narrowed the circle until someone reached down, picked up the child, and handed him to his father. As soon as he touched the child, the father knew that his son was dead. And he lifted the tiny lifeless body in his arms and cried out, “My God, my God – why didn’t we join hands before it was too late?”
That story may sound too cute, but President Obama reminded us of the same truth this past week: we can no longer afford the luxury of going our separate ways, making bread only for ourselves and our families, seeking status through power, and counting on God somehow to save us all – even when the task seems impossible. In his speech he said, “The weight of this crisis will not determine the destiny of this nation. The answers to our problems don't lie beyond our reach. Those qualities that have made America the greatest force of progress and prosperity in human history we still possess in ample measure. What is required now is for this country to pull together, confront boldly the challenges we face, and take responsibility for our future once more.”
Lent is designed to make us partners rather than rivals, and to empower us to resist the temptation to work at cross purposes or not to work at all. John Wray, a former judge in Maryland, wrote a poem in which he said, “You called me, Lord? I tell no lie; I hope you meant some other guy.” Many of us, if we’re honest, share that sentiment. The nails will never graze the palms of our hands, because we never speak up. Lent arouses contrition, and the point of contrition is to mitigate our pride, not eliminate our hope. We are told that “The angels looked after him.” It is our hope that there are still angels around ready to do no less for us, whenever we are ready to emulate and not betray the example of Jesus wrestling in solitude with the devil.