“Vision
Quest”
Matthew 4:1-11
First Presbyterian
The
Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
Sacrament
of Holy Communion & Ordination and Installation of Elders
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The gospel reading today makes
it sound as if Jesus is out in the wilderness alone wrestling with satanic
temptations. But he is not alone, is
he? I know I am out there.
I am so often there. Do you
ever find yourself taking up residence for a time in that desert of the Spirit
that bids you come so that you can try to understand your life, so that you can
contend with the voices that would prevent you from being your most true and
authentic self? I hope you do.
Mary Oliver, in her poem
entitled The Journey, suggests that there comes a time or times in our
lives when we must bear the full force of those voices, but then listen to the
one voice in us that is deeper still.
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice –
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world
determined to do
the only thing you could do –
determined to save
the only life you could save.
“Satan” is a linguistic
personification of all and everything that stands against, obstructs, or resists
what God intends for human life, and for our lives.
Surely God intends for each of us to live into the fullness of who we
are. It is easier not to do that, of
course. It is easier simply to go
along in order to get along. It is
easier not to act on the claims and calls on our lives that require us to
relinquish the present forms and structures of our lives, relationships, or
plans. It is easier to acquiesce to
socially cultivated “shoulds” and “oughts” than to risk the upheaval and
umbrage that come with upsetting dominant social conventions and thereby
disturbing the equilibrium of other peoples’ lives that would be affected by
doing so.
Longstanding tradition suggests
that we give up something for Lent. But
most of us could give up many things and still not notice any dramatic
difference in our lives. What if,
instead, for Lent, we embarked on a vision quest concerning our lives?
That might cost us something as we quiet ourselves sufficiently
and struggle significantly to hear the voice that lodges most deeply within us,
the voice beyond all the other voices that constantly vie and compete for our
attention and allegiance, the voice that is at once the voice that gives
expression to our truest self and the voice of God’s Spirit speaking to us.
The scripture the church assigns
for the first Sunday in Lent every year pictures Jesus on a vision quest.
In the passage of scripture that immediately precedes the one we have
read this morning, Jesus was being baptized and Matthew says that “…just
as Jesus came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he
saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him.
And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I
am well pleased.’” Jesus
sought to figure out in his vision quest what it would mean for him to uphold
the “family name,” so to speak, as he felt called to do, and how to do it,
how to live with the heart, intention, and will of God, how to walk, in the
words of the twenty-third psalm, “…in paths of righteousness for God’s
name’s sake.”
The powerful voices with which Jesus contended on his vision quest wanted to plant and water the seeds of doubt in Jesus. They wanted to distract, divert, and re-direct him from the road he felt deeply called to travel. They wanted to lure him away from living into the life to which he sensed he was being called by offering him convincing and compelling, but ultimately soul-deadening, alternatives.
The
satanic voices in our lives are not the ones that would have us do some evil or
despicable act. We are not normally
tempted by such voices. But we are
tempted, regularly, by voices that ask us to live in the dark house of fear.
We are tempted, regularly, by voices that ask us to sacrifice our passion
and joy in order to be dutifully compliant to someone else’s needs or notions.
We are tempted to believe and act according to the voices that tell us we
are not good enough, smart enough, eloquent enough, or talented enough to be and
to do what we feel called to be and to do. So
we stick to well-worn, if ultimately unsatisfying, ways like the recently
liberated Israelites of old who clamored to return to the minimal securities of
slavery in Egypt because they could not imagine or trust the freedom that
awaited them if they navigated their wilderness.
While
vision quests usually are personal in nature, it is possible for a group to
engage in a vision quest in relation to its shared and common life.
The Session of our congregation will begin to do that this afternoon as
it seeks to discern and to listen to the Spirit’s voice that sounds beyond all
the other voices that would have us be tame, tardy, timid, or tepid about being
the church in these difficult and challenging times, beyond all the other voices
that would busy us with maintaining the forms of religion but not knowing the
power of it.
I
hope that Lent can be for you this year not simply a progression of days on a
calendar but an opportunity for you, like Jesus, to keep intentional company
with the Spirit of God and to come face to face with the voices in your life,
both within and without, that would keep you from living fully into your life.
It was St. Irenaeus who said that “the glory of God is a human being
fully alive.” If you do not
sense yourself to be in these days fully alive and engaged, then it is time, no
matter your age or circumstances, and with the guiding power of God’s Spirit,
to find out why and to begin to amend your life.
“Now,” says
Amen.
© Copyright First Presbyterian Church 2008