Temptation and Identity
A Sermon for Lent 1
February 26, 2023
The Rev. Dr. Pamela Dolan
Texts used: Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7, Romans 5:12-19, Matthew 4:1-11
Lead us not into temptation. This line from the traditional version of the Lord’s Prayer is one of those stock phrases in the English language, something that rolls off the tongue without much thought. It has even become the setup for jokes. The writer Rita Mae Brown once quipped, “Lead me not into temptation; I can find the way myself.”
Both today’s Old Testament reading and our Gospel passage are archetypal stories about temptation, so mythic in scope that they can be a little hard to relate to. There is something pretty grandiose, operatic even, about these temptations stories. Maybe you have had one big, defining moment of temptation in your life, one make-or-break decision that divides your story into a before and after, whether you succumbed to that temptation or managed to resist it. For most of us, though, I think temptation is more mundane, although also more insidious. Rather than some catastrophic test that we fail utterly, it’s usually a series of little things, the habits of thought and behavior we fall into almost without noticing, that can become the real path of temptation.
It’s like hitting the snooze button on your morning alarm. Doing it once, to get five more minutes of sleep, is no big deal. But do it again and again and you will find yourself in a horrible scramble to get your day started, rushing around to make it to your first class or the office on time. Worse, you probably will not even feel that much more rested, and you’ll spend much of the rest of your day kicking yourself for not just getting up when the alarm first went off. In my experience, at least, most of the time when I give in to temptation I end up feeling like that—vaguely disappointed with myself and dissatisfied with the way things worked out.
Today’s passages, though, deal with the “big T” kind of temptations. When the lectionary pairs the story of Adam and Eve in the garden with the story of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness, we tend to see them as inextricably linked, one an echo and a response to the other. Paul’s letter to the Romans certainly makes the case that Jesus, by resisting temptation and living a life without sin, managed to reverse the consequences of the Fall, the original sin that Adam and Eve brought into the world through their disobedience. That interpretation has influenced Christian theology down through the centuries, and I’m not about to argue against it today. But I do think it can become a kind of pat answer, a tidy comparison that might stop us from looking more deeply at how these passages can speak us in our own lives today.
Instead of thinking about these stories as being about disobedience and obedience, I’d like us to explore what they have to say about identity, specifically our identity in relation to God. Let’s look at the story of Adam and Eve first. One constant temptation for human beings is to want to put ourselves in God’s place, to think that we can know what God knows or exert God-like power. The serpent puts it in such straightforward and alluring terms to Adam and Eve: “Your eyes will be open and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” That darn serpent! He couldn’t let them leave well enough alone. Tending and caring for the garden was a bit job—but couldn’t they do even more? Why just care for the tree and enjoy its beauty, when in fact it could be used for a far greater good—to make them wise!
Like all truly insidious temptations, this sounds like such a good thing. What could possibly be wrong with wanting wisdom, wanting to understand good and evil, wanting to plumb that deepest mystery of the universe. Well, goodness, where do we start? Literature, art, and history are chock-full of stories of how that longing to be like God, to play God, can go terribly wrong. Frankenstein, Jurassic Park, Dr. Strangelove, are just a few titles that come to mind—not to mention basically nearly every arch-villain in nearly every Marvel movie ever made.
The truth is, of course, that we are not God—a truth that, properly understood, can definitely set us free. Recognizing that only God is perfect, and that we are not God, sets us free from the painful and endless quest for perfection that squeezes so much of the joy out of life. There is something incredibly liberating about accepting our limits, our dependence, our finitude. As Kate Bowler so aptly puts it, “We are just one of many in a long line of imperfect yet deeply loved children of God.”
That is our identity—imperfect yet deeply loved children of God. Thinking that somehow that’s not good enough, or not what we deserve, or just not enough, is one of the great lies that tempts us away from lives of gratitude and contentment and into lives of resentment, of striving, of scarcity and bitterness.
The temptations that Jesus faces in the wilderness also have to do with identity and self-understanding, but push in a somewhat different direction. Satan cleverly begins the first two temptations with the bullying phrase: “If you are the Son of God.” If can be such a cutting word, so good at planting seeds of doubt in our hearts. Can’t you just hear the echoes of a playground taunt: “Oh yeah? You think you’re so special? Then prove it!”
Rather than drawing on our delusions of grandeur and desire for perfectibility, that hidden impulse to be like God, these temptations draw on another deeply human affliction: our fear that we are not good enough, that we don’t deserve to be seen as children of God. We sell ourselves short. We can’t quite believe that we are enough, just as we are, and so we seek to prove ourselves worthy through our own good works, our achievements, our badges of honor and respect.
At some point or another, I think most of us hear that niggling voice that leads us into temptation by asking, “If you are…”
If you are really so smart—shouldn’t more people notice?. If you are so good at your job—isn’t it about time you got a promotion, instead of all those other guys who are moving on up? If you are such a caring parent—then how come your teenager is always in trouble? If you are really such a loving spouse—wouldn’t you be having fun all the time, like all those other couples on Instagram? If you are such a good Christian—shouldn’t you be signing up for more committees, or running the food pantry or something? And on and on and on.
God says “enough” to those ifs. No more! We are loved with our imperfections. We don’t have to achieve or atone or impress our way into God’s favor. In fact, God desires nothing so much as for us to lean into God’s love for and delight in us.
This might sound like new-age psychology, like just another attempt to paper over the messiness of our lives and improve our self-esteem. It’s not that. Lent is about nothing if it’s not about honesty and self-awareness. I’m not saying that we’re not broken or messed up. I’m not saying that God doesn’t have any expectations for what we do with our lives. God called Adam and Eve to be tend and care for the Earth and to serve as companions to one another. God called Jesus into ministry through his Baptism. God places those same calls on our lives. We are all called to be good stewards of the earth and to be good companions to the people God places in our lives. We are all called into ministry through our baptisms. And we’re far more likely to answer those calls effectively and faithfully if we’re not trying to play God or wallowing in our own unworthiness.
Believing that we are loved just as we are doesn’t mean we don’t have any work to do. It actually means that we are more likely to do that work, and less likely to fall into temptation, because we are clear about our identity, about who and whose we are. When we stop fighting our impulses to control, to perfect, and to do it ourselves, we become free to notice all the ways that God is right there with us, even sending angels to help us live into our calling, and to attend to our weariness, our loneliness, and our pain. May we feel the presence of those angels all around us this Lent, reminding us that we are God’s imperfect yet deeply loved children just as we are—and that is enough.
Amen.
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