As I mention the name Vernon Hunter, you may feel that that would be a curious choice during Black History Month. With all of the instances and prominent Black Americans who have contributed so plentifully to our country’s heritage and history, to chose Vernon Hunter. Well, let me make an argument on his behalf. He served in the United States Army for twenty years. He continued to work for the government until age 68. It wasn’t the Vietcong that killed him it was an American citizen last week as he worked in his office space in Northwest Austin for the Internal Revenue Service. Vernon Hunter was minding his own business looking forward to retirement, getting ready to go and get a degree so he could work with children with disabilities. He was on the receiving end of that high octane funeral pyre. That was the result of a decision made by another person, Joseph Stack. Who when you try to navigate through the rhetorical tirade that he’d written in his anger at the Internal Revenue Service in his basic disillusionment and disenchantment in general had made a decision to burn down his own home then go to the Georgetown airport, get in his private plane drive down and slam it into the side of an office building that’s the home or the working home for a number of Internal Revenue Service employees resulting in many injuries and two deaths, Vernon Hunter and of course Joseph Stack. Now moving away from the smoke and the fury and the broken plexiglass and all of the injury, if you move back in time we realize that violence was initiated with an intuitive voice whispered into Joseph Stacks mind. A voice that said I know… how’s this for a great idea? This is what you need to do, in fact this is the only thing you have left to do, and began to unfold this plan. How does that phenomenon happen? Listen carefully as we read from the Gospel of Luke.

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 him until an opportune time.

This is the Word of God for the people of God.

Thanks be to God.

Just a reminder regarding context, Jesus has been recently baptized. And after the baptism He is driven or led into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit. And here He is put to the test. It is important that we establish linkage between the covenant of baptism and the phenomenon of temptation. Because I want to argue this morning that temptation doesn’t really happen without covenant. If you don’t stand for anything, if you don’t have any perimeters or boundaries, if anything goes. If life is simply all about thrill seeking and collecting experiences and cheap thrills, there is no such thing as temptation. But as Jesus was baptized and was moving into a mission and a ministry, now He is bound by covenant and so temptation becomes a reality, and He is put to the test. In the wilderness we must remember that the wilderness in the Holy Land is a desert. It is a place where there is very little of creature comforts. No water, no food, no civilization, very few distractions. We might be tempted to say that the wilderness is God-forsaken, but the truth of the matter is, God permeates the wilderness. There’s really not much else but God and the Holy Spirit, and yes in this instance Satan. Remember the desert is where mirages take place. Even in the summer, here in Texas, you’re driving on the highway and you can see a mirage, it looks like you would swear that there was a puddle of water there in the distance. And then you arrive at that place and there’s no water at all. It’s a mirage, it appeared to be the case, but it wasn’t and that’s important because Satan relies on the mirage as a very important technique. So the wilderness is a place where you go to be prepared, you go to encounter, you go to wait, and that’s what Jesus was doing. And He was famished; there was no food for Him. He was famished, He was thirsty, and when you’re hungry and you’re tired and you’re worn down, you become vulnerable don’t you? You might be open to doing something that otherwise you would never do. But when you’re worn down, beaten down, exhausted, famished, maybe just maybe you’ll give into temptation.

Let’s talk about the nature of temptation. When you think about Satan, I really don’t care if you want to use demonological language and think of the red individual in the tights and the pitch fork with the horns. I mean we can go with that. Or you can use psychological or psychic language and talk about the intuitive voices within your mind the respected scholar N T Wright really says that in his thinking Jesus was not addressing a visible person standing next to him, but rather he was grappling with these voices within his own mind. You know I love that saying, “you know you’re just jealous because the voices only talk to me”. But those intuitive voices, they’re real. You know we talk about the muse, the inspiration of the muse. We ask ourselves, well where did that idea come from? It begins with this whispering, and Satan does not present Satan and the ideas of Satan as being innately evil things, quite the contrary. Satan appears in the wilderness as your friend.

This past week I was laid out on Tuesday with this cough and the terrible sinus infection, so I was laying in bed with the channel changer and an old rerun of Leave it to Beaver came on. Ms. Landis and Beaver’s group they were having their third grade picture taken. And Gilbert is standing next to Beaver and he says, “Hey Beav, I know, great idea, let’s make a face into the camera”. And Beaver says, “Oh Gilbert that’s not a good idea, I don’t think I want to.” “Oh come on, what are you chicken?” And so Beaver very reluctantly says, ok, and he turns and faces the camera well you know what happens next. The photographer says, “Say cheese”, Gilbert doesn’t move and it’s Beaver that makes the big face and ruins the photograph. And it’s Beavers parents that get the call from the principal asking Ward to come down and see this awful picture. And June and Ward are saying Beaver what got into you? Well it was the whisperings of a friend and that’s the way that temptation approaches us. The whisperings of a friend, an avowed friend anyway. Diablo’s deceiver, accuser, advocate standing next to you just wanting good things for you in your life, that’s the way it’s presented to us.

When you read in Genesis about the serpent talking to Eve and Adam, he doesn’t make apocalyptic pronouncements or he doesn’t say have I got a deal for you, how would you like to be expelled from Eden, I can make that happen for you. Instead, he takes a kernel of truth and he says you know you’re not going to die when you eat that the fruit of that tree no matter what God says, and that was true. But he distorts and he deceives and he creates this mirage, this apparition of the good things that you deserve. You deserve to have your eyes opened. Satan pre-supposes freedom, never coarses, never does it on your behalf. Some of you remember Flip Wilson the comedian and his comedic character Geraldine. She was fond of saying the devil made her do it. Really, the devil doesn’t make us do anything that we’re not willing to do once we’ve given in to persuasion.

When you look at the economic mess that we’re in as consumers and this country as we try to dig ourselves out, how in the world did we get there? Isn’t it true that we heard individually and collectively the sweet whisperings that said you deserve a break today? You shouldn’t have to wait for that hot ticket consumer item, and maybe you can’t afford it but you know there’s something called a credit card, and it’s really free money, it really is. You know the fact that our banks paid a lot of money to circumvent the usury laws of every state and make credit cards a compounded 23% interest available to Americans everywhere. And the fact that we created the mirage minimum payment, which isn’t a payment at all doesn’t take a bite out of principal at all; it’s just paying the interest. Americans bought into the notion that we could live beyond our means, and what a great mess it’s created for us.

The whisperings of Satan in regards to adultery never approach an individual and say how would you like to end your marriage right now? How would you like to lose your standing in the community and find another church? No, it’s always, “Hey you’re just going down for a drink …you’re on a road trip, who is going to know? You need to fellowship and make new friends. It always sort of eases into and then it becomes a slippery slope. And we are persuaded, we give in. Even something as innocuous as texting while you’re driving, what’s the big deal about that, I mean why did you get a Blackberry if you weren’t going to use it? You’re driving and you’re on the toll way and what’s the big deal about that and you’re looking down and you’ve got a very important message cause after all you’re a very important person. And the world cannot go on without you immediately responding to the text. So you do it and its fine and nothing goes wrong… until something does, until something does go wrong and unfortunately when in the area of driving a car 50, 60, 70 miles an hour when something goes wrong usually it’s a very tragic thing and it goes very wrong. And then you look up to find the seducer the persuader the slanderer and Satan is not around. Satan abandons the scene, leaves the scene of the accident and leaves the consequences to you.

Such is the insidious nature of temptation. It reveals the nature of Jesus. Jesus was divine. The Son of God and Satan readily recognizes that and he tries to leverage against it to tempt Jesus to throw Himself off the steeple of the temple, to prove and make a grand display. And we can say “What would be wrong with that anyway? Why not have a grand display of the identity of Jesus and the grandeur of God. What would be so wrong with Jesus being in charge of a global theocracy?” When you’re hungry and you’re famished, what’s so wrong with turning rocks into bread? If you’re hungry, what’s the harm in that? Well sometimes it’s not in doing the wrong thing it’s doing the right thing for all of the wrong reasons. The truth of the matter is the nature of temptation is, is that it seems like a good idea at the time. The fact that Jesus felt the pull the allure, He felt that the siren like quality from Satan who lets give him let’s give the devil his due, is really good at what he does, is a testament to His humanity. And if he didn’t feel that way, we couldn’t identify with Him and his resistance to temptation, but He did. He did, and He’s fully human even as He is fully divine.

And so Jesus gets it, He knows how hard it is to be a human being and so we are called during this time of Lent to confess our sins and to ask for forgiveness. To confess that this is the way that we have been created. We are those creatures who go out and sin and alienate and separate ourselves from our creator God and Lent is an opportunity to own up to that… to resist temptation, to confess our sins, to make things right to atone, to be at one with God. Now I don’t know how anybody here in this sanctuary or even watching on television could have missed hearing something about Tiger Woods news conference on Friday morning. It began with the timing of it as they interviewed PGA professionals over in the tournament in Arizona many of them were saying “Well you know why he is doing it this morning on Friday during our tournament, our sponsor is AT&T and they dropped him and this is called payback.” And Tiger wants to distract from all the attention that is being paid to the tournament and one pro even said that’s very selfish of him and what is he thinking. And I don’t know about that, but as a preacher the timing that occurred to me is that, it’s during the season of Lent. And as I read the text of his message, it dawned on me that he used the word atone. He confessed the specific acts of cheating and being unfaithful, and said that he was sorry and went through the a litany of things that he had done wrong and basically owned up to them. Now, he didn’t ask forgiveness, I don’t know that he needs to ask for our forgiveness. Forgiveness in terms of his relationship to God well that’s between him. I wouldn’t plaster on a Christian appearance…apparently it came out that he’s a practicing Buddhist and that’s between him and his God in that regard. But it dawned on me that during the season of Lent that there’s also the phenomenon called scapegoating, in which we project our collective sins upon an individual and say ‘destroy that individual, they’re the ones that deserves it’. And it becomes a great distraction because we don’t have to own up to our sins and this morning I am less concerned with what Tiger Woods had to say, than I am concerned with what you have to say and what I have to say, because we make mistakes too. You know I am reminded of that every morning when I approach my little Miata. My wife Sidney and I had flown on Southwest out of Love Field to a Texas city. I had preformed a funeral, we had fellowship and had been with friends but it had made for a long day and we flew back to Love Field and then you’re coming out and you get your bag and we we’re tired and we were famished and now we’re on the moving side walk and now it’s time to negotiate the secular labyrinth known as the parking garage. I never write it down…the floor and the space and so you know Sidney is looking at me like you’re supposed to know where we’re going and I don’t know where we’re going and we’re wandering in the wilderness. Finally, we find the car and I take out the key for the car and the lock and the key will not open the trunk. Apparently when I was shutting the trunk I had gotten some fabric from a bag that I had wedged in between and now this thing was all wrapped around it and I couldn’t open the trunk and the more I tried, I was tired, I was exhausted and I was getting angry and it became abundantly clear to me, not to Sidney, but to me, there was only one thing left to be done and that was to rare back and kick the trunk. Which I did, it didn’t help, but it did dent my car. Not an obvious dent, but there is a subtle angulation in the curvature of the trunk. And I sent my son down the next day to try and take that dent out. He said “Dad, I can’t do it, how did you do that anyway?” I did not respond. This is who we are and we are called to confess our human nature and confess our finitude and confess the fact that we do make mistakes, and get right to be one with God again. You know, it’s got to be hard when you read the words of Tiger words; he describes what psychologists call inflation. A state of psychological inflation where he said that the rules no longer apply to him by virtue of his fame, his wealth, his celebrity, and let’s be honest he had a lot of help. I mean after all it was Nike who elevated the position of the common sports hero to mythic godlike status with Michael Jordan. By using slow motion cameras they were able to endow what ordinarily would be mundane tennis shoes with super natural powers. And if you will just buy those tennis shoes that Michael flying thru the air like Icarus is able to use, you too can be super natural. And we’ve elevated these people and a state of inflation should not be a surprise. You know the Dutch skater Sven Kramer is treated like a god in the Netherlands, and this week an American journalist, all be it, probably a lazy and uninformed one who did not do her homework, approached him and thrust a microphone in his face and said “And who are you and what country are you from and have you won a medal yet?” And the incredulous look on Kramer’s face and he finally said back to her “Are you just stupid?” And again, she hadn’t done her homework as a journalist, but it also said to me the state of inflation, do you not know who I am? And I am reminded of Eric Heiden, you know if anyone could be inflated about the winter Olympics, Eric Heiden has won more medals, five gold medals, speed skater. And after he had finished that tremendous performance he was whisked away to the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. And Carson, “gosh you’re a big medal winner, you’ve been around.” Carson asked him a question that had to do with world peace or national security or something and Heiden had this strange look on his face and said “Gosh, I’m just a skater, I’m just a kid, I don’t know about that.” In that way he demonstrated that he was grounded. Lent is the time when we inventory the things that we’ve done, inventory our sins and with great reluctance and yet with truth in our hearts we confess them to God, shake our heads and say, “You know Lord, it seemed like a good idea at the time.” Amen