St. Martin's Episcopal Church

Are We There Yet?!

By the Reverend Shirley Smith Graham

February 10, 2008, St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, Williamsburg, VA

Either as a child or as a parent, we’ve all experienced the family road-trip. As adults who endure long drives, we have the ability to be mature and manage our expectations – well, for the most part.  So then, as adults, we can put up with the boredom, the monotony, the sleepiness of a long car trip.  But children have not yet perfected those coping mechanisms.  So, on a road trip, one might be 550 miles, or 55 miles, down the road and hear from the backseat the plaintive cry, “Are we there yet?!”

            The season of Lent has a lot of uses. One of Lent’s uses is to remind us that we’re not there yet.  As a people in a cultural context where we like to race to the finish-line, check things off our list, and get on with business, it’s helpful to be reminded that we’re not yet at our destination spiritually, that the life of God’s grace has more to unfold to us.

            Salvation, after all, is not a one-shot deal.  Even though it’s popular to talk about being saved as happening in a moment, or having a conversion experience, there’s another way to see life with God.  Being saved, being salved, being healed, being made to be at-one-with-God is more than a moment but a life-time, an eternal life-time of experience, a timeline that extends even beyond our mortal lives. So I invite us today to think about salvation not so much as an toggle switch is either up or down, or an “A/B” switch, which is either turned to the A position for “saved” or the B position for “unsaved.”  Rather, I invite us to reclaim from our Christian tradition and old teaching that conversion, that learning to dwell at the heart of God with God, is an ongoing practice, called, in fact “on-going conversion.”

            Our gospel lesson certainly makes more sense if we abandon the “A/B switch” model of salvation and look at a process of ongoing conversion.  You’ll remember that immediately after the baptism of Jesus, immediately after that wondrous experience of Jesus hearing from heaven, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased,” the Holy Spirit leads Jesus into the wilderness, where he experiences temptation.  (And, by the way, this is the moment that, if we ever doubted it, we realize that Jesus is truly human as well as being truly God.  Isn’t that just like our own lives, that we sometimes find ourselves going from the highest high to an intensely difficult desert experience?)

            People have puzzled for centuries about why this story even exists in our Bible.  If Jesus is God, then what’s the usefulness of showing him being tempted?  If he is perfect and not going to sin, then why do we need a dramatic moment illustrating that he isn’t sinning?  But that’s “A/B switch thinking,” presupposing that the moment of salvation is over in an instant instead of getting lived throughout one’s life.

            In this story of the enemy trying to tempt Jesus, I hear not the forgone conclusion that of course he will overcome temptation, but a sense of real encounter and struggle.  The temptation come after 40 long days and nights, in the wilderness, without human comforts.  Jesus is hungry and worn thin.  His mind must have been in that twilight zone that people who have not eaten for 40 days inhabit.  After 30 days, a person’s body is consuming it’s own resources to live, and after 40 systems begin to shut down.  Jesus is living on the twilight edge of mortal life.

            And the enemy appears.  The enemy appears and tosses Jesus three temptations in rapid succession:

• Make bread, so that neither you nor anyone else need ever be hungry again.
• Be careless with your life, because you know, even after a self-destructive act, you can choose to live.
• Claim all the people, powers and principalities of the world as your own.

[unpack]

            And, of course, these invitations of the enemy are tempting because Jesus does indeed have the power to do them.  As divine Son of God, Jesus does have the power to make bread from stones, throw himself down and be lifted up by the angels, to call all the world his own.  He has legitimate claim to these power.  Yet, the ultimate temptation is being tempted to reveal himself as God in these acts of power, instead of revealing himself as God in acts of healing and serving – the way he chooses after rejecting the powerful acts of the temptation.  God chooses to reveal himself in Jesus as One who serves and heals, pouring God’s own life out for the life of the world, not by building empire and lording power over others.  And this way that God chooses, the way of healing and serving, takes time, and is not over in a moment.

            Are we there yet?  Well, no.  Our God chose a way of revealing that would take time and ongoing relationship with people.  So then, there’s little surprise that our call to follow God also takes us on this path of time and ongoing relationship with people.

            So, who can help us better understand this ongoing work of salvation, or healing, of the life with God?  John Calvin is particularly helpful.  You may remember that John Calvin lived in the 16^th Century, and was a French preacher whose most famous ministry happened in Geneva.  Calvin’s work combined with that of Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli gave reference points to the long, slow and often painful movement of the Reformation of the Christian faith in the 16^th Century.  Calvin referred to the way of salvation that takes time as the Christian’s call to ongoing conversion.  In a way that I find compelling, he taught that conversion, while initially starting in a moment, a moment such as the one wee see in Jesus’ baptism or Chuck Colson’s prison experience, is a long-term process that we’re called to work at; that our lives, if lived well, will be a book that tells of a series of conversion moments and experiences.

            In the ancient culture of the Celts of Scotland and Ireland, the image for this work of ongoing conversion is the spiral.  Instead of life with God being a linear path, that starts at point A, makes a straight path along the most efficient route, and ends at point B (like some Roman road), life with God is more like a spiral, where the journey traveled invites us to turn at many point of our journey, and the multiple invitations to turn cause us to circle back to places that seem like ones we’ve been in before but yet, when we get there, offer new opportunities for growth, different experiences of the Holy One, new encounters of spiritual intimacy with our companions on the road.

            Now, I’m speaking of ongoing conversion and the spiral that represents it as a positive thing.  But, of course, sometimes we are tired, worn or discouraged, and the last thing we want to do is take one more circuit ‘round the spiral.  Sometimes our souls feel tired, and we’re tempted to cry out, “Are we there yet?!”  The last message we want to hear is that God is calling us to turn again, to return again to Him in a new way, to keep walking the spiral.  The American-born, British poet T.S. Eliot expresses this in his poem “Ash Wednesday.”

“Because I do not hope to turn again

Because I do not hope

Because I do not hope to turn …

Because I cannot hope to turn again.”

            The poet is tempted to renounce the voice of God that calls him into the wilderness again, that calls him into the next cycle of his ongoing conversion.  Even though the poet knows that the next turn will bring him into life with God in a new way, he resists making the circuit, as he’s exhausted and discouraged by the things he has seen in life.  “Are we there, yet?”

            But, like Jesus, the poet resists succumbing to temptation.  He knows the work of turning will take effort, but he also knows that God is there, in the spiral.  And the final part of the poem is spent in him talking himself out of the temptation of stopping the journey and talking himself into making another turn in the spiral of journey with God.

“Although I do not hope to turn again

Although I do not hope

Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss

In this brief transit where the dreams cross

The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying

(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things

…

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices

In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices

And the weak spirit quickens to rebel …

This is the time of tension between dying and birth.”

This is where the story of the temptation of Jesus makes sense to us.  We have the power to decide not to act, not to accept God’s invitation to turn toward him, to refuse to summon up the strength to turn again.  But refusing to turn again would be giving in to temptation, instead of giving in to God’s invitation to a holy Lent.  Amen.