wfn.org | [ENS] Jesus' wilderness struggle for self-awareness a model for

["Matthew Davies" <mdavies@mail.epicom.org>]

Sunday, February 13, 2005

Jesus' wilderness struggle for self-awareness a model for Church,
Presiding
Bishop says

Griswold preaches in context of Executive Council meeting in Austin

ENS 021305-1

[Episcopal News Service] Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold preached at the
11:15 a.m. Holy Eucharist today at St. David's Episcopal Church in
Austin,
Texas, where the Episcopal Church's Executive Council is meeting
February
11-14. The full text of the sermon follows:

The Most Rev. Frank T. Griswold
Presiding Bishop and Primate
The Episcopal Church, USA

St. David's Church
Austin, Texas
February 13, 2005

Genesis 2:15-17. 3:1-7
Romans 5:12-19
Matthew 4:1-11

Jesus emerged dripping wet from the waters of the Jordan river with the
voice from heaven still ringing in his ears: "This is my son, the
Beloved
with whom I am well pleased." Without a moment's pause to catch his
breath
or take into himself the profound implications of what had just
occurred,
Jesus is led up by the Sprit into the wilderness to be tempted by the
devil.
The very same Spirit of God who bears down upon Jesus at his baptism,
working within him an all-embracing awareness of his belovedness, now
leads
him out into the wilderness to undergo an intense season of testing and
temptation: 40 days and 40 nights, as we just sang, reminiscent of
similar
seasons of testing and preparation in the lives of Moses and Elijah, as
well
as Israel's 40 years of being and formed and made ready to enter the
promised land.

One might ask: how could this Sprit who in one moment bears witness to
God's
deep love for Jesus, and his delight in the one he calls his Son, in the
very next moment lead him up - or in the more violent language of Mark,
"drive him out" into the harsh and forbidding landscape of the
wilderness?

I think the answer lies in the fact that before Jesus can enter into his
ministry, his living of the mystery of his belovedness for the sake of
the
world, he has to sort and sift through the range of possibilities and
potential misdirections that ministry, that belovedness, might take. Was
he
called to fulfill the messianic expectations that were very much in the
air:
expectations of a warrior-king, a new David, who would marshal an army
and
overthrow the power of Rome? Or, was he perhaps called to establish a
separatist sect, aloof, ascetical, uncompromising in its adherence to
the
Law and untainted by any accommodations to gentile ways?

Before embarking upon his public ministry with all its demands,
temptations
and potential misdirections, Jesus had to know himself in the fullness
of
his humanity. He had to understand the ways we human beings can so
easily be
pulled off course, particularly when the evil one masquerades as an
angel of
light and we find ourselves tempted in the form of something that seems
a
greater good. The Spirit of God who led Jesus into the wilderness now
draws
him into an intense season of interior struggle in order to root and
ground
him in his newfound belovedness in such a way that he will be able to
discern the way forward and resist the various tugs and pulls and ever
present seductions to satisfy ego at the expense of vocation.

How easy it would have been in what lay before him for Jesus to have
become
enslaved to the expectations of the crowd lining the way and waving
palms as
he rode into Jerusalem. How easy it would have been for Jesus to have
succumbed to Peter's rebuke as Jesus spoke of the suffering he was to
undergo. How natural it would have been for him to have railed against
heaven, resisted his belovedness, and given in to bitterness and
self-pity
as he encountered rejection, misunderstanding, misrepresentation, overt
hostility, and, in many ways, failure.

Because Jesus fully shared our humanity he had to face and come to terms
not
only with his capacity for light, but his capacity for darkness and
disorder
as well. The whole range of human possibilities existed within him. He
was,
as the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews tells us, "tempted in every
way
as we are..."

"Unawareness is the root of all evil," observed a 4th century follower
of
Jesus. This desert monastic was one of those who chose to make the
wilderness his home. They went to the desert in order to be
dis-illusioned
-- that is stripped of illusion. And thus, unshielded by fig leaves,
they
were confronted by the naked truth of the human heart and the various
movements within it: movements which can thwart and undermine the
realization of God's unbounded love and justness and compassion in our
lives
and our relationships with others.

"In the desert the air is purer, the sky is more open and God is
closer,"
observed Origen, another early veteran of the wilderness.

And so it is that Jesus is led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to
be
tempted by the devil. Here Mark adds, "and he was with the wild beasts."
These were not just the wild beasts that inhabited the wilderness but
the
wild beasts that prowl about within our own human nature: aggression,
grandiosity, anger, revenge, fear, despair, self-pity. We are familiar
with
these beasts. Jesus in the wilderness had to come face-to-face with the
various dimensions and potentialities of his own psyche: those that
would
both lead him more deeply into the demands of his belovedness, and those
that would draw him into himself.

In the wilderness Jesus had to acknowledge and welcome and befriend what
the
Anglican mystic William Law describes as the dark guest: which is the
shadow
side of our human nature. "When rightly known and rightly dealt with,"
Law
tells us, "[the dark guest] can as well be made the foundation of Heaven
as
it is of Hell."

In other words, the task of the Spirit in the life of Jesus -- and in
our
lives as well -- is to lead us into truth: the truth of our belovedness,
and
the truth of those dimensions of our humanity which if denied or
unacknowledged can play havoc with what we like to believe is our nobler
and
truer self. In the wilderness Jesus is brought face-to-face with the
heights
and depths of his own humanity. He comes to realize that even though he
is
the Beloved Son of God he is capable of collusion with the wild beasts
of
his human nature. He was not simply to reject these beasts, but to
welcome,
befriend, integrate and own them as parts of himself.

This was for him a preparation: in what lay ahead he would be obliged
again
and again to recognize the insistent presence of his own human neediness
and
wrestle anew with the emotions and urges that overtook him at the very
heart
of his desire to do the will of the Father and to accomplish his work.
The
most dramatic instance of this struggle is Jesus' prayer in the Garden
of
Gethsemane: "My Father, if it is possible let this cup pass from me; yet
not
what I want but what you want."

Here every urge toward self-preservation raged and voices cried out
within
him: Save yourself; this can't be what the One who loves you and
delights in
you truly desires. As he struggled, Jesus sought to situate his anguish
and
his doubts within the awareness of the Father's love for him, and his
own
answering love.

Without the self knowledge and the awareness of the spirits that moved
within him, which were the fruit of his 40-day sojourn in the
wilderness,
Jesus the man might well have fled from the garden, animated by the
logic of
self-preservation. Instead he chose another way, a way that cost him
everything, including his very life -- a way that confirmed the
paradoxical
truth of his own words: those who want to save their life will lose it,
and
those who lose their life for the sake of the gospel -- that is for the
sake
of God's loving desire for the world -- will find it.

We ourselves, in our own ways, are often the prisoners of our own wild
beasts, and the stratagem of the evil one is to keep us unaware and
unknowing. In a state of self-deception we assume that our motives are
noble
and pure, without recognizing that we are animated by the unacknowledged
dark guest within us. Left to our own devices, we have little sense that
our
perspective is distorted, false, or partial. Aggression, revenge,
grandiosity, fear, selfishness are unacknowledged or masked by a
rhetoric of
virtue that compounds our self-deception.

Within the life of our church we can see how a sense of belovedness can
turn
in upon itself and become an isolating self-regard that can be easily
threatened and manifest itself as hostile defensiveness. Such isolation
and
defensiveness can belong to any party or point of view but in all cases
such
defensiveness tears us apart rather than brings us together.

And so it is that God's loving Spirit leads us up, and occasionally
drives
us out into the wilderness -- away from our securities and certitudes,
our
firm opinions about ourselves and the world around us. A breach is made
within us and we find ourselves undefended in the face of forces that
threaten to undo us - forces not simply outside ourselves, but within
ourselves as well. Our reactions and responses to what presses upon us
often
reveal to us aspects of ourselves that we are loathe to acknowledge.

Such moments of potential awareness, as painful as they may be, are a
gift,
a gift from the Spirit who Jesus tells us will lead us into all truth,
including the truth about ourselves. This gift is not given in order to
weigh us down but rather to set us free from illusion.

"For freedom Christ has set us free," Paul tells us -- free in the
knowledge
of our belovedness in the eyes of God, a belovedness which enfolds and
contains all aspects of our humanity, and makes it possible for us to
befriend the dark guest who is always present within us, as he was
within
Jesus.

In the liturgy for Ash Wednesday we are invited "to the observance of a
holy
Lent." This means that we, not only individually but together as a
community
of faith, a church, are called with Jesus to go out into the wilderness
--
into that open space of encounter where the air is purer, the sky more
open
and God in the full force of God's purifying and transforming love is
ready
to woo us and speak to our hearts. How different our life as a church
can
be, and what a healing and hopeful gift it can be for the world around
us,
as we live evermore out of a deep knowing of our belovedness, and in a
sober
awareness of the ways in which belovedness can turn in upon itself.

As Episcopalians shaped by the Anglican tradition of common prayer it is
in
our worship that we find ourselves and one another bound together
through
baptism in the risen body of Christ, a body whose life force is the love
poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. Week by week that same
self-giving love draws us out of ourselves by becoming one with us.
"This is
my body; this is my blood. Take, eat, drink. I in you and you in me."
Over
time and through many wildernesses illusion gives way to truth and
awareness
replaces unknowing. And in the fullness of our humanity, with all its
complexity and the interplay of light and darkness -- a humanity Jesus
knew
as well -- we find ourselves drawn forward into Christ's own urgent
desire
to reconcile, to restore, to heal and to make all things whole.

Therefore may we, dear brothers and sisters, as individuals, and as a
church, be so drawn. May we as individuals, and as a church, be faithful
to
this call such that we together give ourselves to God's own work of
reconciling, restoring, healing and making all things whole.

Glory to God, whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we
can
ask or imagine.

Amen

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