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SERMONS

First Sunday of Lent
February 10, 2008

By The Rev. Alston Johnson

Matthew 4.1-11

“You know that prayer is certainly one of the most useless, if not the most useless activity that we might imagine . . .”

When I heard that I put my pen down, and looked up at our retreat leader. He was a fifty-ish, spectacled, disheveled, Benedictine monk, probably had not bathed in two days, wearing Birken stocks without socks with bread crumbs on his black robe. He was leading us in a Lenten silent retreat. With a little grin he said, “Good prayer - it’s mostly useless.”

It stopped me in my tracks because I felt it was like someone saying that baseball, hotdogs and apple pie were pointless on the fourth of July.

It was Lent. This was a silent retreat. He was a monk; someone who gets up often at midnight and four in the morning to say prayers - not to mention the seven prayer periods during his day. He was someone who had read, traveled, and written widely about prayer. For him to say that prayer was useless was like saying that his life was useless.

After he had our attention, Brother Andrew went on to say that according to the rules of common sense and utility that govern most of our lives, good prayer never promises to be useful to the fulfillment of us achieving our ends.

The point he was making is that at the level of ground zero of human existence as lived by the rules that work in this world, prayer offers little weight in the scales; it has difficulty justifying its usefulness, its utility.

It does not guarantee a financial return, it does not guarantee success, it does not conquer as a useful means to worldly ends. As a tool in the toolbox of achieving purely material gains, prayer is of questionable value, as opposed to, let’s say, education, physical beauty, political savvy, or business sense.

And as someone whose daily life is shaped by regular periods of prayer, it took me a moment, but I knew exactly what the monk meant; not because I have transcended the rules of this world, but because of the opposite; I too know what it means to succumb to them.

One of the double binds that ministers and priests find themselves facing is the temptation of taking every inner directed moment and mining from it some nugget of gold that might be shared or “marketed” in the interest of the “ministry.”

It is the temptation of taking the consolations and insights cultivated in the inner temple of the heart consecrated to God, and then dusting them off, or dressing them up, as something that might be hawked out in the marketplace of the spirit; in a sermon or a teachable moment; not for the sake of furthering the Gospel, as much as fending off the ever present demand to be fresh, creative, and a celebrity of things spiritual.

And it is not just a double bind for the clergy, I know that it is true in other professions and lines of work as well; where ostensibly we offer service to others as a means of gaining something for ourselves. It is the old problem of doing the right things, but doing the right things for the wrong reasons.

After his baptism, Jesus goes to the Ground Zero of his own soul in the Wilderness. While Jesus is in the Wilderness doing battle with himself, he meets the one who will be perhaps his most constant companion, other than the Father and the Holy Spirit, throughout the Gospels.

{As Sylvia said eloquently last week, it has become unfashionable to speak of sin as a reality in and of itself; we prefer to speak of it in terms of psychiatric health and wellness. Some would chalk up the Devil, Satan, to the shadowy side of children’s stories . . .something to put away once we have a more enlightened and sophisticated view of life.

However, we are not so sophisticated in our own tradition. If you turn to page 306 in the BCP, you will find the name of the one Jesus meets with a capital S. This is the one that Jesus goes out to meet for us in the Wilderness. In the Wilderness Jesus meets one who will walk with him every step of his earthly journey - but not as a friend.}

Notice that each invitation Satan offers to Jesus invites Jesus to whet the edge of his prayer and devotion with the purpose of “getting something” as a result of his having a relationship with God. It is really one invitation - a compromising of God’s scripturally prescribed “means” in order to achieve our desirable “ends.”

The spiritual writer Henri Nouwen summarizes them as the desire to be relevant, spectacular, and powerful.

“Apply this relationship to achieve some useful end.”

“You are hungry, you need bread, get it - feed the people, yourself - do something useful and relevant with your power don’t be useless.”

“You are alone and vulnerable, you need power over others, get it - you have a relationship with God - do something spectacular and capture them.”

“You are a king without a kingdom, just glance in my direction, and have it; have all the kingdoms - do something useful, become powerful.”

“Just turn a little corner in your mind Jesus, and you can have anything and everything. Make your relationship to God useful.”

And so the worm turns in our minds and our hearts. My friends if it seems like a hard thing to grasp, that is because it is. Anyone who has spent even a moment in the midst of such a tangled web of the heart and the will knows that Jesus is a champion by not succumbing to the old problem of compromising God’s means to achieve our own ends.

It has always seemed to me that our Father in heaven has never promised to us that we will not face hard choices in this life; I have never heard an allusion in Scripture to being saved from having to choose, from having to face temptation. Rather, the promise seems to be that when we are in that Wilderness, that we do not have to choose alone.

When we would turn that corner in our minds away from God, there is the promise of help to keep us from losing our way; because Jesus has gone ahead for us.

Jesus does not forsake righteous “means” in order to achieve an unrighteous “ends”. Jesus does not make himself useful in the means of the world, and thereby make himself useless in the purposes of God.

No, Jesus, in this moment of temptation would rather be God’s holy fool, a useless vessel, so that He might become useful to God, and therefore become of ultimate use to us . . . He forsakes the comfort of having bread from stones for a day - so that He might give to us forever and always bread that is his flesh that is our path and our doorway to freedom and peace and everlasting life. Thanks be to God.