Lent 1C- March 6, 2022
Jesus in the Wilderness.
When I was in elementary school, we occasionally had school assemblies and special classes where we were taught about the dangers and horrors of drug use. We would watch videos and they always included some figure in the shadows, usually wearing a trench coat, with an offering of drugs, a pu pu platter of narcotics, with a clear message: if we sampled them even once, we would become hopeless addicts with no future. All of these classes and assemblies drilled into our eager heads the catchphrase “Just say no!” Hearing this in my very embarrassingly sheltered upbringing, this seemed like an easy choice. I was ready to battle my teenage years with sheer willpower.
But, as you might have guessed, I never really got to practice this willpower because as the do-gooder in a small town, you don’t really get invited to the parties they show in these videos, where drugs are supposedly offered like candy. While I never said yes to drugs, I never really got to practice my ‘just say no.’
The thing about these particular drug abuse prevention programs is that studies have shown that they statistically really don’t have much impact in whether kids will ever experiment with drugs or not. Temptation is a lot more complex than giving kids a one syllable response. People often turn to drugs in a response to real but unacknowledged pain and the prospect of relieving that pain, even just temporarily, drowns out any logic. To offer a kid in this predicament little more than a catchphrase vastly oversimplifies a deeper problem.
This morning’s gospel reading tells the story of Jesus spending 40 days in the wilderness with nothing to eat, no place to sleep, and no company but the devil. (Sounds like a really good Johnny Cash song.) And boy does that devil know how to strike when the iron is hot. “You’ve got to be hungry, Jesus… so just turn these rocks into bread. You’ve got to want people to listen to you… so just say the word and all the kingdoms of the world are yours. You’ve got to want to prove to me who you are, it could be as simple as throwing yourself off this tower…”
We use devil and satan interchangeably and while they refer to the same creature, the roots of the words reflect different aspects of him.
Satan comes from ‘satanus’ which means the accuser. Satan wants to find out what we’re really made of.
Devil comes from ‘diabolus’ (think diabolical) meaning ‘the one who tears things apart, the divider’ The devil aims to sow suspicion in our communities and convince us we are alone in our struggles.
There are a lot of places in the church’s teaching, including our Eucharistic Prayer, that we describe Jesus as perfect. I sometimes make the mistake in thinking about Jesus as perfect and I imagine him as someone who only brought home straight-A report cards, who only hits green lights on his commute home from work and was offered every job he applied for. You know, they types that seem to check every box that’s expected of them and probably could easily ‘just say no.’ But that’s not at all the type of perfect Jesus was.
In her book Braving the Wilderness, Brene Brown writes about the roots of bluegrass music: “Story has it that as a child, Bill Monroe would hide in the woods next to a railroad track in the “long, ole, straight bottom part of Kentucky.” Bill would watch World War I veterans returning home from the war as they walked along the track. The weary soldiers would sometimes let out long hollers—loud, high-pitched, bone-chilling hollers of pain and freedom that cut through the air like the blare of a siren.
….The minute you hear it, you know it. Oh, that holler. It’s not a spirited yippee or a painful wail, but—something in between. It’s a holler that’s thick with both misery and redemption. A holler that belongs to another place and time. Bill Monroe would eventually become known as the father of bluegrass music. During his legendary career, he often told people that he practiced that holler and “always reckoned that’s where his singing style came from.” Today we call that sound high lonesome.”
Jesus knew the high lonesome. Misery and redemption were key elements to his life to the very end, especially his time in the wilderness.
Whether we attribute it to Satan or not, we can relate to Jesus’ temptation. We all get hungry, we all want people to listen to us, and we all want to prove who we are. And those aren’t necessarily bad things, in the right context. We obviously need food to survive. We all deserve to have a voice, to be heard. And the desire to be known and loved for just who we are is natural and right. But what Jesus is tempted with when he goes into the wilderness isn’t really those things: he’s tempted with the easy answer. The quick fix.
And the easy answers and the quick fixes are everywhere. Just buy this product, do this “life hack,” be smarter and better and more hard-working, get a new car or a new house or a new phone, and you too will have a full belly, power, and love.
But Jesus offers something else, a way of love. Jesus knew temptation and Jesus knew the high lonesome.
When you listen to bluegrass music and hear that high lonesome, it’s arresting. The power of the high lonesome is that in singing it and hearing it, our loneliness loses its grip. It builds connection and knits together that which had previously been divided.
We all have times in the wilderness, periods of our lives when we might’ve wandered far beyond what is familiar and known. That’s the beauty of Lent- our chance to remember that these times in the wilderness are a natural part of faith journeys and ultimately bring us closer to God. I don’t have a catchphrase to give you to make the wilderness seem easier or to downplay how difficult it can be to sit in pain. But I can point you to a savior who knew the high lonesome. When we cry out, God hears our pain and God knows our pain. And that high lonesome has that same power in our prayer as it does in song- loneliness loses its grip and it connects and knits together that which had previously been divided.
