Maybe it’s the fact that it’s always so encouraging to read about how Jesus faced very real and very human temptations.  I think we sometimes forget that.  Or, even if we intellectually acknowledge it, it’s still so easy to think that Jesus got a pass on really being tempted, like he only got the churchy or sanitized temptations, like skipping the blessing at dinner one night or forgetting to take his tithe to church one Sunday, something like that.  Surely Jesus didn’t face our temptations.  He wasn’t even married so how could he possibly know?  Surely he never faced anything like lusting after a fellow office worker who not only looks so very good but also keeps saying just the right thing every day or downloading Internet porn or cheating on taxes or taking one too many drinks at the end of a long day, every day.  Jesus never faced what we face, right?

This chapter in his life’s story pretty much dispels that myth.  And, maybe if we read this story every day it would make us more willing to talk to Jesus about our fellow office workers or our addictions or the IRS, the stuff that really tempts us.  The writer of Hebrews was very emphatic about Jesus’ humanity.  “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one in every respect has been tested as we are, yet was without sin (Hebrews 4:15).”

Nonetheless, we don’t like to think of those who tell us about God as being very human.  It’s like the first time we discover how human our parents are; it’s such a let down.  We want our preachers, too, to be a little human, just not too much.  Hiding our humanity can be a real obstacle to being an effective parent and a good pastor, but only if we buy into the myth others would make of us.  People don’t want to see our feet of clay and, too often, we’re willing to not give them what they don’t want. 

One of the first steps toward a loss of integrity preachers ever take, long before you hear about them stealing money from the church or stealing someone’s wife, is when they buy into the temptation of believing that they only have power to influence people as long as they stay hidden behind the church curtain pulling the levers that keep the smoke blowing and the mirrors angling just so.  When Toto got loose from Dorothy and pulled the curtain back, it was such a letdown to discover that the Wizard of Oz was just a man.  Too often, we preachers live in fear that someone might pull the curtain back and discover that we are just one of them.  As though hiding our clay feet makes them less like the oversized clods of dirt we keep tripping over and as though our attempts at discussing the mysteries of God only have meaning if we keep ourselves a mystery.  And, even when some of us want to pull the curtain back on ourselves and come out and celebrate being a part of God’s faith community, some people can’t take it and try to cover us back up. 

God is not so inclined to be hidden.  He was so interested in us knowing him that he not only pulled the curtain of heaven back on himself in order to reveal his glory through creation, he put on some clay feet himself and walked around among us for just over thirty years.  I’m a size twelve.  I’m not sure what size Jesus was, but Florsheim would have been able to fit him somewhere off the rack. 

There’s something else about this story that keeps intriguing me.  This is only the fourth chapter of the gospel of Luke.  Jesus, God in the flesh, gets his full humanity out front right up front.  He experiences virtually every human emotion we ever experience and, in this chapter of his life, his humanity is graphic.  What’s that about?  Why is it so important to God that, right up front, the first thing he wants to do is dispel the myth that Jesus got a pass on temptation and so he let him get clobbered by Satan himself, out in the wilderness?  Why is it so important that we know that Jesus walked in feet like ours and in the same places we stumble when we try to walk in these clay clods we call feet?  What’s that about?

My brother-in-law emailed me this week about a minister’s son who had just gotten his driver’s permit.  I couldn’t help but wonder if his story had a hidden meaning.  Maybe you’ll see it.  It goes like this.  After the young man got his permit, he asked his dad if he could borrow the car.  Dad said, “I’ll make a deal with you.  You bring up your grades, study your Bible a little more and get your hair cut and then we’ll talk about you driving my car.”  A month later his son came back.  He’d done everything his dad asked except one.  He’d gotten his grades up and even read his Bible more often.  But, he hadn’t cut his hair.  He said, “Dad, you know, in reading the Bible, I figured that Moses had long hair and Samson did for sure and Jesus probably did.”  His dad replied, “Yes.  And, everywhere they went, they walked.”

And, everywhere Jesus went, he walked in feet just like ours and stepped right into temptation just like we do.  Three of the four gospel writers made certain to include this story in their version of Jesus’ life and all of them, Matthew, Mark and Luke, place the story early in their gospels.  If we’re going to walk with Jesus in order to discover what he has to tell us about God, that walk will begin with following his very human footsteps right through the middle of the most crucial temptations any of us will ever face.

If you’re like me, you’ve never had a personal conversation with Satan.  I’ve had some conversations that made me wonder!  But, as far as I know, Satan has never pulled up a chair at my table and asked for a cup of coffee.  And, I’ve never been offered the world as the grand prize at the circus of sin or felt tempted to bungee jump off the highest point in town, without the bungee, just to impress others.  I will say that Nancy and I have learned that we do much better when we never have a conversation about anything of real significance until after we’ve had a good meal.  There’s something about low blood sugar that makes for bad conversational chemistry.  Jesus had been fasting for forty days.  At his blood sugar’s lowest level, along comes Satan offering him what he offers you and me, every day, on some level.

Resource.  Satan came to Jesus and “said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.’ Jesus answered him, ‘It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’”  Matthew recorded Jesus as also saying, “‘but by

every word that comes from the mouth of God (Matthew 4:4).’” 

When my boys were first born, I remember wondering how I would ever be able to stand the thought of them leaving home someday.  I’ve been watching you real closely whose children have left for college the last couple of years, wondering how I’d pull off turning lose of my sons.  Then, as time has flown, I’ve discovered that God has this wonderful plan for giving parents the ability to let go of their children.  He lets them turn eighteen.  And, before that, seventeen.  And, before that, sixteen.  By the time they turn eighteen, if my sons don’t leave home, I may have to.  Isn’t God brilliant?!

Of late, however, the sentimentality of letting go of them has begun to give way to a greater concern.  How well have I prepared them for the day when I’m not there to tell them how to live when they have to be their own parent?  I’ve given up on teaching them how to make their beds and pick up dirty socks off the floor.  I figure that’s what marriage is for.  But, by example and instruction, have I taught them how to pray and read the Bible for themselves?  What have I given them that will keep them connected to an eternal source beyond their earthly father?  What have they learned from me about what it means to trust God for everything they’ll ever need, living in interdependent relationship with God and not just trusting their own ingenuity and wit? 

“You’re hungry, Jesus.  Just use your power to turn this world into a private banquet table.  Gorge yourself on what you can make of it,” Satan suggested.  That’s not just a temptation we face when our blood sugar is low.  It’s a temptation we face every single day, to see the world as nothing more than our private playground, a place to indulge our every wish and slake every thirst and feed every hunger. 

What is your resource?  Someone once said that character is what we are when no one is looking.  Jesus was out in the wilderness.  No one was looking.  His parents were gone.  His Home Team wasn’t going to meet for at least forty days.  Who would have known if he’d played a little magic trick for Satan and dipped his bucket in another well?  When no one is looking, when the door is closed and the phone is turned off, what do we turn to for relief, to restock and re-energize?  What is your resource?  Down in the deepest caverns of your heart, in that lonely place that knows only your footprints, who are you really trusting to get you through the next twenty-four hours?  Down there, is there any dialogue with God or are you just depending on the magic you can work to get through the next day?  Of course, Jesus never dealt with that, right?!

Ownership.  Our fathers and grandfathers may have had to respond to the challenges of Nazism and socialism.  The headlines today would tempt us to think that our greatest fear should be terrorism.  I’ve actually wanted you to be more concerned about religious fundamentalism than most of you seem to want to be.  It’s doing far more to dismantle Christian education where our future ministers are being trained than any terrorist could possibly hope to achieve and I do well to get a congregational yawn when I say that.  Recently, a good friend suggested that I consider worrying more about another “ism.”  He may be right. 

It may well be that, when the history of this generation is written, it will tell that the greatest temptation we faced, even in the church, was not any force of evil that came from without, but the cancer of materialism that eats at us from within.  On a day to day level, it may be that the cancer of materialism, the driving passion to own, control, possess and devour as much of this world as we can bite off and chew for the sheer pleasure of it, is as threatening to our spiritual health as any other “ism” that ever was.  Of course, Jesus wouldn’t know anything about that, right?  Or, did he?  Looking out on the world, Satan said to Jesus, “If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.” 

When Nancy and I were in Fredericksburg, Virginia last fall, we toured the Rising Sun Tavern, a colonial-era inn once owned by George Washington’s brother.  In the colonial days, when a traveler stopped for the night, the innkeeper would offer him a chew off a twisted chord of tobacco, something like a small piece of rope.  Because the innkeeper based his charge on how much the traveler bit off, travelers had to be careful not to “bite off more than they could chew.”  At the end of long, exhausting days, when our houses feel more like motels than homes and we’ve spent more time with our “clients” than with our children because someone told us that, if we worked this hard, we could own the world, doesn’t the gospel make us stop and ask whether we’ve bitten off more than we can chew?  Jesus could have had it all.  But, what would it have cost him, and us, if he’d bitten off more than he could chew? 

Every single moment of every single day, the gospel, the witness of Jesus’ own struggle with temptation, invites us to re-evaluate what we value and how we live, where our clay feet touch the ground, even in the church.  One writer puts it this way.  “The hallowed concept of private ownership is being confronted by the biblical concept of stewardship.  Conservative Christianity has become the happy mistress of capitalism that enshrines private ownership.  Private ownership and private enterprise are defended by many conservative Christians as vigorously as the doctrine of the Trinity or salvation by grace.”  Yet, “for increasing numbers” of believers, “words like private (meaning autonomous personal and individual), ownership (meaning autonomous, personal, individual control over projects that use God’s world for our purposes) seem to fly in the face of kingdom values.  Values such as community . . . fellowship . . . and mission (meaning our participation in God’s projects in God’s world for God’s purposes) (Brian McLaren, “Consider the Turtles of the Field,” Sojourners, March 2004, pp. 16, 18).”  Jesus put it this way.  “‘It is written, Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’”  If we don’t answer the temptation of materialism the way Jesus did, do we own our stuff, or does it own us?

Identity.  Browning Ware once wrote about a ritual his mother would go through every time he left the house during his teenage years.  She almost always wished he dressed a little nicer but she also almost always slipped a crumpled dollar bill into his hand, back when a dollar could still buy a night’s fun.  And, every single time, she repeated these exact words.  “‘Remember, son, always be the man that I know you are.’”  Browning wrote that his “mother changed many a devilish plan by her trusting love.  But she lifted me from being the boy I was toward the man I would become (Browning Ware, “A Mother’s Trust,” Diary of a Modern Pilgrim, Imago Dei Publications, 2003, p. 94).”

Satan had given up offering Jesus the world and he had resorted to daring him.  “Prove yourself,” he taunted Jesus, “‘If you are the Son of God . . ..’”  He was trying to get Jesus to question his identity.  Browning’s mother reminded him of his identity until her words became his own and where, as a man, he could tell himself even after his mother was gone.  It may well be that that the single greatest mark of maturity is when we have come to the place of parenting ourselves, of being able to announce to ourselves who we are, without having to prove it to anyone else.  Jesus had just come from the baptismal waters where he heard his father’s blessing, “‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased (Luke 3:22).’”  Jesus’ answer to evil was rooted in a deep sense of self, his inseparable identity with his heavenly father.  When Satan dared Jesus to jump, Jesus told him to jump back.  “‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’”

Who tells you who you are?  I’ve wondered if so many of our materialistic and professional exploits are more than anything our futile attempts to prove to the world who we are because we don’t already know ourselves that we are loved by Someone who doesn’t need us to prove anything to him anymore. 

If you pray for God to help you make that discovery, don’t be surprised if you find the Holy Spirit coming to take you by the hand and leading you to wander for a while in the wilderness.  There are just some things that can only be settled, like who you are and who you’re going to worship and serve, until you’re in a place where no one else is looking and you find yourself staring the greatest temptations you’ve ever faced eye-to-eye. 

Jesus didn’t get a pass.  Neither will we.